Great Moments in Sports Journalism: Hell, We'll Give it a Shot

Over at Gawker we run a regular feature called Great Moments in Journalism where readers send in particularly egregious examples of overwriting, poor writing, excessive use of clich , or any other example of journalism gone wrong. We very rarely nominate sports pieces, since most of our readers don't follow sports. Also, as you know by reading your sucky hometown columnist, it would almost be too easy: Every jackass with a thesaurus and access to the press box thinks he's some twenty-first century combination of Grantland Rice and Walter Wellesley Smith. But since we're desperately trying to fill space over here today we're going to do the sports version of Great Moments: We'll give you an example after the jump to start you off.

Under the execrable headline "Capital Punishment, Friday's Vancouver Sun ran the following bit of prose:

First, a monarch butterfly from Canada somehow shows up in England. Now this. An exotic, exciting, never-before-seen-here species was sighted Thursday in the Lower Mainland. It was a hockey player, but a strange one. He possesses explosive speed, an equally dynamic shot, the ability to drive Colorado Avalanche defencemen through the glass and pucks into the net while prostrate, Ringo Starr's haircut from 1963, a double-black-diamond ski slope for a nose and a disarming smile through which he tells bad jokes in two languages. Witnesses in Burnaby were initially confounded by the subject's sudden appearance, but investigators were able to identify him as Alexander Ovechkin of the Washington Capitals.

This should give you a pretty good idea of what we're looking for. Submit your own nominees in the comments and, should their be enough submissions, in a couple of hours we'll update this post with a poll. Should there not be enough submissions, you know, whatever, free post for us. Win-win, really.

Capital punishment: Ovechkin's here [VS]