Flashes of Panic

I’m about to teach you something about track and field. Pay attention, and you, too, can be smug and knowledgeable about this next time the Millrose Games is on tape delay.

There is a throwing event called the shot put. This is a noun phrase built out of a noun and a verb, like the pole vault. The noun, the direct object, is the shot. (The athletes in this event sometimes call it “the ball,” because it is nothing but a sixteen-pound metal ball named for its resemblance to a cannon ball.) The action is “to put.” The athletes put the shot. However, there is no object you can point at which is called a “shot put.”

If you are particularly careful about your terms, you are even careful about using the verb by itself. Individual puts can be called “tosses” or “efforts” but there are other terms which are to be avoided; I don’t mention them because I may get them wrong.

There are other things you need to know about track and field. You can take a step or two off the track to the inside if you’re jostled or stumbled, but three consecutive steps outside your lane is beyond acceptable. You’re supposed to have “a full running stride” of lead before cutting in front of a runner you’ve just passed; I suspect this rule is more often honored in the breach.

Millions of people know the standard for American football receivers making a catch inbounds, and there are even a few million who have managed to understand the hideous complication known a soccer’s offsides rule. I suspect there are even a few hundred people who are not hockey referees and yet understand what “icing” is supposed to mean. However, I think I am one of a couple dozen or so people in the U.S. who know that the object which is thrown by Reese Hoffa is not “a shot put,” despite however many millions used to be on the track team in high school or junior high.

And I’d like to thank Mr. Burnham, my junior high school gym teacher and track coach, for explaining all this to our team when I was in 7th grade. Because we might never become star athletes, and many of us were never going to get anything more than a high school education, but we were damn well going to learn what the sport was about if he had anything to say about it. Anything worth doing was worth doing correctly, he figured, even if we didn’t do it particularly well.

So here we are, twenty years later, and I am actually capable of getting a certain limited amount of work based on my ability to tell a shot from a shot put (much like Bill Bryson, who claimed to have convinced the London Times to hire him because “they needed someone on staff who could reliably spell ‘Cincinnati.’”) I have to imagine that this was a wholly unexpected consequence of my two junior high track seasons.

Oh, and you know how “soccer” is called “football” in the rest of the English-speaking world? They also refer to “track and field” as “athletics.” This comes in handy when you’re looking at a British newspaper’s sports section.

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