University of Illinois Press Chapter Title: Football Town under Friday Night Lights: High School Football and American Dreams Chapter Author(s): MICHAEL ORIARD Book Title: Rooting for the Home Team Book Subtitle: Sport, Community, and Identity Book Editor(s): DANIEL A. NATHAN Published by: University of Illinois Press. (2013) Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5406/j.ctt32bcf2.8 JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://about.jstor.org/terms University of Illinois Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Rooting for the Home Team This content downloaded from 76.77.171.75 on Mon, 27 Mar 2017 16:14:30 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 4. Football Town under Friday Night Lights High School Football and American Dreams Mi Chael oriarD In 2003, the prolific best-selling novelist John Grisham took a break from legal thrillers to publish Bleachers, a novel about high school football that is a virtual encyclopedia of clichés and stereotypes, including the competing ideas at its center. Has high school football in the southern town of Messina been a source of community identity and pride or a collective pathology? Was the legendary coach Eddie Rake a great man or a monster? Grisham ultimately answered these questions positively, yet until that concession to pop-fiction necessity a convincing sense that the sport and the coach were not one or the other but irreconcilably both gives the novel its power. The competing views echo familiar narratives about the role of high school football in American communities. One we might call the “Friday Night Lights” syndrome, after H. G. Bissinger’s popular and critically ac- claimed journalistic account of football at Permian High School in Odessa, Texas, published in 1990, and made into a film in 2004 and a TV series in 2006. The other narrative we can name “Football Town,” after a series of portraits in popular magazines in the 1940s and 1950s that have long been forgotten but whose image persists. In some American cities and towns, high school football is simply a sport played by fourteen- to eighteen-year- old boys on teams representing their schools, cheered on by their families and friends. Elsewhere, and to widely varying degrees, it matters much more. “Football Town” casts the high school game as America at its best— communities bonding and celebrating their homegrown traditions through a shared passion for their school team. “Friday Night Lights” casts it as a This content downloaded from 76.77.171.75 on Mon, 27 Mar 2017 16:14:30 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Nathan_Text.indd 68 1/28/13 3:17 PM Football Town under Friday Night Lights 69 sign of those communities’ spiritual impoverishment, and as a potentially crushing burden borne by mere sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds. Like professional and collegiate football, the high school version is often much more than an innocent game, and Americans have been arguing over what it tells us about ourselves for a very long time. Interscholastic football began in the late nineteenth century, in tandem with the development of the intercollegiate game. Secondary schools in Boston first adopted the carrying (rugby) version in the 1860s, emulat- ing developments at Harvard. The longest-running high school rivalry, Phillips Academy (Andover, Massachusetts) versus Phillips Exeter (New Hampshire) Academy, began in 1875. Like the college game, interscholastic football spread outward from New England (the dates are moving targets, as researchers keep revising them): to Illinois (Evanston, outside Chicago) by 1879, Ohio (Cleveland) by 1890, California (San Francisco) by 1891, Texas by around 1900.1 City, state, and national organizations followed in due course: the Public School Athletic League (PSAL) in New York, in 1903, creating a model for other metropolitan areas; state associations in Georgia in 1904, Ohio in 1907, Texas in 1910, Pennsylvania in 1913, California in 1914, and so on; the National Federation of High Schools in 1920.2 Again following the college model, geographical diffusion led to inter- sectional competition by at least 1902, when Hyde Park of Chicago played Polytechnic Prep of Brooklyn in what local sportswriters treated seriously as a measure of eastern and western football prowess. This was the first of some 160 intersectional games played by Chicago-area high schools over the next half-century, in addition to eighty more against schools from Ohio and other nearby states, beginning with a contest in 1901 between Morgan Park Academy of Chicago and University High of Cleveland for an unofficial “private schools Midwestern championship.”3 Intersectional games prolifer- ated in the 1920s in all regions, though trips to and from the West Coast were relatively infrequent. Some of these games were promoted locally as “national championships,” but the first “official” high school national champion (from Waco, Texas) was crowned in 1927—by a twenty-one-year- old high school coach in Minnesota, on his own authority, who later made retroactive selections back to 1910. (USA Today inaugurated the modern era of national rankings in 1982. The first high school All-America team was selected in 1948, followed by the Sunday supplement Parade Magazine in 1963, among others.)4 Intersectional contests led by the 1930s to “bowl” games and other post- season invitationals, again modeled on college football, typically in Sun Belt communities through the agency of local promoters or sponsoring This content downloaded from 76.77.171.75 on Mon, 27 Mar 2017 16:14:30 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Nathan_Text.indd 69 1/28/13 3:17 PM 70 MiChael oriarD newspapers, sometimes on behalf of a Shriners’ Hospital, Christmas Toy Fund, or the like. The longest-running of these interscholastic bowls include a Christmas Day game in Miami from 1929 through 1947, with a break for the war, pitting Miami High against a powerhouse from another section; and the Peanut Bowl in Columbus, Georgia, on New Year’s Day from 1947 through 1954, with the Georgia state champion taking on an outsider. The Toy Bowl in early December in New Orleans, sponsored by the Times-Pic- ayune from 1934 through 1944, matched the New Orleans city champion with a regional champion from Mississippi, before becoming an in-state affair in 1945. Several other postseason “classics” lasted a year or two.5 Yet again mirroring big-time college football, these games sparked con- troversy over distorted priorities, commercialism, and “overemphasis.” A year after the landmark Carnegie Foundation report of 1929, which included a chapter on these problems at the high school level, the North Central Association Committee on Athletics in Schools, representing secondary schools throughout the Midwest, reported that three-fourths of its mem- bers acknowledged “educationally undesirable” aspects of their athletic programs, including the emphasis on winning, excessive number of games, postseason play, and lax eligibility rules.6 Over the 1930s and 1940s, school boards and state federations began setting limits on travel and postseason play, leading to sporadic controversies and eventually the disappearance of postseason bowls and most intersectional games by the 1950s.7 These contests would likely have ended even without school board restric- tions because local rivalries simply mattered more. The interscholastic “bowls” in Miami, New Orleans, and other cities sometimes drew as many as twenty-five thousand but more typically seven to fifteen thousand, in contrast, say, to the seventy-five thousand for Chicago’s Catholic-Public league championships in the 1930s and 1940s—an astonishing 120,000 in 1937—and the fifty to sixty thousand for Philadelphia’s. Despite their metropolitan settings, these were neighborhood affairs, spiked by broader religious and ethnic partisanship.8 Whether filling a twenty-two-thousand– seat state-of-the-art stadium in Massillon, Ohio, or a thousand seats on rickety stands in a cow pasture in Pflugerville, Texas, high school football aroused its fiercest passions in small towns without large public universities or professional franchises to provide a competing source of local identity and pride. In towns too small to field eleven-man teams, six-man and eight- man football sometimes played this role. As intersectional games largely disappeared after World War II, postseason in-state competition entered a new era. Several states (North Carolina, California, Texas, Louisiana, This content downloaded from 76.77.171.75 on Mon, 27 Mar 2017 16:14:30 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Nathan_Text.indd 70 1/28/13 3:17 PM Football Town under Friday Night Lights 71 Colorado, and Montana among them) had instituted state championships from nearly the beginning of their statewide associations, but many others began adding them in the 1940s and over the following decades (including Georgia in 1947 and Ohio in 1972), or created divisions to involve more schools of all sizes in existing tournaments. With the creation of three divisions in 1948—adding two more in 1951, and three more (including six- and eight-man) in 1972—the state of Texas established arguably the most intensely followed football playoffs in the nation.9 When the national media began paying attention to high school foot- ball in the late 1930s, the actual game’s place in local communities began to take on larger meanings.10 The teams from Boys Town (near Omaha, Nebraska)—orphans rescued by football from dead-end lives and given a surrogate family—became a minor phenomenon after the producer of the popular 1938 film starring Mickey Rooney and Spencer Tracy (who won an Academy Award for his performance as Father Flanagan) arranged a game in Los Angeles before a celebrity-studded crowd, with newsreel cameras running.