Stop 'Putting the puck in the back of the net'

Blame Jane Antoniak for this rant.

I used to love sports clichés and jargon, until I met Jane.

If you’re unfamiliar with her, she was a terrific Canadian sports journalist who covered a variety of major professional sports for years.

She has since gone on to a variety of journalism-related gigs.

I encountered her in one of those – when she was helping teach aspiring journalists at Western University, back when I was a student there and determined to make a career of covering sports. Jane engaged me one day after I had submitted a proposed script for her review for an upcoming radio sports segment.

I thought my writing took the rock to the rack. I thought it put the biscuit in the basket. I thought it was a wire-to-wire winner. Jane disagreed.

She highlighted each of the sports-speakisms I had included in the product. Then, she asked me what every one of them meant. I was frustrated at being obliged to do so – as she clearly knew the meaning of such expressions and they were quite popular phrases among certain sports journalists at the time.

She accepted that both of those things were true. And, she urged me to consider if good journalism should be a lazy craft that re-used others’ once-clever metaphors – particularly ones that would mean nothing to members of one’s audience who were not serious sports fans.

In short, she argued, employing tired sports jargon or the jargon of any subject or milieu being covered – courts, business, politics, you name it -- makes for lesser and less inclusive and impactful journalism.

She was and is correct on this point. It informed me for many years as a reporter and editor in media and still does in my corporate communications role today. Her teaching also renders me wired to wince when I note a new banal phrase becoming an in-expression to drop in journalism and most acutely in sports journalism.

Of late, I suffer over all forms of: “Putting the puck in the back of the net,” from the world of hockey.

It has become so in-vogue with the hockey media set, it could become the ‘every time you hear it’ subject for a dangerous drinking game.

And why?

Whoever uttered it first, take a bow and retire it. Or, try to.

To those repeating it ad nauseum, stop. Please. The expression is stale, empty, overused and even inaccurate. If a hockey player gets a puck over the goal line, it’s a goal. It need not go “in the back of the net” to count.

And, worse, every time you “put the puck in the back of the net” you’re asserting something that has little or no meaning for someone new to hockey or your content. Do you like that feeling when you don’t know what someone is talking about because they’re not bothering to speak to you in way that you would understand things?

?I suspect not.

Or, if you do, keep “putting the puck in the back of the net.” Just, look out because Jane Antoniak is still out there.

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Phil Andrews is a Senior Communications Consultant with the Ontario Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs. He worked in the daily newspaper industry for more than 20 years. He can be reached at [email protected]

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