Lenny-Baby

My post on Len Pasquarelli a while back might have left those of you not familiar with the Bard of ESPN scratching your heads. What's the big deal? you ask. Well, yesterday Lenny had a fantastic column on, well, I don't actually remember what it was about, but man that imagery was simply gorgeous. Here's a sample:

True enough, the NFL forum isn't a Broadway stage, and the men charged with nurturing and refining quarterbacks aren't exactly Henry Higgins mentoring Eliza Doolittle. The rain in Spain falls mainly on the plain? In the NFL, the reign of terror falls more often on the head of the quarterback ill-prepared for the rigors of the position, and on those who don't possess the level of inherent skills necessary for a successful tutorial process.

Did you get that? The "rain in Spain," only this time it's the "reign of terror"! Brilliant! Although somehow "mainly on the plain" seems a little more succinct than "more often on the head of the quarterback ill-prepared for the blah blah blah blah blah...." A minor quibble, though. Let us continue to the next stanza:

You can, recent history has indicated, forge a quarterback. What one can't do, it seems, is create the clay that goes into the mold. The first difficulty is in assaying the quality of the natural resource. The second is in enhancing that excellence before it goes into the kiln.

Oh, man! Such beauty! It's getting a little dusty in here, as the SG says.

Let's do some parsing. What's the meter? "Assaying the quality." That thesaurus Lenny invested in is really paying off here. And I'm sure that we all have areas of excellence that we would like to "enhance" in our own lives. My snobby dictionary seems to think that you "forge" metals, not clays, and certainly not in a kiln, but what does it know? Moving on.

Everywhere he went, it seems, Walsh had a Svengalian gift for getting inside the heads of the quarterbacks with whom he worked. He didn't actively pull the strings nearly as much as, say, Steve Spurrier at Florida, where the former Heisman Trophy winner still wanted to play the position himself, almost as if by osmosis. Obviously, the hands-on Spurrier could not apply those skills at the NFL level. Walsh, though, didn't suffer such failures.

This excellent stanza reminds me of something Jonah Goldberg wrote a couple of months ago:

The rulers, bureaucrats, aristocrats, intellectuals, and guys in funny wigs running these empires refused to accept that their way of life was unsustainable, that the curtain was closing on their chapter under the sun ("Jonah Goldberg doesn't merely mix metaphors, he snaps their spines!" — self-blurb).

But back to Lenny. "Playing quarterback by osmosis." I have no idea what that means. Doesn't osmosis have to involve physical contact? Perhaps he meant some kind of telepathy? Ah, but like all great poets, Pasquarelli hides his intent from the uninitiated, challenging us to dig deeper and find new meaning in old phrases. Oh yeah, and my pesky dictionary insists that a Svengali always manipulates with an "evil purpose." And I'm pretty sure they didn't have any puppets. Unless Dr. Leo Marvin was a Svengali. Oh well, more challenges for the reader!