[For this year’s annual Super Bowl series, I wanted to focus on some football figures & communities. Leading up to a special weekend tribute to some of our best current public scholarly SportsStudiers!]
On a few different ways to AmericanStudy football’s place in the Lone Star
State.
High school football has apparently been huge in Texas
for a good long while, but the last couple
decades have seen some high-profile cultural representations of Texas high
school football and thus brought it to more mainstream attention. The trends
goes back at least to the films Varsity Blues (1999) and Friday Night Lights (2004), although
it can be taken back nearly a decade earlier to the best-selling 1990 Buzz Bissinger book on which the latter was based. And it certainly achieved another level of
popular prominence during the five-season run of the cult favorite and
award-winning televison show, also titled Friday Night Lights (2006-2011). In
their own ways, each of these cultural texts reveals the appeal of big-time
high school football: combining the thrill of sports played at a high level
with the universal and complex realities of teenage and family life, the
possibility of heroism (there’s a reason why “My Hero” was the theme song of Varsity
Blues) with the realities and
challenges of everyday existence.
So I get why high school football strikes a chord, and thus why stories of
the state where it’s particularly huge are compelling for American audiences. But
Texas high school football is also emblematic of a significant
national problem with priorities: that we’ve come to support educational
athletics (at the high school and collegiate levels) more and more at the same
time that we’re defunding and cutting and generally failing to support
education in every other way. There are plenty of details and stories that
symbolize those (at least) mixed-up educational priorities, but I’ve never
encountered a more striking one than the $60 million high school football stadium at Allen
High in Texas. No, that’s not a
typo—this venue for high school athletics—for one high school sport—cost $60
million in public funds, money that, to quote that ESPN.com story, the school
district “know[s] full well it will never recoup.” Frankly, the public funding
element, aggravating as it is (although the bond measure did receive 60%
approval—they do love their high school football in Texas, apparently), isn’t
even the issue here—even if the $60 million were all private donations, I would
say exactly the same thing: take the money, thank everybody very much, and then
build a $5 million dollar stadium and use the remaining $55 million for public
high schools throughout the state. Maybe that’s not legal, but it’s sure as
hell logical.
So I get the allure of Texas high school football, and am at the same time
very frustrated by what it means in our contemporary society and moment. There’s
at least one more American layer to this onion, though, and it’s probably the
most complicated and double-edged of them all. On the one hand, high school
football, like all sports but perhaps more than most (and certainly more than
professional sports), has the potential to bring a community together, to offer
unifying hope and possibility even in particularly dark and difficult times
(such as ours). Yet on the other hand, while high school sports can seem to
offer such hope and possibility for the individuals who take part in them, I
would argue that in many (indeed, most) individual cases those things are
alluring, promises of potential futures that will never come true and can
instead keep the individual from focus on his or her more definite and
significant next steps. (Cf. Hoop Dreams.) So is Texas high school football a source of hope or
an illusion of it? Does it serve important communal and national purposes, or
does it distract and take away from what we should be doing and focusing on? As
is so often the case with the questions I focus on here, the answer,
confusingly but critically, is yes on all counts.
Next
football figure tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What
do you think? Football figures or communities you’d highlight?
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