Training camps are opening across the NHL, which means it's time to motivate the fellas. Never mind that pro athletes have been hyper-competitive from birth, or that the tangible reward for performance is to be financially set for life—they need slogans! Nothing gets a hockey player going like slogans.*
*I don't know that this is true. But I know that the people who come up with the slogans believe it is true.
Maple Leafs camp opened on Wednesday, and on a wall in the media room was the motivational slogan "No grit, no grind, no greatness." Eagle-eyed observers noted that this is a minor but significant change from what was printed there last season: "No grit. No grind. No greatness." The periods have been replaced with commas, after the motto was roundly mocked by those pointing out that when read in plain English, the slogan implied that the Leafs possessed none of those things.
You can see what they're going for. They're trying to convey the message that if you don't have grit or grind, you can't have greatness. But changing the periods to commas doesn't fix anything! It's still just a list of the Leafs' insufficiencies! I am begging the Leafs to consult an English teacher on this.
Or, for a $40,000 CAD consulting fee, I will fix it. What are my qualifications? Well, I fight with my coworkers near-weekly about proper use of en dashes. So get a load of this: "No grit? No grind? No greatness." See how the question marks turn the tense conditional, and make it clear that without the first two qualities, you won't achieve the last?
How about this, if you want to open your players' third eyes without forcing them to memorize an entirely new saying: "Know grit. Know grind. Know greatness." I just homophoned your ass!
We should at least give credit to the Leafs for coming up with their own nonsensical quote, rather than just misattributing various apocrypha, the preferred tactic of even sadder organizations like the New Jersey Hall of Fame and the Cleveland Browns. But originality can have its own tripwires. Here's The Athletic's Rob Rossi, speaking to former Canucks head coach Rick Tocchet about Vancouver's slogan last season:
“Mine last year was ‘Embrace The Hard,’ and my point was, it’s going to be hard and you want to condition your mind that every day it’s not going to be easy,” he said.
Then he saw that motto decorating a room at the Vancouver Canucks’ rink, and ...
“It’s like, eh, I don’t know,” said Tocchet, now behind the bench of the Philadelphia Flyers. “It’s one of those things that you don’t really see the error until somebody points it out to you.”
The Maple Leafs have certainly embraced the hard—the hard being "syntax." They're 0–2.
