I know you are probably sick of me talking about baseball, so I'll divert. I will now talk about football. Not so much the sport, but because of one incident that is perhaps one of the stupidest things to ever happen to a professional player.

A punter for the Jacksonville Jaguars accidentally gashed his leg with an ax while chopping wood. So you might say, "Well, I guess he was doing something at his house, perhaps getting ready to make a fire." You'd be wrong. The ax and the wood were in the players' locker room. It was being used as a motivational tool by their coach. Since the team sucks, the coach used the slogan "Keep choppin' wood" which somehow translates to "Don't give up."

So anyway, the coach got an actual ax and some wood for the players to literally chop. If there's one thing this guy must hate, it's a metaphor that can only be taken figuratively.

So the punter decides to go chop some wood, he misses, hits his leg, and now he is probably out for the season. If you are a punter, you have the easiest job in the world. You make a ridiculous amount of money to kick a ball about 5 times a game. You rarely get hit and you rarely get blamed for a loss. My advice to a punter would be, "Don't chop wood. Ever. Don't do anything that will put your legs in danger. In fact, buy yourself a wheelchair and use it throughout the week."

I'm not sure who is more stupid. The coach for doing this, or the punter for thinking it was a good idea. My guess is that the punter was just so bored, he decided to see if he could chop through a log. Despite it being an easy job, it is probably incredibly boring, so any kind of diversion is probably pretty sweet.

Believe it or not, there are plenty of other motivational tools like this that were even more unsuccessful. There was the 1962 Mets whose pitchers adopted the motivational slogan "Keep jugglin' knives." There was also the 1987 Moroccan National soccer team, who after 5 consecutive losses stood behind their rallying cry of "Keep kickin' bowling balls really hard." And who could forget when Penn State's archery coach told his players to "Keep chuggin' whiskey before you show up to practice."

The biggest tragedy of all time though, was probably when the Polish Olympic swim team used the motivational slogan of "Keep tyin' cinder blocks 'round your ankles before you go swimmin'."

This Polish joke has been brought to you by Obvious Jokeski's Kielbasa.

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