I'm a native Hoosier. That means that if you were to scrutinize my blood under a microscope, even after twenty-five years outside the state you'd probably find a sprinkling of oversized, perfectly spherical corpuscles. They'd be an oddball orangey-brown color, with a pebbled surface marked by thin black lines. There would not, however, be a single brown one with pointy ends and a patch of white laces. You see, I don't "get" football. Oh, sure, I understand the rules and can appreciate some of the strategy; I've been to games and have even considered myself a fan. But there's no way I can understand the near-religious fervor with which the game is approached where I live today.

That makes John Grisham's Bleachers both a pleasure and a conundrum for me. It's a straightforward description of life in a small southern town where the local football coach has been accorded the status of a demigod. I can identify with that syndrome - I live in a state where the high school's head coach is almost invariably the best-paid employee of a school district; usually making at least three times as much as an entry-level teacher and often getting a house and a car in the bargain. On the other hand, I still just don't get it - what's so darned important about high school football?

Grisham does get it - he grew up in that environment, even played high school ball himself. So Bleachers is his way of telling it like it is - or his way of retelling what H. G. Bissinger said in Friday Night Lights, for at the heart of this little novella lies a town that Grisham may call "Messina," but we all know is really Odessa. Through the townsfolk, Grisham proffers the same argument that all rabid boosters of high school football parrot: sports builds character through teamwork and adversity, which is a case that's a bit hard to make for Nintendo.

It took one-time All-American quarterback Neely Crenshaw fifteen years to find that character within himself. As Coach Eddie Rake - the man who put the town of Messina on the map - lies on his deathbed, the boys he had coached over thirty-four years filter back into town, sitting a death watch on the bleachers of the field that bears the Coach's name. None are vast successes - Neely, his football career ended as a sophomore in college, barely scrapes by as a realtor; other former players run coffee shops or banks; are judges, sheriffs, convicts, and thieves. Yet hundreds have returned to pay homage to the man who molded their young lives, whose work ethic and rough justice rubbed off on each of them. As Neely recalls his own days of glory, other players share their own stories of Coach and life after football. Most of them aren't very pretty.

Football is often compared to war. Victory does not necessarily come to those with the greatest talent; it can be seized by those with the strongest desire or those who are best prepared. If you buy what Grisham has to say, the leaders who win are those who can call forth the most from the least, those who can build a whole that is far greater that the sum of its parts. If that leader is a Patton or a MacArthur, he might save a nation. If that man is a high school football coach, he can build men. The flip side of that coin is all those wasted minds - uneducated boys who got all A's because they were on the team; 150-pound linebackers with no hope of a college scholarship and who lack the academic skills to graduate on their own. Coach Rake's 700-plus athletes spawned but one NFL player, even with thirteen state championships in thirty-four years. In that respect, Messina again mirror's Bissinger's Odessa Permian, right down to special privileges for team members. And yet the town revered not just the man but his teams and his legacy.

It's hard to tell what Grisham wanted to say: did Neely fail because he was overprepared for football and underprepared for life? Or did he fail because he did not take to heart all the lessons Coach Rake wanted to teach him? Perhaps it was just a bit of both.



Recommended: Yes