Bobby Johnson, the head football coach of the Vanderbilt Commodores, enacted a cursing ban for his players last spring. Other schools have similar bans, but Vandy seems to have garnered most of the attention. Apparently, the ban was put into effect last spring so that any children who may be watching practice with their parents won’t be exposed to the profane speech. Spot the irony: letting them watch a high-impact contact sport where people have been known to be gruesomely and hideously injured is fine, but profanity is a strict no-no.
I wondered how the ban had affected Vanderbilt’s performance, so I checked the latest standings. The Commodores are 2-7 (0-5 in the SEC). Still, I wonder how many players get giggly hearing Johnson scream “YOU GUYS ARE PLAYING LIKE POO-POO!” at halftime. Apparently weeding out the old “sailor talk” hasn’t helped much.
However, it did get me to ask: what if a similar ban had been enacted when I played football (which, contrary to popular belief, was NOT in the days before face masks)?
Coach Wilson would have sounded really funny saying “ODOM! Get the lead out of your bum and put that son of a biscuit on his hiney just as soon as he comes down with the ball,” as opposed to what he actually said.
Trash talk from other players wouldn’t have been nearly as intimidating, either. Ernest Mace, the behemoth we had playing defensive line and trash-talking whiz, would probably have seemed a little less threatening telling opposing players that he was gonna “knock their nose in the dirt,” and “stomp a mud-hole in their act.” Come to think of it, football practice would have been a lot more entertaining that way.
Of course, if my father had been slapped with a cursing ban, I doubt he would have been able to communicate at all. I just don’t think, “Gall dang it, son, do you have sugar between your ears?” would have conveyed the same message as his favorite query always seemed to.
Saturday afternoons would have been a lot funnier, too. Picture it: Georgia in the late ’80s. My Pop and his buddies sitting on the sofa, drinking Budweiser, watching the “other” Bulldogs and yelling “Fiddlesticks! That ref is a lousy flapping moron!” and “Pull the gold-arm, maggot farming quarterback for Chris’s sake!” It would probably have had me in hysterics instead of praying for their immortal souls.
I actually like the idea of this ban. Anybody can shout one of the “seven words you can never say on television” in a moment of frustration or acute anxiety. It takes a real thinker to concoct an original phrase on the spot like that.
My childhood friend Phillip, who has gone on to become a pastor, was a genius at this. He was the only human being I’ve ever seen hook a golf ball into the woods, then smash his club into the ground and shout a Bible verse. I also heard him use “Daffy Duck” as an expletive once.
Phillip was a fun guy to be around when he was mad because you never knew what you’d hear. Honestly, the guy should have charged cover whenever we came over to play video games. But he never cursed.
Sometimes, though, only a proper swear word can fit a given situation. For example, if I’m a Vanderbilt football player and I get my finger smashed between two other guys’ helmets, and as a result, the tip of my thumb is severed (which actually happened to a guy at my high school), I just don’t think that a word like “dang-nabbit” or “flibbledy floo” is going to accurately convey the pain and horror I feel at that moment. Severed body parts and high velocity bleeding call for something a little stronger than “Scooter Booter.”
Even my severely Baptist grandmother admitted to me once that sometimes, only a particular four-letter “s-word” would do in a given situation. Like, when you say, “Boy those guys in the opinion section are really full of …” You get the idea.
Tony Odom is a graduate student in the history department.