Ted Cruz called a hoop 'a basketball ring.' What does he call other sports equipment?

Introducing the Ted Cruz Sports Gear Encyclopedia.

By Rodger Sherman Apr 27, 2016, 11:37am EDT

Indiana holds its crucial primary election next week, so Tuesday night, Ted Cruz tried his best to appeal to Hoosier voters by re-enacting a scene from universally beloved basketball film Hoosiers. He showed up at the gym in Knightstown where the movie was filmed, and tried to give the same speech coach Norman Dale gives to his team where he demonstrates that the basketball goal in a cavernous Indianapolis arena is the same as in their small-town gym.

Except he messed up a kinda big part:

Cruz called the big thing 10 feet in the air at the end of the court a "basketball ring." There are a lot of words I've heard used to describe that thing you shoot the ball into: Hoop, basket, bucket, tin, iron, so on and so forth. In the Hoosiers scene, Dale calls it a "goal," which is old-timey, but accurate. Cruz could've called it a "net" and it wouldn't have been totally accurate, since that's not the metal part, but we would've understood. Perhaps Cruz was trying to say "rim" and his tongue slipped. But he said "ring," which is not something anybody calls it.

You don't have to like sports to be a good president -- some of our best politicians apparently know nothing about sports, and some of our worst are obsessed with them. But we're always here to laugh at politicians pretending they're sports fanatics to appeal to audiences when they actually don't know the most basic aspects of sports, like what to call the thing you shoot the ball into.

So we started to wonder what Cruz calls other pieces of sports equipment. Does he call a basketball jersey "basketball clothes?" Does he call the backboard "the basketball wall?"

We took our best guess at what Ted Cruz would call various pieces of sports equipment: