Football isn't exactly a font of great literature

When I was in high school, I once came across a poem written by some local poet in my father's clothes closet, commemorating Nebraska's glorious 1978 victory over the Sooners and printed on a rolled-up poster. I remember the last two lines:

The sweet smell of success cast its aroma
The day the Cornhuskers beat Oklahoma.

This sort of thing may not exactly be Shakespeare, but if it supports your team it's only a step below -- maybe Shelley or Yeats.

Shelley Winters

It's ironi the movie is coming out right now, since the team it focuses on, Odessa Permian, has been suffering through its longest drought of success since the school opened 47 years ago (when Bissinger decided to write the book, it was due to Permian's ominpresence in the Texas football playoffs, which resulted in the construction of the 20,000-set Ratliff Stadium). Teams from Midland and Abilene have been lording over Permian in recent years, with the school's main claim to fame being producing this year's No. 1 draft choice for Detroit, Roy Williams.

Given the choice, I think the people at least on Permian's side of Odessa would choose to get back their intimidating program of the 1980s, even with its dark side, than to be to Texas high school football today what the Celtics are today to basketball or the Canadians are to hockey.

OJ:

Don't be such a grump. Think of glorious works like the Red Sox haiku. :)

Ah, but baseball produces great literature--as do boxing, fishing and horse racing.

Ah yes, Odessa Permian. During their 80's and 90's heyday it seemed that every year they were either state champs or banned from the playoffs for various recruiting violations. There's nothing like Texas high school football.

OJ:

If that is true, it raises the question as to why football has produced so little great literature and those other sports so much. Willa Cather defended football thusly:

"It makes one exceedingly weary to hear people object to foot ball because it is brutal. Of course it is brutal. So is Homer brutal, and Tolstoi; that is, they all alike appeal to the crude savage instincts of men. We have not outgrown all our old animal instincts yet, heaven grant we never shall!"

And she also said this:

"It is one of the few survivals of the heroic...A good football game is an epic."

Of course, a skeptic could argue that I am nuts to quote a woman on any sports topic. I'm not sure I have an answer to that.

Matt:

http://www.baseball-almanac.com/legendary/libvf100.shtml

#24) Marianne Moore loved Christy Mathewson. No woman of quality has ever preferred football to baseball.

Okay, OJ, this is where you lose me. Good point, perhaps, but from a bad source: 100 Reasons Why Baseball is Better Than Football? Don't get me wrong -- I love watching baseball -- but there is absolutely no way on God's green earth it's a better game than football. For one thing, there's too much wasted time, and it's gotten worse over the years -- I once saw a letter in the Smithsonian that FDR wrote to the baseball commissioner after Pearl Harbor telling him to let the games continue. Roosevelt wrote that baseball was a pleasant 2 or 2 1/2-hour diversion. I only wish it were that today.

Incidentally, if you and I are on different sides of the street, this guy is on some other planet.

There's plenty to like about both sports that it's possible to be a fan of both the visceral, violent but controlled game of Football, AND the slower, more thoughtful game of baseball, such that we need to unite against our common enemy, the PD crowd that would destroy all sports through title 9 and the glorification of soccer, the ultimate communist sport, where there are no skills to learn so nobody is better than anybody so the game is decided by penalty kicks and parents need not to anything but drop their kids off instead of actually teaching them skills that might benefit them as adults.

MarkD:

Stephen Moore asked in an essay a few years back whether there was anything more disturbing than seeing an empty baseball diamond right next to a soccer field filled with kids.

Yikes. YIKES!!!

Well the baseball diamond should obviously be demolished to make room for a second football pitch.