Poetry: This Football Coach Is Using War As A Metaphor For Football
In what could only be described as a soliloquy destined to be immortalized in the annals of sports history for centuries to come, local Mason High School football coach and modern-day Walt Whitman incarnate, Larry Gehlhausen, is currently using the age-old concept of war as a brilliant metaphor for his team’s Thursday night game.
“We are all brothers today, marching to the front lines, in a game of wills against the enemy combatant,” shouted the silver-tongued, staggeringly erudite coach, who, as a 10th grade history teacher himself, is well-versed in the horrors and atrocities which man has perpetrated against man for countless millennia. “We need to hold our ground in the trenches and never surrender. Only by doing that will we achieve victory.”
Gehlhausen’s rousing, 2-minute Homeric epic in miniature has already made its way across the globe, with sports historians reaching—and failing—to find any other instance in recorded history where a coach has happened upon such brilliant oratorical analogues as referring to a team’s passing game as an “aerial assault,” or the team’s wide receivers as “weapons.”
NFL Network’s MJ Acosta-Ruiz drew particular attention to the end of Gehlhausen’s speech, noting the poignant combination of asking the team to “avenge” the memory of assistant coach Brian Lenahan, who had recently been suspended without pay for driving while intoxicated, followed by chanting “all’s fair in love and football” and “football is a battlefield” repeatedly for thirty seconds, had caused the entire locker room to weep openly.
“Football players are signing up for poetry classes. Poetry students are signing up for football,” added Acosta-Ruiz. “Coach Larry is inspiring young people everywhere.”
According to plans released by a visibly moved President Biden, a commemorative plaque dedicated to the coach’s speech will be unveiled early next month, where Gehlhausen himself will be presented with a McArthur Genius Grant, the 2028-2053 Nobel Prizes in Literature, and the Medal of Honor.
