American Busboy

Friend of dcat (and fellow Newporter -- Go Tigers!) Matt Guenette, has a new book of poetry, American Busboy (which was a finalist and editor's choice of the 2010 University of Akron Press Poetry Prize) that you should buy and he was recently interviewed in Devil's Lake, a UW-Madison literary magazine.

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 . . .

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.

Hometown Media

It has not been a great few days for the print media in my home town and its environs.My dad told me the other day that the weekly paper that covers local news, the Argus Champion, is closing its doors. It is hard to explain what the Argus means in a town like Newport. There is a daily newspaper, the Eagle Times, based in the (larger) town next door, Claremont. But the weekly newspaper always held the soul of newport. Or it did until a few years ago, when the coverage started leaning toward some of the more affluent nearby towns. For many in Newport, this is the real reason why the Argus failed.

In high school the Argus was especially good at covering local sports. Each week the paper chose an athlete of the week, and a local grocer sponsored the award by giving the winner two free steaks. I must have had two dozen steaks as a result of this partnership, the sort of thing that characterizes, indeed defines, small towns. The Eagle Times does a fine job of covering high school sports, but its coverage area is such that it encompasses well more than a dozen small communities and their high schools. The Argus was for our town and our teams, with a strong emphasis on Newport Tiger sports. I so rarely get home, and must admit that I do not go online to look at the Argus at all often. But like every other institution in my hometown, just knowing it was there has always been comforting.

On a lighter note, yet another basically local paper, the Valley News, which was based a few towns away and thus rarely figured in our day-to-day lives (unless we accomplished something against one of the Upper Valley teams in sports) has made news lately for a rather embarrassing snafu. On July 21, the newspaper misspelled its own name. On the front page:
The paper later sheepishly apologized:

[Hat tip to Patrick Appel, one of the writers still subbing in for Andrew Sullivan, for the Valley News gaffe.]

All Politics is Local: Simpsons Edition

In this global world I suppose it should not surprise me that I discovered that Springfield, Vermont will be hosting the premiere of the Simpsons movie from a South African newspaper, though the news initially was the result of a contest in USA Today (where you can click to see all of the video entries). I grew up about a half hour from Springfield, and played against them in sports, especially football (we beat them on a great defensive stop my senior year) and track (I won my first high school event at Springfield High my sophomore year; it seemed like we competed there three times a year). And now it is semi-world famous. In my mind this means Newport = Shelbyville (though I suppose in fairness Bellows Falls comes closest in geographic proximity and rivalry value to playing Springfield's foil).

Home at Home

Over at Slice of Life Holmes has a powerful post that begins as a tribute to a fallen police officer in his new city, Charlotte (where I lived from 1994 to 1996) and ends up as a reflection on what it means to be at home. Over the course of the post he comes to an epiphany that he presents through the literary tactic of epistrophe. Charlotte has become his city.

For many of us "home" is a more problematic concept than it ought to be. Holmes and I grew up in the same home town, and for many years "home" was to us a simple concept: A little out of the way mill town where we attended our one high school and lamented how damned boring life there was. Newport was the poor stepchild in the Upper Valley, a town we rather easily referred to as a shithole, though nestled as it is in the hills and trees of New England it is a lovely shithole and when things are good and jobs are plentiful and the many narrow-minded folks are not winning the hearts and minds of the town, we both can even romanticize it if the conversation flows in the right way.

But then you go to college, and by sophomore year you discover that after a week or two at home you are ready to be back on campus. By senior year, you are comfortable saying that you are ready for break to be over so you can be back in your room, back at your house, back to practice and even to classes. You are ready to be back home, or at least "home." To use academic jargon, "home" becomes a problemetized concept during your college years. To strip away that jargon, for many of us, college marks the first time that we realize that our horizons have changed, and that home will no longer be simply where we grew up.

By now I have moved so often, and my Mom no longer lives in the old hometown, and my Dad is only there for a little more than half the year, and the house in which I grew up was lost (conceded?) in a divorce settlement far from my control or say-so, and though I may return once every eighteen months or so I am rarely there for more than a couple of days, so that Newport is my old home town, but it is no longer home and has not been for a long time.

In recent years home has been Charlotte and Washington, Charlottesville and Athens, Grahamstown (South Africa) and Oxford (England). There have been others as well. Home has been Mankato, unhappily, and now it is Odessa, and I am as surprised as anyone that it is happily so. I've no idea how long this flat, dry expanse between Dallas-Fort Worth and El Paso will be home, but it is for now, and while home is, for most people, a long-time thing, in my peripatetic life since leaving the home town it has also often been a right-now thing.

"Home" is surely more than where you lay your head, though laying one's head is probably a necessary condition. Home is, ultimately, where you live your life not only in the grandest sense, but also where you establish a rapport with the mundane. Home for me is a frustrating and expensive heating/cooling unit and the little old ladies next door with whom we exchange small talk when they teeter outdoors to smoke. It is the Odessa American in my carport every morning even if I will rarely read much of it, and it is the growing campus less than a mile from our front door. Home is where I come back to when I have been somewhere else. Home is a place I defend to outsiders before they have even said anything disparaging and it is a place I need to leave every so often even if it won't be long before I'll be referring to "home," and I'll know exactly the place I have in mind when I say it.

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.