Talk:List of sports idioms

Gloves
Someone should look up references to ice hockey for the phrases "the gloves are off / taking the gloves off" due to hockey players' tendency to remove their gloves prior to a fight. I have no cited reference to this, which is why I'm putting it here for someone much smarter to investigate. Thanks! Randrewd 16:58, 29 March 2007 (UTC)


 * All the references I can find indicate it comes from boxing. See the article. -- Sig Pig  |SEND - OVER 17:07, 29 March 2007 (UTC)

Weigh in
Could someone please add "to weigh in on something"? I think it's from boxing but I'm not competent. Thanks. Maikel (talk) 23:36, 4 December 2007 (UTC)

Keep the ball rolling
The idiom to "keep the ball rolling" actually originated in William Henry Harrison's 1841 presidential campaign. His supporters had a huge fabric ball that they pushed along with them on the campaign trail. It was used to rally support and record campaign stops. Harrison's followers would cry, "Keep the ball rolling to Washington!" to the effect that if they made it to Washington, Harrison would have won. This can be found in A Pictorial History of American Presidents by John and Alice Durant. Therefore, this really isn't a sports idiom at all, unless you consider presidential campaigns a sport. Huck2012! E. Novachek (talk) 16:09, 26 March 2009 (UTC)

Thursday Morning Tippy Tappys
Supposedly a 'soccer' related idiom. Is this an American thing? In all my years of watching and following football I've never come across this before. And to suggest Champions League games are usually on Wednesdays is wrong, they are always evenly split between Tuesdays and Wednesdays. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 87.194.35.227 (talk) 00:17, 8 January 2011 (UTC)
 * I removed it. It was originally added by User:Maxxx_Power, a user who has only ever made two edits, one of which was clearly vandalism. I've googled the phrase in both the singular and plural but there are no references dating from before he or she added it to this page. A part of me feels like I should congratulate Maxxx_Power on almost succeeding in inserting this phrase into the lexicon. --90.201.63.117 (talk) 00:30, 5 October 2015 (UTC)

No good deed goes unpunished
After past editors went to the trouble to cite specific OED links as references for dozens of the entries in this list, I had to mark a lot of them as s due apparently to the paywall. I don't know if the links still work for subscribers. 67.100.125.102 (talk) 21:48, 19 April 2011 (UTC)

Own goal
This is obviously a football (soccer) idiom, but in Britain at any rate is used outside that context: a mistake of your own making which land you in trouble.

Is "injury time" an idiom which is also used apart from in football? Poshseagull (talk) 20:21, 5 May 2011 (UTC)

Duck
This is from cricket and means being out (dismissed) without scoring. It comes from the analogy with a duck's egg, which is shaped like a 0. More common, off the pitch, is the phrase, "broken my duck", eg, "I didn't make any sales in my first week, but I've broken my duck now, getting two this week". Poshseagull (talk) 20:28, 5 May 2011 (UTC)

Boxing-heavy
I appreciate that boxing has contributed more than its fair share towards the English Language, but this list is almost bereft of idioms from other sports. It's also extremely US-centric. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 62.6.159.62 (talk) 11:38, 4 February 2013 (UTC)

Get The Ball Rolling...
It's actually a reference to ball-point pens. Sometimes you get a new pen and it doesn't write, so you have to get the ball rolling before you start making progress. It doesn't even make sense as a sports metaphor.76.29.225.28 (talk) 00:22, 1 September 2013 (UTC)

Go The Distance
This is listed as a boxing idiom, but it doesn't seem to be related to boxing at all. It's more likely to be derived from marathon running or something like that. BevansDesign (talk) 14:14, 18 September 2013 (UTC)

Is Professional Wrestling within scope?
Pro wrestling has inspired idioms, e.g., "smack down," "tag team," "face turn/heel turn," that have crept into common parlance. Is pro wrestling considered a sport for the purposes of this article? Keynote2k (talk) 22:38, 27 January 2021 (UTC)

Strike Out
Perhaps the most common sports idiom in American English is missing from this list. 47.208.1.224 (talk) 09:01, 29 July 2022 (UTC)