Living on the Cut Line

Paul Shirley has a problem with the eleventh hour. It's not just that most of his professional basketball career came down to deals made in that proverbial time slot (though they did), or that the phrase originates from the Bible, one of his least favorite books (though it does). Mainly, it's because the wording makes little sense. "Shouldn’t the cliché involve the twelfth hour?" he writes in his book Can I Keep My Jersey?: 11 Teams, 5 Countries, and 4 Years in My Life as a Basketball Vagabond. "The eleventh hour runs from ten to eleven, which makes it a lot less urgent and suspenseful and more just irrelevant."