The allure of high school football

Saturday, August 26, 2006 By LINDA P. CAMPBELL MCCLATCHY NEWSPAPERS I assumed I'd long since gotten over the allure of that hate-love relationship. The one with high school football. At its essence, the game is bone-crunchingly brutal. Well-executed, it's intricately beautiful. At worst, it devours money, time and energy that might be applied inside classrooms or elsewhere. But then it envelops a disparate array of students — top athletes and less accomplished ones, band members, cheer groups, flag corps members — and their parents in a community-building pageant with few parallels. How can you love a game that glorifies machismo, bloats teenagers' egos, encourages groupies, polarizes popular and unpopular kids? How can you hate a game that promotes teamwork and goal-setting, rewards hard work and self-discipline, develops problem-solving skills, teaches life lessons in self-discovery and perseverance? It elates, and it disappoints. And in Texas, it's as inevitable as it is ... well, inevitable. Euphoria, regret In the 1970s, when I attended Arlington, Texas' then-newest high school, we fans rode the alternate waves of euphoria and regret of building what would become a perennial playoff program under Eddy Peach (more than three decades later, the only head coach whom the Lamar Vikings have ever known). I graduated to college games but then discovered, during a year of graduate work in London and limited access to TV, that I could live without a weekend football fix. But the high school lights drew me back during my early days as a reporter, when I harbored delusions of becoming a sportswriter. Working in the newsroom by day and freelancing for the sports pages on fall Friday nights, I sat in cramped and rickety press boxes in towns around and in Fort Worth and Arlington. I kept my own stats, interviewed coaches and scurried back to write it up for Saturday readers, often with less than an hour to produce a story. It was the best training ever for writing on short deadline. Rushing in one night, I rode the elevator to the third floor with a young sports reporter who assumed I was there to man (or woman, as usually was the case) the phones, taking calls from the array of correspondents who checked in with scores and other details for stat boxes. He was flummoxed that a female reporter actually covered games. It was my turn to be flummoxed the night that a mother phoned while I frantically tried to finish my assignment. As I vaguely recall it now, her son's team had been trounced in the game I covered, and she implored that I treat them kindly in my story because, after all, they'd worked so hard. Don't guilt me, I wanted to say. My job is to describe what happened, not sympathize, I thought. At 20-something, I couldn't quite relate. But now I can. Agony As a freshman football mom, I'll sit in the stands agonizing. I'll pray that everyone plays well and no one gets hurt. I'll cheer wildly (and probably obnoxiously) at the outstanding passes and touchdown runs. I'll try to bite my tongue (though probably not successfully enough) instead of grousing at the busted plays. Yet despite the value of high school sports, I can't in good conscience argue for diverting more scarce dollars toward the playing fields and gyms when the district must focus on raising academic achievement and reducing dropout rates. So I'll marvel at the passion, determination and even hope with which the home team trudges uphill on an uneven playing field. And I'll fret. In "Friday Night Lights," H.G. Bissinger's book examining one town's obsession with its high school football team, the author quoted a father as saying: "Athletics lasts for such a short period of time. It ends for people. But while it lasts, it creates this make-believe world where normal rules don't apply." That doesn't sound like a compliment. Still, Bissinger called the games he watched that season "the most exquisite sporting events I have ever experienced." Maybe that's my greatest fear. Not so much about the potential for injuries, but that my son will so love the game that he'll want to play it all four years. Then in college. And, heaven forbid, beyond that. Linda P. Campbell is a columnist and editorial writer for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.