Balls out - to the walls

In defending himself before the Senate Hearing Committee on the government’s response to Hurricane Katrina, former FEMA Director Michael Brown used a strange phrase: “I told the staff… the day before the hurricane struck, that I expected them to cut every piece of red tape, do everything they could; that it was balls to the wall…”

The slang phrase Brown used derives its meaning neither from sports nor male anatomy but from aviation. The first written usage dates to Frank Harvey’s “Air War – Vietnam” which contains the sentence, “You know what happened on that first Doomsday Mission (as the boys call a big balls-to-the-wall raid) against Hanoi oil.”

The aviation context is easy to understand. On some planes the throttle levers, as well as the fuel mixture and propeller governor levers, have round, ball-like grips. To increase speed the pilot pushed the balls all the way forward to the wall. The wall in question being the firewall, which was supposed to keep an engine fire from advancing into the cockpit.

Korean War veterans take exception to dating the phrase to the Vietnam War, insisting it was common military-aviation slang in the 1950s. World War II pilots claim to have been using the phrase even earlier, or at least the phrase “balls out.” For proof they point to fighter planes that often sported provocative nose art, including at least one that had the words “balls out” painted above the picture of a rampaging bull. One has to question, however, whether in that instance the artist had throttle knobs in mind.

Interestingly, though “balls out” denotes the same meaning as “balls to the walls” – to go at full speed, to give it one’s all – “balls out” more likely derived from steam engines.

The phrase cannot be traced to any written source. Nevertheless, it is generally associated with the way a governor works on a steam engine. A governor is a mechanical apparatus with round metal balls attached to two arms. The apparatus is fastened to the engine’s drive shaft and the arms connected by a rod to the steam valve. As the steam engine gains speed, centrifugal force causes the balls to spin outward, which in turn pulls the rod and closes the valve. Denied fuel, the engine slows and the balls move inward. The process soon reaches a steady-state and the train runs as fast as possible within safety parameters – or balls out.