A Town, A Team, A Documentary

The Onion SportsDome (which you probably should be watching) might just be tweaking Odessa (Friday Night Lights : The Book, The Movie, The television show) "High School Football Documentaries a Way of Life In Small Texas Town."

NHS -- 2010 New Hampshire State Football Champions! (With A Hint of Melancholy)

I never got to play for a state championship when I played football for Newport High School. My sophomore year we lost in the first round of the playoffs to a team we had beaten just a few weeks earlier. My junior year Newport began an ill-fated experiment in playing in a league of Vermont and New Hampshire teams, the Connecticut Valley League, that made total sense geographically (I don't think we had a road trip of any more than an hour in two seasons). But the New Hampshire Interscholastic Athletic Association was not a fan of our trans-state machinations, and so for two years we were ineligible to play for any sort of postseason berth. Both years we had winning records against teams from schools that were at least twice as big as we were and in some cases four times as big -- each of the New Hampshire schools in the conference would later play in conferences two or more divisions above Newport.

The next year, when I was a freshman in college, Newport went back to the NHIAA with its tail between its legs, entered the normal divisional system (which has changed at least five times in the last three decades) and won a state championship in a tiny division of the state's tiniest football playing schools, and between then and 1995 won at least two other championships. After something of a dry spell (brought about at least in part because Newport continues to be one of the smallest, if the the smallest, football-playing high school in New Hampshire) Newport again emerged as state champions last weekend after crushing a team from Gilford that had defeated my Tigers by twenty points two weeks earlier. The final score was 35-0, all the more impressive because it took place on Gilford's home field. And in typical Newport fashion, residents of the Sunshine Town traveled well -- we likely outnumbered the home crowd by a substantial margin. My junior year we played a pivotal conference game against Lebanon, 45 minutes up the road, and Newport, a town of 6,000 people then as now, had fans numbering in the thousands on the sidelines. (For posterity's sake I should note that I made the first tackle in that game against Labanon's All State kick returner and running back. Yeay me!).

My uncles won a couple of state championships back in the 1970s and Newport won another a few years before I got to the varsity. But because of the CVL experiment I never got particularly close to a state championship in football despite playing for teams that had a record of something like 18-7 in my three years. And while I am proud of my individual track state championships, it's just not the same thing inasmuch as no one actually gives a shit.

I certainly have not long lamented not winning a state championship in high school. I was always better at track than football, and while I was recruited by a few small colleges to play football, once I got into Williams I banished any of those ideas, though I have long regretted not even trying to "walk on" for the Ephs. But Newport winning brought back a bit of melancholy.

Newport is a small high school in a small town. The connection that one has to a school such as NHS is deeply personal, made all the more so by the intimacy of a community such as NHS. I would guess that there have been fewer graduates of Newport High School since I left for Williams than walk the halls of Permian High School this morning. I know the head coach (who was one of my high school teachers, who was then the baseball coach who had been passed over for the head coaching job, who some of the town idiots -- including the AD -- tried to remove a few years ago after his only losing season in nearly two decades, and who is by just about any measure the most successful football coach in Newport's pretty solid football history) and talked to him on Sunday. Most of the players have names I recognize -- I played with their fathers or uncles or brothers. And now they are New Hampshire Division VI State Champions.

Glory To Newport . . .

Oh No, Mojo!

Odessa and Permian High School have come a long way since the days of Friday Night Lights, which revealed a pattern of placing high school football and the guys who played it on a pedestal. Now I always thought that what people missed about FNL is that it told a more universal story than most realized. In many ways Buzz Bissinger's book was less about Permian Mojo than about a society that had elevated high school sports well beyond where they belonged.

Well, whatever progress Permian has made is not going to be helped by a story that has exploded here in Odessa and that has ramifications that we are just now beginning to grasp. I don't want to pile on, so I am just going to direct you here, here, and in the most damning news yet, here and here. There is more to this story than I want to get into here, as I have insight based on knowing several of the named and unnamed principals. But this has the potential to be truly ugly.

Tennessee Hates Good Students

It's pretty easy to summon up outrage these days. Much of it is fake, a pose of outrage geared toward scoring easy political points, a trend I have called "fakerage," though "mockrage" would be as good a term for it. The world of sports is not immune from this phenomenon, which sometimes makes it all the more difficult to recognize a true outrage when it occurs.

Well, Sports Illustrated's Phil Taylor has found one. In his "Point After" column in this week's SI Taylor tells the story of four would-be cross country runners at Chattanooga's elite McCallie School. All four are elite students. And all four should be elite athletes on the school's cross country team. But they have been declared ineligible not because of anything they have done, but because they are such good students that they attend the school on academic scholarships.

Tennessee athletic officials, recognizing the legitimate possibility of abuse of academic scholarships for high school athletes, have nonetheless committed a pretty absurd injustice by ruling these students ineligible. And state officials have shown no sign of budging. Essentially because of the possibility of abuses that surely could be policed were the state inclined to try to do so, these four students who have abused nothing do not get to experience being high school athletes. I'm sure we could all find better examples of petty bureaucratic dogmatism, but we'd have to search pretty hard. Let's hope that Taylor's column proves to be the push factor allowing the three who will still be in school next year to run for McCallie. The other is Harvard bound in the fall.

The Last Bastion

At The Bygone Bureau Josh Fischel has a great feature on the only high school ski jumping league. This story is particularly close to my heart because I competed in this league back when I was on my high school ski team. My high school has one of the jumps from the 1932 Lake Placid Olympics and we often hosted the state meet, though insurance issues have kept NHS from fielding a ski jumping team for quite some time. As for my own ski jumping career? I was decent enough for a guy picking up the sport as a teenager. A guy a few years ahead of me was a multiple-time Olympic ski jumper and by the time he was in his early teens he could no longer use our jump because he would have out-jumped the incline and thus killed himself. Oh -- and there were only two "agony of defeat moments" that I saw. One came when a friend and teammate wiped out on the ramp in Plymouth, which was humiliating for him and so hilarious to us. The other one came when a jumper from Concord High crossed his tips in the air and we all thought we'd just seen someone die. he walked away with a concussion and broken nose.

"A Good Pan of Chicken"

The New York Times had a great feature a while back on small-town West Texas football.

Hat Tip to my student, Cannon.

A Mother's Love

If this story from the latest Texas Monthly does not inspire a pretty strong emotional reaction, you might not have a soul. It got very dusty in hacienda dcat by the end. It tells the tale of a tragic high school football injury, remarkable human spirit, and above all a mother's deep devotion. You'll probably want to give your Mom a call after this one.

The Natural

The Boston Globe has a story about a 16-year old baseball player in Las Vegas who conjures up images of The Natural.

On Recruiting

The New York Times has a great feature on the football recruiting process for one of the best prospects in the nation, Jamarkus McFarland, a defensive tackle from Lufkin, in East Texas. His choice came down to the heated Red River rivals, Oklahoma and Texas and he has verbally committed to Oklahoma.

It is hard to fathom what being recruited at that level must be like. My own experience twenty years ago, in a non-revenue sport like track & field (I was recruited by a handful of small football programs, but not with much zeal - smart programs) leads me to believe that for a big-time football or basketball player the frenzy must be both ego-boosting and seriously pressurized. By the fall of my senior year I was receiving letters and phone calls every day, mostly from DIII schools but from a number of DI programs as well, albeit mostly the Ivies and their ilk. And even for an athlete of relatively limited talents in a sport that does not exactly carry with it a great deal of status I learned quickly that recruiters run the gamut from the unctuous purveyors of sleaze to the genuinely kind, almost avuncular. One Ivy League coach called me weekly and by the time the recruiting process was done we could spend an hour on the phone. But the school was too close to home and I had decided on Williams, which was actually comparably low-key in the recruiting process.

My favorite recruiting story: I had just gotten home from football practice one afternoon when the phone rings at my Dad's farmhouse. I answer and it is the secretary from a major ACC basketball powerhouse track program. I was being recruited by their blood rival, which was another basketball power but not an especially prominent (read: "good") track program (and going to a subpar program was the only way I was going anywhere near the ACC). I assume my being on the rival's recruiting list explains the call. The secretary asked me to hold for Coach X, and as soon as he got on the line he addresses me in a Southern drawl out of central casting. He asked me about some of my performances, and then there was a pause so pregnant it could have been half of the girls in the sophomore class at my high school before he let out with this gem: "Son, that just won't fly with us." I was taken aback (being insulted is generally not part of the recruiting process, which usually involves lots of smoke going up lots of derrieres) and since I was clearly not in any position to blow a scholarship at this Tobacco Road redoubt I simply responded, "But coach, YOU called ME." I still root ardently against that team during basketball season.

The Assist

There is a specific genre of books that I'll fall for every time. The writer embeds himself with a team for a season, or a year, or longer, providing the insights not only of the dynamics of a sports team, but in the best cases, also of the humanity at the heart of sports. The latest of these, and one of the best, that I enhaled pretty much in one sitting is Neil Swidey's The Assist, which follows Charlestown (Massachusetts) High School's basketball team over the course of three years. Heartbreaking and tragic, it also just came out in paperback with a new epilogue, meaning that just weeks after buying the hardcover I am going to have to shell out for the paperback. (In other words: One of you may be receiving The Assist for Christmas.)

Sportsguy on An Athlete Dying Young

For a reminder of what Sportsguy is like when he is truly on, I would strongly recommend that you take a look at this article on the death of a high school athlete in Los Angeles. This is heartbreaking, essential reading.

Overstating the Glow of the Lights

The latest issue of the New York Times' sports magazine, Play has an interesting piece on both Friday Night Lights and the spectacle of Friday Night Lights that inspire the show. Football is fast approaching and so naturally Odessa and the region are getting geared up for another season under the lights. There is no doubting that football is huge in West Texas, and that Permian High is the most prominent program, though in Odessa it appears that the coverage of both PHS and Odessa High are fairly evenhanded (my guess is that Bronchos fans might disagree).

To a degree I take issue with one assertion from Darren Allman, Permian's third-year head coach who played on the Panthers' 1984 state championship team, when he discusses how realistic the television show is:

“The book, movie and TV show are all based on how rabid the people in this community are about high-school football,” he says. “Is that realistic? Yes.” Football is “the No. 1 source of entertainment,” he continues, adding, “It’s what people think about and talk about all the time.”

This represents fiercely insular thinking. Lots of people spend lots of time thinking about football here, to be sure. But football simply is not so dominant throughout the community that we all sit around discussing whether the Panthers can improve on last year's playoff performance. (I think perhaps they can).

For parents and alumni and die-hard fans, of course, local football is huge, as it is in just about any community across the country. But once you escape the penumbral shade of Permian's world, one can live an existence in Odessa quite removed from the black and white wonders of Mojo. And this does not come from a hostile observer -- anyone who has read this blog for even a week nows that I obsessively love sports. But like most things related to high school life, those within its ambit tend to over-inflate the significance of what goes on within.

Of course Coach Allman thinks Permian High football is the be-all and end-all for the community's existence. As well he should as the program's head coach. But one of the problems we as a country tend to have with regard to high school sports is to make them life-or-death, and thus more important than they are. Since 1998 Permian High has made the playoffs exactly once. And by almost any indicator, the community is thriving, arguably more, on the whole, than it ever has. Like a swath of the city's denizens, I'm looking forward to next weekend's Permian Basin Football Preview in the Odessa American. I'm hoping to make my first foray under the lights at Ratliff Stadium this fall. But if I chose to pay the hype no heed, I would not represent a scorned outlier in this community. In a sense, it does Odessa and this region a disservice to imply otherwise.

Good News For An Old Friend

An injustice has been rectified in my hometown. This man, the most successful football coach in Newport High School history, was one of my teachers and served as an assistant coach for a couple of my football teams. Several of us wrote letters and provided other forms of support. Small towns sometimes produce an abundance of small minds, but in this case, enough people with their senses intact managed to do the right thing.

Quick Hits

Three articles in today's Boston Globe caught my attention:

Bob Ryan argues that history shows how NBA teams that trade away superstars always end up on the losing end of the deal. He provides seven examples. His approach is a bit historicist, and certainly is deterministic, but when it comes to basketball, Bob Ryan is like E. F. Hutton: When he talks (and writes) people should listen.

Meanwhile, apparently a number of Massachusetts high schools are using pictures posted on the web (MySpace, et al) to catch, and possibly punish, students seen in pictures using drugs or alcohol. While this approach in and of itself might be debatable, the most problematic aspect is that these schools are choosing to focus solely on athletes in meting out punishments. This approach is dubious at best and sends precisely the wrong message: That athletes are different, that they are subject to a different level of scrutiny. In this case, to be sure, athletes pay the price. But on the other hand, if we can choose to single out athletes for punishment for deeds that are either right or wrong for all students (why not punish a kid in the chorus, or the debating team, or a class officer?) then we are saying that we can also treat them favorably as a matter of official policy. It seems to me that one of the positive aspects of Buzz Bissinger's book Friday Night Lights is that it shed a light on the excesses of glorifying high school athletes. Now what some Massachusetts public schools are doing is feeding this mindset even while putting it in the context of holding these athletes to higher standards.

Finally, Jason Stearns, a senior analyst with the International Crisis Group, and the spy novelist John Le Carre (!?!) have a plan to get the Congo's vast mineral wealth into the hands of its suffering people. Their suggestion, an entirely sane one that I do not see happening to the extent necessary anytime soon, is that the government and international organizations must renegotiate contracts "in a way that benefits the Congolese state and people."