"It was an ideal day for football - too cold for the spectators and too cold for the players"
About this Quote
An “ideal day” that’s miserable for everyone is Red Smith in miniature: the sportswriter as deadpan realist, puncturing boosterish mythology with a single twist of the knife. The line borrows the familiar cadence of pregame optimism - crisp air, autumn grit, the romance of the season - then yanks it into the bodily truth of actually being there. By repeating “too cold,” Smith turns what could be quaint local color into a shared inconvenience. The symmetry is the joke and the critique: football’s supposed communal pleasure depends on a lot of people enduring discomfort for the sake of a story we prefer to call tradition.
The intent isn’t to dunk on the game so much as to deflate the promotional language surrounding it. Sports culture loves to treat suffering as authenticity: frozen fingers become “hard-nosed,” numb toes become “character.” Smith refuses that alchemy. He’s telling you that the “ideal” is often a marketing adjective stapled onto conditions everyone would normally avoid.
Context matters: Smith wrote in an era when football was less domed stadium spectacle and more open-air ritual, when writers were expected to supply grandeur on deadline. His wit works because it’s observational, not ornamental. It’s also quietly democratic. The players aren’t elevated gladiators; they’re cold. The fans aren’t heroic loyalists; they’re cold, too. In one sentence, he collapses the distance between field and stands and exposes the absurd bargain at the heart of mass entertainment: we call it fun, then endure it like penance.
The intent isn’t to dunk on the game so much as to deflate the promotional language surrounding it. Sports culture loves to treat suffering as authenticity: frozen fingers become “hard-nosed,” numb toes become “character.” Smith refuses that alchemy. He’s telling you that the “ideal” is often a marketing adjective stapled onto conditions everyone would normally avoid.
Context matters: Smith wrote in an era when football was less domed stadium spectacle and more open-air ritual, when writers were expected to supply grandeur on deadline. His wit works because it’s observational, not ornamental. It’s also quietly democratic. The players aren’t elevated gladiators; they’re cold. The fans aren’t heroic loyalists; they’re cold, too. In one sentence, he collapses the distance between field and stands and exposes the absurd bargain at the heart of mass entertainment: we call it fun, then endure it like penance.
Quote Details
| Topic | Witty One-Liners |
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