Ambiguous Name: Gretzky Has The Ball

Gretzky Has the Ball is one trope that suffers from a case of extremely obscure and Character-Specific naming.

Gretzky is, supposedly, a Hockey player, and the irony is that he is holding a ball - which apparently doesn't apply to Hockey. It's a reference to a gag from FoxTrot.

Needless to say, this trope name is ambiguous as hell.

It would only make sense for someone who knows anything about Hockey, and who this Gretzky fellow is, and what kind of ball they are referring to; a football? A basketball? A baseball? A dodgeball? Leave a hint, guys. Even if you know FoxTrot, you probably won't get it without a trip to the Laconic section (because the original joke is actually quite different from this one).

Hockey is not exactly a globally dominating field of sport, and Wayne Gretzky is a moderately relevant Canadian player almost unknown outside North America. A reference as obscure as this would maybe be understood by one or the other hockey-savvy American, but it was totally lost on me (a moderately sports-oriented German), as well as a majority of other Europeans, and probably most of the world.

And of course, this name tells bugger-all about the trope it's supposed to name. It's not indicative of the fact that it's supposed to be about two types of sport getting mixed up for comedic effect, unless (once again) you get the joke.

Hence, I motion to rename Gretzky Has the Ball, in favour of a more indicative, descriptive, clear-cut and straightforward name.

edited 17th Jun '14 2:25:51 PM by jeez

Geez, this is named after a gag from Foxtrot? Also, reading the trope description leads me to wonder what the heck this is trying to be anyways. You say this is mixing up sports, but this reads to me as a more general sports-related Critical Research Failure. I dunno, this might not be a trope at all, and I'm leaning towards cut.

First lets see some evidence that it's being misused. It has 177 wicks and 409 inbound links. That's a lot to do away with because "not everybody will understand the reference the name is to."

Um, I'd do a wick check, but I'm actually not sure what the definition is from just reading the page. Maybe I'm just being obtuse here or something, but even carefully reading it for the fourth time has me scratching my head what they're trying to say. This kinda makes checking for misuse hard...

Wayne Gretzky is the most famous hockey player who ever lived. Hockey, as it happens, is a sport played around the world, in colder climates at least, as folks from Russia or Scandinavia would tell you. Nothing wrong with this trope's name.

umm, I was going through the wicks to see what they are being used as(just to see if it matches what the definition is supposedly about) and came across a universal folder. I'm not sure, but it seems to be a folder of general examples. Torch?

The trope is Artistic License – Sports, basically.

Also, I have never heard of Gretzky and I don't know about hockey rules at all.

Which apparently is already a redirect to this trope. Is there a reason why we're using the obscure name rather than the Artistic Liscence title?

Neither have I. We don't have hockey in our country.

Me Too!.

Just because he's "the most famous hockey player" doesn't mean he's well known to everyone who's not in the world of hockey.

It's like saying "Shigeru Miyamoto is one of the best video game developers of the world"... to a non-gamer.

I sure am familiar with Wayne Gretsky, even though I'm not really a sports fan. Then again, ice hockey is huge here in Sweden. I think he had his prime back in '90s though...

Wayne Gretzky is not obscure. He just isn't.

A Canadian hockey player is going to be a lot more obscure than the President of the United States.

Never played or even seen a hockey game. I'm well aware who Gretzky is.

I have no issues with the name, personally.

"A Canadian hockey player is going to be a lot more obscure than the President of the United States."

Safe to say that he is better known than Chester Arthur.

"Never played or even seen a hockey game. I'm well aware who Gretzky is. I have no issues with the name, personally."

Same here.

edited 19th Jun '14 5:54:27 AM by Catbert

If this is part of the Artistic Licence category, there's not really anything to discuss.

It's shouldn't be Artistic License, though. That redirect is misleading.

It should be when a character completely bobbles how a game is played or the terminology of a game, like thinking ice hockey involves a ball of some sort, or that a baseball player scores a touchdown, usually when they're trying to show off.

edited 19th Jun '14 8:10:30 AM by Madrugada

The examples look fairly Artistic License-y to me, though. Not decided on whether the trope should be "artistic license - sports" or "character gets sports facts wrong".

Yeah, I edited my post. As it stands, this really is "Artistic License – Sports (usually played deliberately for humor)". The other is a trope as well, (probably a subtrope of the Know-Nothing Know-It-All).

So this looks like a split and clean-up is in order.

edited 19th Jun '14 8:13:05 AM by Madrugada

Disambiguate or redirect for original title?

Prolly disambig.

I'd say disambig. 400+ inbounds is way too many to discard.

I know what hockey is in general, but I'd never heard of Gretzky before I stumbled across this trope for the first time. It seems to me like there are several other sports that are more prominent than hockey here in America, so that might have something to do with my ignorance on the subject.

edited 20th Jun '14 12:31:10 AM by MrL1193

Having never heard of Gretzky I could still tell by the way the name is phrased, the context it's been used in, and the kind of things present on this wiki, and also because of the reference to a ball, that it's about mixing up sports. Go to the page, and it's about either the writers not knowing about sports or about an In-Universe character only pretending to know their stuff by saying something sporty and referencing actual sports terms they've heard, but messing it up. However, I'd immediately suppose the latter. An inversion of that would be like once on some show there was the foolproof plan to seem cool "did you watch the game last night? What about that result!" By just being vague enough to seem like you follow sport. So, split?

edited 20th Jun '14 10:11:05 AM by lakingsif

I'm a hockey fan but have never heard of this Gretzky guy. Perhaps that's because he retired fifteen years ago?

Regardless, it strikes me that hockey is played with a ball, and that it's common idiom to say that a player "has the ball" even if that means he isn't physically carrying it; it simply means he has it on his stick. So that makes the name pretty confusing unless you're familiar with the FoxTrot strip.

So I agree that changing this to a disambig is a good idea, moving the trope to a clearer name.

I think that's stretching it a little. Never heard of the strip, never had trouble understanding what it's about. Then again, my brother was sort of a fan of him, so it's a safe bet I know who he is.

Also, considering the trope says, "The trope name doesn't actually come from any examples," I think the reference to FoxTrot is way overinflated in this discussion. It's just not relevant to the understanding of the phrase.

The way I see it it is a type of research failure, rather than a character trope, but it's used as both. A split sounds like a good idea.