[Ads-l] GOATS and goats

[Laurence Horn]

In today’s Times, Kurt Streeter has this piece on the evolution of GOAT as an acronym for “Greatest Of All Time” in sports talk (and beyond—I’m sure legal scholars, logicians, literati, lutenists, laundrists, and even linguists are drawing up lists of candidates for this status at this very moment).  

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/03/sports/tennis/greatest-athlete-of-all-time.html

Evidently GOAT is No. 1 on the 2023 incarnation of the notorious list of banished words purveyed annually by Lake Superior State U. 

But I was struck by a side-comment Streeter offers concerning the older homonym, which some have suggested results in a pernicious ambiguity: the non-acronymic “goat”.  Streeter writes

No doubt, being a goat isn’t what it used to be. In sports, it was once a terrible insult, a term of shame hung on athletes who snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. Greg Norman, <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dM5z_sCHNQw> otherwise known as the Shark, was a goat for coughing up a six-stroke lead in the final round of the 1996 Masters, a tournament he lost by five strokes.
Before Norman, there was the Boston Red Sox’ grounder-through-the legs-at-the-worst-possible-World-Series-moment goat, Bill Buckne <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=18caPNisP2U>r.
Need I say more?

Yes, I’d say he does need to say more, in particular to distinguish the status of goat in team sports like baseball—yes, Buckner qualifies for his 1986 error (although some would say undeservedly, since the true goat was the Sox' catcher Rich Gedman whose misplay had let in the tying run just before), along with Fred “Bonehead” Merkle for the 1908 N.Y. Giants, Leon Durham and Steve Bartman respectively for the 1984 and 2003 Chicago Cubs, and so on—and in individual sports. Greg Norman cannot be a goat, nor can any tennis player (unless it’s in team competition for the Davis Cup and the like). 

I always assumed the lower-case pejorative “goat”, as antonym of “hero”, derived as a clipping from “scapegoat”, but the OED doesn’t support (or explicitly refute) this hypothesis:

OED, s.v. “goat”, n.

6.  North American colloquial. A scapegoat.

8.  colloquial (North American Sport, originally and chiefly Baseball). (A name given to) the player whose mistake is believed to have lost his or her team the game, championship, etc.; a poor player, considered a hindrance to a team. Cf. to wear (the) goat's (also goat) horns at Phrases 5 <https://www.oed.com/view/Entry/79564?rskey=c0Wxd6&result=3&isAdvanced=false#eid1213315480>.

Be that as it may, my own intuition supports the restriction of “goat” to team sports, as in sense 8.  So if Greg Norman blew his lead while playing in a crucial match for Australia in an international competition, costing his team the victory, he could be a goat, but not when he just blew his own chance to win the 1996 Masters. 

This is why I always connected “goat” to “scapegoat"—if you’re the goat, it’s because your team and its fans can hold you responsible, rightly or wrongly, for costing them the game/match/championship.   

LH




 




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