FYI.

This story is over 5 years old.

Sports

GOP Candidate Threatens PA Gov. with Bizarre Golf/Baseball Violence

"You better put a catcher's mask on your face because I'm going to stomp all over your face with golf spikes."
Scott Wagner threatening to stompTom Wolf's face with golf spikes.
Screen capture via Twitter/@mattmfm

Politicians are notoriously shitty with sports metaphors. Say, when Reince Priebus compared passing the ACHA bill to a touchback and the time that Sean Spicer really went out of his way to bring up the New England Patriots in a pretty irrelevant and unhelpful metaphor about elections. But this one that Scott Wagner cooked up? It's just fucking weird.

Wagner is the now broke GOP candidate for governor of Pennsylvania, running up against current governor Tom Wolf (with the debate moderated by a very booed Alex Trebek). But it seems it's not just Wagner's campaign videos that are getting pretty budget, but so too are his sports metaphors. If you can even call this is a "metaphor."

Just take a look at a man in a sweater vest, angrily Kavanaugh-pointing into oblivion next to a director's chair full of napkins at a construction site:

It's really pretty impossible to tell how Wagner cooked up this scenario, but let's try to dissect it for a moment. Wagner wants the standing governor to put on a catcher's mask (baseball), so that he can wear golf spikes (golf) to walk all over his face with? Alright, so there's not really anything to dissect here. This is just pure mumbo jumbo.

The weirdest part is that it's such a confusing setup that it doesn't feel like a metaphor. It just sounds like an actual threat at this point. Wagner, who has been painting his competitor as a liberal elitist, seems to have been trying to connect with your Average Joe: "sports, amirite?!" But he's so filled with hollow bluster that his baseball/golf metaphor/threat just kind of amounts to a gigantic nothing. Because nothing says sports-ball quite like masked-face spike stomping? What in the holy hell is wrong with these people?