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Look't his eyes! Look't his eyes!

Football announcers love to say that!

"Look't his eyes!"

The eyes, of course, belong to the quarterback,
who is 100 yards away from the announcer,
and thirty yards away from the eye-looker-to-be.

They are talking about a guy who is wearing a helmet
with a steel-bar face mask, whose eyes are in there, somewhere.
But it wouldn't do to say his helmet is turned to the left,
or to the right, or is upside-down.  They talk about his eyes,
pretending that a defensive player, thirty yards away,
can see that although the helmet is turned to the left,
the quarterback is really looking to the right, and that
is plain to anyone who will track his pupils.  Or his irises.
Or his macula.  In there.  Inside that helmet, and that
face mask, and that deceitful, bloodshot eyeball.

A few years ago, the same announcers were telling us
how good quarterbacks are at "looking the defender away",
which sound like a beginning German lesson:  "Throw me
off the train my suitcase!"  What they meant was that
quarterbacks deliberately looked short and left,
for instance, to mislead the defender, while they intended
to throw long and right; something like that. 

It's a tough job, being an announcer.  Every former
high school athlete in the country is an authority
on the game, so announcers, most of whom have
the disadvantage of having to show up sober, become
analytic geniuses.  Baseball announcers talk about
"balance points", and "two, or three, or four, or eleven
seam fastballs".  "His slide-step is slipping!"  Anyone
who has ever seem Jim Furyk hit a golf ball
knows that it is possible to play the game while
imagining a figure-eight backswing. 

It would be refreshing to hear an analyst say,
"How in hell does he do that?"  or "I don't get it!",
but you can't earn a big paycheck telling the truth.

Bret Favre (pronouned, "FaRRRve": Go figure!)
plays now for the Minnesota Vikings.  I cannot bring
myself to want to look deeply into grizzly ol' Bret's eyes.
Anyway, he throws most of his passes with his eyes
closed, falling down, right after getting sandwiched
between hit men with socially acceptable rage control.

The time to look at ol' Bret's eyes is while he is trying
to get back up off the ground.  They wobble around
like Jim Furyk's backswing.  But he is probably
doing that on purpose, you know, "looking us away". 

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