vivid sports metaphor of the day

Brian Phillips at Grantland, on the current status of Kobe Bryant:

“Kobe’s relentlessness has always been his most celebrated quality, but this season, he’s starting to remind me of one of those space probes that somehow keep feeding back data even after they’ve gone out twice as far as the zone where they were supposed to break down.”

Wonderfully written column. Not only can Bill Simmons write, he can also choose colleagues who can write.

And by the way, that’s a perfect metaphor for what Kobe has become.

Only problem: Phillips continues it for about another ten sentences, as if falling into the same trap as Kobe himself.

And that’s a good general piece of writing advice– don’t keep a metaphor going for too long. See how Phillips damages his own good work here:

“Kobe’s relentlessness has always been his most celebrated quality, but this season, he’s starting to remind me of one of those space probes that somehow keep feeding back data even after they’ve gone out twice as far as the zone where they were supposed to break down. You know these stories — no one at NASA can believe it, every day they come into work expecting the line to be dead, but somehow, the beeps and blorps keep coming through. Maybe half the transmissions get lost these days, or break up around the moons of Jupiter, but somehow, this piece of isolated metal keeps functioning on a cold fringe of the solar system that no human eyes have seen. That’s Kobe, right? While the rest of the Lakers look increasingly anxious and time-bound, he just keeps gliding farther out, like some kind of experiment to see whether never having a single feeling can make you immortal. He’s barely preserving radio contact with anyone else at this point, but basketball scientists who’ve seen fragments of his diagnostic readouts report that the numbers are heartening. It’s bizarre. He’s simultaneously the main character in the Lakers’ drama and someone who seems to have nothing to do with the narrative logic of the post-Phil team. Whatever the Mike Brown era is, he’s got no point of contact with it. Even Gasol and Bynum, his best supporting players, essentially just concentrate on not interfering with his flight path. Everyone stays out of his way, which is easy, because ‘his way’ is a couple of billion miles from the rest of the Lakers.”

If I were his editor, I’d applaud the first sentence, and maybe keep the second as well. After that, a big red X through the rest.