CHARLES SMALL/NEWSMAKERS Titans' running back Eddie George's comments after the Super Bowl were less than profound.

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But the problem extends beyond professional sportswriters. We, as fans, watch sports and analyze the events within the framework of a few oft-repeated maxims from which we can't seem to escape. To a large extent we are not even aware how much these phrases have been hammered into our minds and how big a role they play in shaping what we see in the sports we watch.

Pop quiz. Last weekend, at the end of Super Bowl when the Tennesse Titans' wide receiver Kevin Dyson was tackled a yard short of a touchdown on the final play of the game, were you thinking: a) "It's a game of inches"; b) "To have made it all this way and come up just short"; or c) "The longest yard," the cliché that the ABC announcer actually used, before self-consciously admitting was trite. These same stock phrases passed through roughly 100 million minds at the same time. And then, to make the situation worse, variations of all three appeared as headlines and leads on the front page of almost every paper in the country, even the supposedly more literate New York Times.

I used to be dismayed by this lack of creativity in sports discourse. Whenever I heard a player say something like, "There's no reason why we can't go all the way this year," I thought back to George Orwell's famous essay "Politics and the English Language." Worn-out phrases, Orwell wisely tells us, are immoral and insincere because they blunt our sensitivity to reality. In other words, clichés make us like-minded droids. Sports are exciting, and so is language. Why can't they work together and avoid the dirty habit of banality?

The easy answer is that sports people know no better. Some would say that the athletes themselves are uneducated, and if the sports reporters could actually write well, then they'd be doing book reviews. I'll grant that sports generally appeal to a different demographic than does the New Yorker, but there has to be something more.

But earlier this week, it occurred to me that maybe these clichés aren't such a bad thing after all. Clichés generally harm writing because reality is complex and more multifaceted than the cliché will allow. But what if sports aren't more complex? We may need an infinite number of phrases to describe a relationship or a human being, but do we really need as many to describe a base hit?

While good literature encompasses the entire spectrum of human emotions, sports focus solely on one—the competitive spirit. You win or you lose. You run faster or slower than your competitor. With the exception of pee-wee leagues, sports, in essence, never go beyond that simple challenge. You are either better than the other guys or you're not. End of story.

Examine, as evidence, three quotes from different players on the Titans. After losing on the last play of the Super Bowl, tackle Brad Hopkins declared, "Falling short like that really tears your heart out." Dyson echoed those sentiments, saying "I was thinking that to come this far and be a half-yard short is just a sick feeling." Running back Eddie George was no more original: "It will always be special to me. We just fell short."

Yes, these words are overused, sentimental, and uninteresting. But that's all that happened. What do you want them to say? Would George have expressed himself better if he had said, "When to the sessions of sweet silent thought/I summon up remembrance of things past/I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought?" No.

This doesn't mean that sports fans and writers should feel free to swim in jargon. I'll still grimace when I hear that "the Bulldogs are steamrolling through the competition," or "next week the Bulldogs do battle against archrival Harvard."

Language, like a baseball bat, is a tool. Off the field, the bat can be anything. But in the bottom of the ninth inning with the bases loaded, a full count and the home team down three runs, sometimes it's helpful to remember that a baseball bat is just a baseball bat.

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