I climbed the ropes

This was heard on a podcast interviewing National Hockey League players. One player was recounting how he made his way into the NHL. He started at the bottom, and “climbed the ropes” until he made it in the NHL. This is a mashup of “climb (up) the ladder” (to become increasingly successful) and “learn the ropes” (to learn how to do a particular job or skill). Climbing the ropes was a requirement in most high school gym classes so the speaker may have been thinking of those days. By the way, “ropes” appear in many malaphors (just type in the word in the search engine on my website malaphors.com).

A big thank you to Adam Jacob (aka Andy Jacobs) for hearing this one and sending it in!