People on this wiki have a bad habit of troping the careers of Sportspeople, and the outcomes of sporting events like The Olympics, despite these being Real Life events and not related to how they are portrayed in media.
Problems on Sportspeople specifically:
- It lists both Creator and Useful Notes. Not bad by itself, but
- Creator/ pages are for those who create tropeworthy content besides their athletic career, like Terry Crews, who is an actor. A sports career by itself is not enough to qualify as a Creator/. So pages like Yuna Kim need to be cut. (It would've been cut anyway for being a stub and troping real life.)
- Useful Notes pages should focus on portraying individual athletes in fiction. It is not supposed to trope them in real life; any trope list should be about fictional appearances, portrayals, or personas. We should not aim to trope their career achievements or playing styles. Real Life events are not Sports Stories.
- It lists wrestlers when they have their own dedicated index, Professional Wrestling.
- Lastly, there's merit in listing commentators but I personally find the "sports team owners" list kinda useless. Thoughts?
Other miscellaneous notions:
- Advertising tropes can stay as long as the advert in question is cited (eg. National Animal Stereotypes at the Olympics)
- Costumes are not tropable in *most* cases.
- Some trope pages can have real life examples (eg. Disqualification-Induced Victory), but not while troping real people as characters.
Edited by Synchronicity on Aug 3rd 2021 at 12:50:42 PM
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A few sportspeople Useful Notes pages have been cutlisted; once the cuts have been processed, I'll remove them from the index.
I had a dog-themed avatar before it was cool.
Should the redlinks for non-wrestling sportspeople be removed too? Since we presumably don't want to encourage people to make creator and useful notes pages for random sportspeople who haven't appeared in any works.
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![[up]](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/smiles/arrow_up.png "[up]"){kind=icon}
That's what I'm planning to do.
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Sportspeople index has been cleaned up.
I had a dog-themed avatar before it was cool.
Nintendo Fanatic Extraordinaire
Should sports examples be allowed in Late-Arrival Spoiler, given that there's a near-consensus to remove real-life examples?
Kirby is awesome.
I don't see how sporting events can have spoilers. They are not scripted and are happening in real time.
Nintendo Fanatic Extraordinaire
There are some sports fans who would want to watch a game that was played earlier, but don't want to be spoiled by the results.
Some sports websites even have the option to hide results.
Sports may be part of real life, but unlike much of real life, sports do have spoilers, despite sports being unscripted (when played legitimately).
Kirby is awesome.
Again that's not a spoiler in the narrative sense, and it is so overwhelmingly common as to be meaningless. What would an example even look like> "Joe Blow missed Superbowl XXXVIII and spent the rest of the week hiding from the internet until he could see the game"?
It also makes even less sense for Late-Arrival Spoiler, which is when the nth installment of a series spoils the climax from the first or second installment (like if a trailer for a hypothetical Star Wars vol 32 advertises that Darth Vader is Luke's father). The Real Life examples we already have are vague and shoehorned, adding in every major sports event that some hypothetical person missed will make it even worse.
I didn't choose the troping life, the troping life chose me
Serial Cut Lister
Ok, so the Champions League's finals are about to start in Fox Sports, but I didn't watch the semifinals, so to dont spoil myself, I'm just gonna ignore all kind of ads about the game.
Its that what you meant? If yes, I think I understand. If not, I just dont get it.
Edited by Braylovsky on Jan 13th 2022 at 7:30:33 AM
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Nintendo Fanatic Extraordinaire
That is correct.
Again, what would an example of that look like on a page? It's only tangentially about sports as described, and would still run afoul of No Real Life Examples once the vote is finalized.
And again, how is that "spoiler" actually a Late-Arrival Spoiler?
Edited by laserviking42 on Jan 13th 2022 at 10:51:23 AM
I didn't choose the troping life, the troping life chose me
Bumping this (as a note to myself or anyone who wants to fix it) to look at Peyton Manning, which is troping real life.
I see what you mean there, so I decided to take a quick sweep myself:
- Adam Westing: Fond of this in his various media appearances and endorsements, either Flanderizing or subverting his Nice Guy persona.has to do with his ad appearances, keep
- Always Someone Better: Manning is one of the greatest quarterbacks of all time, but while his stats are better, his overall record, especially in the playoffs, is overshadowed by Tom Brady, who has won seven of ten Super Bowls (and counting), while Manning only won two of four. Even more so by Manning's Broncos being totally blown out by the Seahawks in Super Bowl XLVIII, and then the Patriots defeating the Seahawks in Super Bowl XLIX. Then after Manning won Super Bowl 50 in a relatively lackluster performance, the Patriots won Super Bowl LI in an incredible Miracle Rally against the Atlanta Falcons. Interestingly in their head-to-head records, Manning has the edge in the playoffs, winning 3 of their 5 meetings (his two losses to Brady in the playoffs both came in Foxborough while his wins were one in Indianapolis and two in Denver), though his overall record against them is much worse, only going 3-9 in regular season games against Brady and the Patriots.troping real life, cut
- Peyton himself is this trope to his brother Eli, who himself is regarded as a great quarterback among the likes of Drew Brees, his brother Peyton, and Ben Roethlisberger and Phillip Rivers (his draft classmates in the 2004 draft), due to leading an underdog New York Giants squad to upset victories over Tom Brady and the New England Patriots twice—one of them being the famous 18-1 game Super Bowl XLII—but gets shafted due to his comparatively ordinary regular season stats. In fact, before Super Bowl 50, Eli could always claim to having won two Super Bowls and Super Bowl MVPs, but with the Broncos' victory in Super Bowl 50, Eli and Peyton now have two Super Bowls...and Peyton holds the records.troping real life, cut
- Celebrity Endorsement: The football equivalent of Michael Jordan when it comes to endorsements. After he became an endorser for Papa John's Pizza in 2012, Manning would own several Papa John's restaurants in Colorado. He still regularly films new commercials for Nationwide insurance, and also had lucrative deals with DirecTV, Gatorade, and MasterCard, to name but a few.related to media appearances, keep
- Cloud Cuckoolander: His persona in commercials is best described as a Golden Retriever puppy trapped in human form: happy, excited, and enthusiastic to the point of annoyance.media appearances, keep
- Crossing the Burnt Bridge: Subverted. After Manning left the Colts to join the Denver Broncos, the two teams eventually met at a Colts home game. Rather than being booed, Manning was given a standing ovation by Colts fans
, including showing a video package which ended with a graphic reading "THANKS PEYTON." The Colts later erected a statue of Manning outside their stadium soon after his retirement.troping real life, cut
- Crippling Overspecialization: Manning's Colts teams were mostly geared around providing good receivers for him to throw to and blockers to keep the defense away from him. The Colts were high scorers but tended to fizzle in the playoffs, proving the old adage of "Offense wins games, but defense wins championships". Even the Colts' Super Bowl championship in 2006 was at least partly a result of their defense stepping up at the right time (they played unusually well in the wild-card and divisional rounds, as well as the Super Bowl, and the play that sealed the Colts victory against the Patriots in the conference championship was an interception of a Tom Brady pass with seconds to go). The Broncos were also more offense-oriented when he first arrived, but after their embarrassing 43-8 loss to the Seattle Seahawks in Super Bowl XLVIII, the team was reworked to be better on defense, and they won two years later against the Carolina Panthers in Super Bowl 50.troping real life, cut
- Every Year They Fizzle Out: The Trope Namer, after Peyton's SNL skit that lampshaded Manning's infamous tendency of this trope before his first Super Bowl win. While his regular season accomplishments are legendary, Manning has a mediocre playoff record (14-13, including nine one-and-dones, the most for a starting quarterback), mainly from the trope codifying in the first half of his career while Tom Brady racked up titles in New England. His two Super Bowl wins have erased most of this stigma by this point.troping real life, cut
- Freeze-Frame Bonus: Manning set the 16-game single-season record for passing yards in the 2013 season. His last pass of the year, which put him over by a single yard, went sideways to a receiver on the boundary. Under NFL rules, if it went backwards, it wouldn't count as a "pass" and therefore Drew Brees would retain the record. NFL fans have spent significant amounts of time reviewing this otherwise routine play and arguing over this point.troping real life, also misuse, cut
- The Rival: To the New England Patriots in general and Tom Brady specifically. He continued to tease both of them for their various scandals well after his retirement.troping real life, cut
- Self-Deprecation: He won Super Bowl 50 with the Broncos, but he was visibly hindered by injuries and helped by a historically-good defense. He's made many public jokes about being "carried" to that title.iffy on this one
- The Band Minus the Face: Oddly enough, the Tennessee Volunteers won the national championship the year after he went pro, behind a far less heralded and less successful quarterback.note troping real life, cut
- Vetinari Job Security: This happened to the Colts in 2011, as Manning's backups, Kerry Collins (who came out of retirement), Curtis Painter, and Dan Orlovsky, struggled to replicate Manning's offense, and combined with a very difficult schedule (the AFC South played the AFC North and NFC South that year), the Colts finished 2-14, leading to jokes and discussions that Peyton was the 2011 NFL MVP without playing a game. (Ironically, the only quarterback of the three who won any games was Orlovsky... previously best known for being the quarterback of a Detroit Lions team that went winless for the whole season.)troping real life, cut
"Fellas, if #18 goes down, we're fucked. And we don't practice fucked." — Tom Moore, Colts offensive coordinator, on why Manning's backups don't receive snaps during practice
- Subverted in the 2015 season, in which the defensive-oriented Broncos finished 5-2 while Manning sat out while recovering from his foot injury. The Broncos would go on to win Super Bowl 50, despite Manning's offense being awful that night (his offense gained the fewest yards for a Super Bowl champion).troping real life, which can't be subverted, cut
- What Could Have Been: As noted in The Rival above, he and Tom Brady fought to be the best QB in the AFC for years. However, their teams (the Patriots and Colts) were split up in the 2002 NFL realignment, meaning they could have spent most of their careers fighting for the same division title. Brady and the Patriots only played one season against the Colts as divisional opponents, going 2-0. For a lot of years, the Pats looked like Peyton's kryptonite — in his first seven years in Indy, he only won two games of eleven meetings, dating back to when Drew Bledsoe was playing, and when Brady took over, the Pats beat the Colts four times in the regular season and twice (in humiliating fashion) in the playoffs. It's speculated that having an extra game (and a guaranteed home game) would have made the initial matchup look more even.troping real life, cut
Thoughts?
Edited by laserviking42 on Aug 15th 2022 at 4:48:48 AM
I didn't choose the troping life, the troping life chose me
I’ll agree with that, though I think “has he appeared in enough tropable media to warrant a Creator/ page” is the more pertinent question.
The only thing I would say in favor of keeping, is that he is in alot of commercials.
On the other hand, he's not featured alot in narrative works, and isn't one of those athletes that dominates pop culture with parodies and expies and what not.
I wouldn't shed a tear if the whole thing got cut tbh.
I didn't choose the troping life, the troping life chose me
That's Dr. Title, thank you!
Going through the Sports Story Tropes on tropes A-B, the following have Sports or Real Life folders
Academic Athlete
Accidental Athlete
Animal Athlete Loophole
Artistic License – Sports has both Chess and Boxing/MMA folders, but looking at that those they look like missing subpages for Artistic License Chess and Artistic License Boxing rather than misuse
Bad Guys Play Pool
Beastly Blood Sports
The Benchwarmer
Bizarre and Improbable Golf Game
Black Boxer Stereotype
Blood Sport
Bowling for Ratings (the one example is about a legend, but also doesn't seem to fit the trope?)
The Boxing Episode
So that's 12 out of the first 18 tropes that need some cleanup, before I stopped looking further. Some of them need minimal cleanup (and some just need a folder to be completely removed), but there's already a lot of worth to do just stepping through the Sports Story Tropes.
Just a heads up that I made UsefulNotes.David Beckham yes I watched the Netflix doc because I think he is actually a pro athlete with a significant media footprint, so I tried to emphasize that in the writeup.
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Anything salvageable on Creator.Ross Chastain?
I had a dog-themed avatar before it was cool.
I'd say no, Ross hasn't ever appeared in any sort of narrative or tropeable work, he's solely a racecar driver.
Im also against that idea, but since we don't trope real life, I doubt that we could "bend" that rule when troping something sports-related.
Yo soy el futuro, luwawanu mu sadila kisalasala kio.