Two similes, a metaphor, and an allusion in today's model sentences

You can find great sports writing quite easily, partly because the very nature of sports contains all the elements of story-telling: characters, setting, challenges/problems, and resolution. Sports are also just plain fun and people are so passionate about them.

This week's Frank Bruni feature on "for the love of sentences" reminded me of that, though I will share just a couple examples as we wrap up the week and the semester. The following sentence ends with a striking simile: 

The New York Times’s coverage of the World Cup has brimmed with too many standout passages to mention, but here’s a characteristically excellent one from Rory Smith, regarding Portugal’s often underwhelming play: “The country has for years boasted enough individual talent to match any team on the planet and yet, under the aegis of Fernando Santos, it has been assiduously, unapologetically, and in many ways successfully dour, as if a group of the finest artists in the world had been gathered together and asked to wallpaper a bedroom.”

There is something about our relatively slower sports -- like soccer and baseball -- that seems to inspire writers. Maybe that is due to writers having time to process what happens on the field, with plenty of time to speculate about the causes of great success or spectacular failures... not to mention the quirky, driven personalities who dominate at the highest level of sports.

This soccer writing features a provocative metaphor:

Andrew Das, also covering the World Cup for The Times, described a match in which Brazil grew frustrated and “pivoted to some of soccer’s darker arts: dives and flops, shirt pulls and shoves and appeals to the referee for justice. None of it worked. Croatia had brought a vise to a gunfight, and for more than two long hours on Friday it calmly and methodically squeezed the life and the joy out of Brazil.”

It helps if our students realize the expected cliche is "a knife to a gunfight," but it's not strictly necessary for them to get the idea. 

This comparison requires the reader to be familiar with both a 1981 movie and recent controversies with Ye and a fellow-bigot dining with the former president:

And Bret Stephens rued our country’s trajectory: “Pretty depressing how American culture has descended from ‘My Dinner With Andre’ to that dinner with Kanye.”

For most of our students, this may be asking too much, and it's a good reminder that allusions always assume a lot from our readers. Handle with care. 

And let's finish with another simile:

An unsigned article in The Economist asserted: “Trying to learn about sex from Hollywood is like watching James Bond for tips on a career as a British civil servant.” 

This one appealed to me both as a nice figure of speech but also because we have decided to revisit our James Bond collection of DVDs, combining Friday nights with the movies in chronological order and pizza night. 

There's little meaning to be found in those movies and lots of things to criticize and bemoan, but if we turn off our critical minds for a couple hours each Friday evening, what's the harm?