Here’s a column for you to tackle

Since Friday featured Warren County High School’s Homecoming Parade and football game I thought it might be interesting to include the origins of some familiar sports terms in this column.

Since it was a local gridiron event that inspired me, I’ll start out with football. The first term that comes to mind is arguably one of the most important. It’s ‘touchdown.’

One source on the Web reports this comes from an older type of football game originating in the old country, England, called rugby, which was a major influence on many games that followed it, including American football.

Apparently in the sport of rugby the ball must be touched down to the ground by the ball carrier after he crosses the end line for the score, known as a ‘try,’ to be official. The same used to be true for American football when it was being formed, but these days, obviously, that is no longer the rule. Oddly enough, although they have to do it to score, the term touchdown isn’t used in rugby.

The influence that rugby, which is still happily played over the pond in the UK, had on American football didn’t end there, since the terms for player positions, quarterback, halfback and fullback, also came down from this precursor to the many football games that followed.

There are two variants of rugby, called Rugby Union and Rugby League, with the main difference between the two being the number of players per team, 15 for Union, and 13 for league.

In Rugby Union, the team is divided into the forwards, eight hulking men who form the ‘scrum,’ which generated the term ‘line of scrimmage,’ and the backs, who line up diagonally across what is called the ‘pitch’ whenever a scrum takes place, and these must be behind the ball. The seven backs are then sub-divided into two half-backs, four three-quarter backs, and right at the rear, the full back.

So it’s all about the positioning of the players in rugby, and most feel these terms were eventually adopted and amended by American football.

One sports term that had me wondering when I first heard it is ‘sudden death’ overtime. The term is used to describe settling a tie score with a single stroke, and is used, with varying rules applied, in football, soccer, ice hockey, golf and tennis.

This term probably comes from an activity that has forever been entwined with sports, much to the chagrin of many fans, and that is gambling. Gamblers used the term to represent a final single throw of the dice or a flip of the coin.

Interestingly enough, the first known usage of the phrase ‘sudden death’ had nothing at all to do with sports. In fact, author Samuel Clemens, also known as Mark Twain, reported it as early as 1865 as a frontier expression for rotgut whiskey.

Following in the footsteps of football, another sports term that originated with a game popular in Great Britain is the ice hockey term ‘hat trick,’ which is applied to a single player who scores three goals in a game. According to the Word Detective, the online version of the popular newspaper column written by Evan Morris, the term came from the English game of cricket. Morris cites no less an authority than the ‘The Oxford English Dictionary’ which states: ‘The feat of a bowler who takes three wickets by three successive balls, originally considered to entitle him to be presented by his club with a new hat or some equivalent.’

Another tidbit on this term comes from John Halligan, who writes a hockey trivia column, who reported that in the 1940s a Toronto haberdasher used to give Maple Leaf players free hats when they scored three goals in a game, but even so, Halligan also agrees that the term ‘hat trick’ probably evolved from cricket.

Charlie Johnson is news editor of the Standard. He can be reached at 473-2191.