© Cary Edmondson | 2019 Jan 5
Why I love sports, Part 3,591: I get to Jock Blog about how Draymond Green, Donald Sutherland, and John Milton have me excited for the next five months of Warriors basketball.
By now, you probably heard Green tell NBC Sports Bay Area after the Warriors’ 147-140 win over the New Orleans Pelicans that, given the team’s six-game win streak, given the team’s historic shooting clip, and given the arrival of DeMarcus Cousins on Friday in Los Angeles vs. the Clippers: “All hell’s about to break loose.”
We instantly proclaimed it the slogan for the 2018-19 season.
That is, after we junked earlier slogans like “The Warriors Have to Trade Draymond Now” after the dust-up with Kevin Durant in November; or “Klay Thompson May Never Make Another Three Again” after his cold start to the season; or “The NBA Has Caught Up To the Dubs” after their blowout losses to the Lakers, Rockets, and Thunder.
Yeah, so . . . those are out. In the dustbin.
In is Draymond, proclaiming “All hell’s about to break loose.” It’s much catchier.
What he means, of course, is that the Warriors are finally unleashing #FullSquad Dubs, with the long-awaited DeMarcus Cousins making it *five* NBA All-Stars on the roster. And that Stephen Curry seems intent on continuing to get better as a shooter, which seems impossible, but true. And that Klay is hellbent on fixing that cold start. Since he gazed at his hand in Portland on Dec. 28 — the “Moonstruck” moment (“I missed my hand! I missed my shot!” For all you Nick Cage-heads out there) — he is shooting 38-for-77 from 3-point land. That’s 49.3 percent — from outside the arc!
Yeah, hellbent. There’s that word again. H. E. Double hockey sticks.
It got me thinking: where did we get that phrase anyway? Turns out you gotta go deep. It was the poet John Milton in “Paradise Lost”, who wrote: “Wherefore with thee came not all hell broke loose?”
Whoa. That sounds deep. I guess it has to do with Satan visiting Eden, and the thought being that if all the suffering souls of Hell got loose, it’d be pretty gnarly.
Of course, any mention of “Paradise Lost” brings us immediately to our favorite English teacher, Donald Sutherland’s apple-biting, corduroy-wearing professor who tries to tell a bored Faber College English class about the epic poem:
Classic.
Bottom line: Draymond is more entertaining than Milton. And the original meaning may translate differently when it means the Warriors are posting up Cousins and spreading Klay, Durant, and Steph in space around the 3-point line.
But we know what he meant. The rest of the NBA had their fun. Now, the Warriors aren’t joking. As Sutherland said: This is their job.