From Judy Battista’s “For Cardinals and Steelers, Differing Pasts and Expectations,” New York Times, 21 January, 2009:

The Cardinals could be excused for letting their giddiness overwhelm them a little longer after earning their first trip to the Super Bowl. They have spent nearly their entire history being a team apart, peripatetic and sometimes even a little pathetic. Nobody wears vintage Cardinals jerseys, because, like wine turned to vinegar, the vintage was always pretty sour. That makes their unexpected arrival this year all the sweeter.

Now, I understand that sour wine is nasty, and that the Cardinals are nasty; ergo the analogical function of the metaphor is complete (nasty old Cardinal jersey : remembered-sense of Cardinal’s nastiness, in NFL :: old, cheap wine, turned to vinegar : felt-sense taste of vinegary sour nastiness, in mouth).

But the analogy I have just now reconstructed is not actually present in Battista’s insane simile. She says: (vintage Cardinal jersey : wine[?] :: vinegar : sourness, both as nasty prior experience and as felt-sense of sour taste in mouth), which makes no sense at all. You can’t wear a liquid, at least not for long, at least not so long as you want to be a pro baller.

And the Cardinals, according to her, never were “wine.” They never had a golden era or Namath or Joe Montana or Plaxico; ergo they never had “vintage” jerseys which could “sour.” So the thesis of her simile, that the Cardinals have a “sour vintage,” is broken, an example of overreaching not just in rhetoric (using a simile that doesn’t make sense in place of a sturdier species of description) but also in sports history—by her own account of it.

Further, to reconstruct any football franchise’s past failures as “sour” is a leap into culinary metaphor that I am not totally willing to make. We sometimes describe as “bitter” those past experiences that we regret; we certainly do describe positive remembered events and subsequent affect as “sweet.” I have even thought of some experiences as “hot” or as having left me “cold.”

But sour is tricky; I think of Chinese food, lemons, and lemon-scented cleaning fluids. I certainly don’t think “sour” is a bad way to describe failures and the feelings failures engender; it’s only that a fallen franchise or vintage or pedigree as “sour” is a specific extension of this (new) notion of failure as sour. Fallen, sour, once-gold, tarnished…

Again, we’d need our real clement, the franchise (or whatever it is) to have been positive, powerful, or successful at some point in the past. The souring describes a process. Wine is sweet; wine gone sour is vinegar, a new substance. This alchemy of liquid (wine —> vinegar [ —> mother-of-vinegar { —> mold}]) mirrors the alchemy of the franchise (Michael Jackson c. Thriller —> okaaay, so he likes monkeys, music kind of falling off 90s MJ —> crazy bankrupt toucher MJ) which mirrors the linguistic process by which we arrive at a description of that franchise ([{good —> } neutral —> ] failed —> gone bad —> gone bitter or been tarnished or bruised or rusted —> “soured”).

I would add that this process even mirrors my reading of Battista’s metaphor, which went something like: (bad simile —> wait, didn’t she just say the Cardinals were never any good? —> “peripatetic” makes me think of feet, sweaty feet, gross, sour —> what a wack sentence; I don’t really know what she intended to say —> let me try to sort this out).

Perhaps if we could wear wine (or vinegar), I would have less of an issue with Battista’s surely little reflected-upon choice. Perhaps I am missing something innate in wine or in the Cardinals (tannins? sulfites?) that would connect the various clements in the metaphor, creating a happy new association. But for now, I think of sweaty, sweat feet and bitter-sour vinegar, and I don’t for a moment wonder why I avoid football just exactly as I avoid the gout, because, like the gout, football is a painful medical condition. Or something like that.

Says an actual sports fan, friend and fellow writer Jake of Bread City:

That metaphor makes no sense whatsoever, and you’ve pretty much nailed down all the angles on its complete terribleness… Just more reason that this writer is a total moron: The Cardinals actually had some of the best jerseys in the 90s, and any true fan knows that nothing gets you more points than an old jersey that proves you’ve been on board since before your team was good. Sigh.

Jake also recommends that we would-be sports-deconstructors check out Straight Cash Homey Dot Net, a daily review of sports-jersey culture. I don’t really know what I’m supposed to be looking at here; the site mostly consists of snapshots of men wearing jerseys, showing off their Local Sports Franchise Enthusiasm, or, as I plan to call it from now on, their “Lospofram.” Sounds like a heart drug.