1/12/2024 0 Comments South pawGyllenhaal is Billy Hope, the light-heavyweight champ devoted to his lovely wife Maureen (Rachel McAdams) and daughter Leila (Oona Laurence). The drama is aggressively bulked up like Jake Gyllenhaal himself in the lead, who shows none of the live-wire charisma he had in Nightcrawler here he gets a gym-bunny makeover, mumbling machismo and a tendency to steroidal, sub-Hulk roaring in the ring. It’s the most overhyped event of the year: a hammy, cynical, empty boxing movie written by Kurt Sutter and directed by Antoine Fuqua, watchable in its first act but then increasingly dull and overwrought, fudging the idea of whether the audience should get behind its “redemption-revenge” motivation. Have you got a Big Question you'd like us to answer? If so, let us know by emailing us at. South and left are on the side of the devils.” If that theory is correct, we’re probably lucky people decided to go with southpaw instead of devilpaw. “North and right are on the side of the angels. “North is the direction for heaven, south the direction for hell,” Thorn told Zimmer. There’s a slightly better chance that the term started in a boxing ring, and that the combative nature of that sport could help explain how the animalistic paw came into play.īut without baseball diamonds, how did south end up associated with left? Major League Baseball’s official historian John Thorn thinks it’s related to the once-popular belief that left-handedness was a sign of evil. In short, it doesn’t seem likely that southpaw originally described left-handed baseball pitchers, or even left-handed baseball players at all. Before that, it was more commonly used to describe a left-handed boxer or left-handed punch-much like Cass’s jabs in the cartoon. The first known reference to a baseball southpaw came 10 years later, in an 1858 New York Atlas article about a batter who “let fly a good ball into right field.” According to The Wall Street Journal language columnist Ben Zimmer, southpaw didn’t really become popular in baseball until the 1880s. (Zachary Taylor won, by the way.) / Abel & Durang, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division // No Known Restrictions on Publication Democratic candidate Lewis Cass delivers a left-handed blow to Zachary Taylor, while a black-eyed Millard Fillmore lies on the ground muttering, “Curse the Old hoss, wot a south paw he has given me!”Ī political cartoon believed to have been drawn by E. Southpaw showed up again in Philadelphia in an 1848 political cartoon poking fun at the presidential race. The earliest known written use of the word didn’t come from baseball it came from a June 1813 issue of a satirical Philadelphia newspaper called The Tickler, which mentions a “right paw” and a “south paw.” Baseball, for reference, didn’t officially begin until 1846. Of course, one could easily argue that southpaw may have been coined at a stadium that did-like Chicago’s West Side Park-and then simply caught on throughout the sport.īut that brings us to the second problem with southpaw’s apocryphal inception. First, as points out, plenty of professional baseball stadiums didn’t follow this directional orientation. There are two problems with this explanation. (That doesn’t address where paw came from, though it’s been used to mean hand since at least the 15th century.) Pitchers faced west, which meant a left-handed pitcher threw with the arm on the south side of the mound. It’s generally assumed that the term originated within the sport-a theory that's supported by this pretty convincing origin story: During the 19th century, baseball diamonds were built so that batters faced east, away from the setting sun. While the term southpaw officially applies to any left-handed person, you probably hear it most often in baseball, where left-handedness can really impact a player’s game (for better or worse).
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