Why does sports writing seem to necessitate corniness?

No. 1 USC beat UW yesterday, which was not a surprise. I was disappointed, however, in the choice the Seattle Times made on how to report this. The title of their article: "Trojans don't horse around against UW." Get it? The Trojan Horse? Hilarious.

I find, though, that this is a common enough technique in sports writing, this tendency towards corny puns on the team's mascot. Another example from the Times' Sports page, the preview for the Seahawks/Cowboys matchup: "Bledsoe riding high again as a Cowboy." This tendency extends to player's names, too, as in "Hill has mountain of a night," referring to WSU receiver Jason Hill.

To prove this phenomenon isn't limited to the Seattle Times, note the LA Times' Sports page, which includes such titles as "Perfect 'Penmanship" and "Man on a Mission Beats His Man From a Mission." Or Sports in the Chicago Tribune, with "Assessing a penalty to golf's dumb rules" and "Superman too hot for Tech to handle."

I imagine the Sports writers tossing potential headlines for their articles around the lunch table:
"hey guys, whaddya think: the White Sox had terrific pitching last night, right? So how about "Perfect Bullpenmanship" as a headline?"
"Hey man, cut the 'bull,' [laughs around the table] and let the subtlety of the pun speak for itself!"

Though I must admit, I've been known to include a pun in the occasional term paper title. Perhaps it comes down to the psychology of the writer, whether they're reporting a baseball game or doing a close reading of a classical text. Perhaps at some point, after focusing on something for a while, we get a little goofy about it. That this goofiness occasionally manifests itself as a pun I guess isn't terribly surprising. It's the level of corniness, I guess, that gets me with respect to these sports headlines, though. I like to think of my own use of puns as somewhat ironic, like the title of this "blog."

Maybe sports writers think of them that way, too.