On a long-ago summer Saturday, I visited a collectibles store near Wrigley Field. I was thumbing through a bin of photographs and magazine covers, and was startled by a celebrity image that was eerily familiar.
I reached for my wallet and beelined to the register and brought the picture home. I called my younger brother to see if he or our father had my middle school pictures.
I described the photo I was looking for and I received it in the mail a few days later. I mounted it on a presentation board next to the celebrity photo I’d purchased and showed them to a senior art director co-worker.
Bobby Sherman and Me
We examined the photos as if we were forensic detectives. After a few moments, he pulled out a ruler and measured the shirt collars in both photos and said: “They are an exact match. Bobby Sherman is indeed your father!”
It’s puzzling that in a year with more than 70 major elections around the world (many in weed-legal states) that nobody endeavored to create a line of cannabis-infused choice cuts of beef, under the brand name of: “The Steaks Have Never Been Higher.”
(The earliest draft of this never-published piece was written several years, ago, but most of 2025, I’ve pondered what I with pent-up energy that grows with each encounter with a news headline, )
I’ve noticed that nearly all promotional, motivational and political content, that is based on sports metaphors, is….offensive.
That is, they refer to things like home runs, touchdowns, knockout punches, or other terms that are about scoring points.
Rarely do you hear defense-oriented phrases about catching a fly ball at the outfield wall before it leaves the park, stopping a running back short of the goal line, or dodging a haymaker in the boxing ring.
However, sports teams, businesses and constituents are reliant on defense as well as offense. You play more defense in your work and life than you probably realize.
Why haven’t defensive sports metaphors permeated the vocabulary of business and political clichés?
A few of my college friends have been using one for decades. We frequently played pickup basketball a few blocks from our apartment building. On the court’s western edge, the concrete was bordered by a 6-ft fence. In the wooded area behind that there was a small trickle of flowing water.
Depot Avenue Courts, Gainesville, Florida
Whenever a player attempted a shot, somebody on defense would issue this call to action:
“Knock that shit in the creek.”
During a game, if a player blocked a shot with authority, their teammates would shout, “He knocked that shit in the creek!”
If a player dribbled toward the basket, a defender would yell, “C’mon, bring it this way and I’ll knock that shit in the creek!”
In the years since my friends and I have constantly used variation of that phrase to describe our responses to (depending on our professions): a business challenge, a news interview, or a dissertation defense…
As you write a response to a request-for-proposal, or field challenging question from an audience, or draft a letter to your US Representative or Senator, you are not in a position for a metaphorical slam dunk, though visualize knocking that shit in the creek.
Posted inUncategorized|Comments Off on Knock That Shit In The Creek
Thurmond was so incensed by President Truman’s 1948 Executive Order integrating the US military, that he ran for president as a member of the segregationist Dixiecrats party. You can see Confederate flags in photos of the party convention and campaign rallies. Thurmond won 39 electoral votes in the 1948 election.
Later, he held the Senate floor for over 24 hours in his filibuster of the Civil Rights Act of 1957.
A few years later he fought against the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and then the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Oh, and a he had a Black daughter. At age 23, he got his parents’ housekeeper pregnant.
SHE WAS 15.
Governments, corporations, and other organizations are going to do what they will do with their laws and corporate policies, etc. and I have pretty close to zero control over that.
Though I like to think there would be contexts where I’d ask “What Would Strom Thurmond Do?” that I would strive to do something diametrically opposed to that.
Posted inUncategorized|Comments Off on What Would Strom Thurmond Do?
