Sunday, March 28
When good sportswriters go bad
I generally like the Washington Post's sportswriter and columnist Sally Jenkins. I disagree with her on some points, of course (for example, she goes too far in her criticism of the NHL after the Bertuzzi hit), but I think she is generally very good. But this passage, from a paean to new Skins' quarterback Mark Brunell, seems a bit over the top:
Underneath the cap is a face that seems dug out of clay, a faintly handsome archetypal football face that ought to be photographed in sepia, wearing a leather helmet and creased with sweat. The most youthful thing about Brunell now is his head of lustrous coffee-brown hair, side parted across his forehead. . . . [H]e has a physique that is faintly eroded, he looks somehow smaller than his 6 feet 1 and 215 pounds, with no ostentatious bulges of muscle. His legs are almost delicate, save for the ragged L-shaped scar inside of his right knee, which dates him, the result of an ACL injury in college when knee surgery was still performed by scalpel.That may in fact be a good description of the man, but it seems a bit florid for the sports section, no?