The Eighty Yard Run
Reviewed by Derek Charles Catsam, Department of History, University of Texas of the Permian Basin and currently Post-doctoral Fellow, Rothermere American Institute, Oxford University, summer 2005
JUNE 20, 2005 archive
Seth McKinney, a football player for the Mayfield High School Trojans in Los Cruces, New Mexico, grabbed Theron Hopkins by the arm after his team had just lost a heartbreaking state championship game. "You make sure, in that damn book," the dejected teen demanded, "you tell 'em we did the best we could." This is a powerful moment in a book full of them.
Eighty Yard Run is a compelling account of high school football that deserves wider distribution. It is pretty clearly an independently published book, as it has no ISBN, and generally bears all of the signs of a do-it-yourself project. Major publishing houses: If you are reading this, The Eighty Yard Run deserves to be the next Friday Night Lights.1 Like Buzz Bissinger's wonderful book about the 1988 Permian Panthers in Odessa, Texas (full disclosure - I just finished my first year as a professor in Odessa), Hopkins' treatment explores the emotion and pageantry and power of high school football. A crucial difference, and what should be a selling point, is that rather than follow one team for a year, Hopkins covers an entire high school football season in America, twenty weeks, from the start of practice in August through the Texas 5A Division II championship in late December.
Each week he immerses himself in the life of a different program, starting his travels in Blanco, Texas, and traveling a huge swath of the country in the weeks in between. Hopkins travels from Blanco to Vicksburg, Mississippi to Valdosta Georgia to Hillsborough, North Carolina. He heads north to Bethlehem, Pennsylvania and Syracuse, New York. The Midwest loves its football too, as we see in Masillon, Ohio, Bettendorf, Iowa, and Valentine, Nebraska. Hopkins is from out west and he certainly does not slight his own region. Sheridan, Wyoming and Great Falls, Montana and Kennewick, Washington and Waldport, Oregon get his attention before he spends two weeks in California, one in Sutter and another in Sacramento. Rena, Nevada, Mesa, Arizona, and Las Cruces, New Mexico, where Mayfield High lost their championship game, are the final stops before Hopkins returns to Texas (the generally recognized epicenter of the high school football culture), where he follows the Fort Davis High School Indians as they pursue a championship (played in Odessa at Permian's Ratliffe Stadium) in six-man football, and he finishes the season in San Antonio's Alamodome, where the Katy High School dynasty cements its legacy with another state title.
Hopkins visits huge schools and tiny ones, dynasties and also-rans, rural and urban programs, public and private and parochial schools. In twenty weeks we see successes and disappointments, wins and losses, the most intense concern about the game of football and striking apathy. Some communities care a whole lot about their program. Others seem more sanguine. Some end by winning state championships. Most do not. Hopkins shows all of the folderol and pomp and circumstance surrounding those Friday Night and occasionally Saturday afternoon lights.
The book concludes with a chapter in which Hopkins revisits each team briefly to explore how their seasons went (for the teams he visits early in the season this is an especially welcome touch) and to wrap up a few loose ends. We learn the fate of coaches and injured players and discipline cases and discover who has plans to go play college football. We see programs on the rise, programs in decline, and programs in that vast middle expanse into which the overwhelming majority of teams, high school, college, professional and pee wee, manage to settle.
At the heart of the book lie the coaches who make these teams tick. In almost every community the coach is a venerated figure, especially if he has been around for a while. In a few locales, such as Valdosta, Georgia, the coach is under the sort of pressure that would have fit in well in the environment that surrounded Permian High when Bissinger spent a year there. If a coach does not win in Valdosta, arguably the most successful high school football program in America (it is the most successful in terms of wins), it will not matter what sort of role model he provides, or how well his student-athletes do in class, or how disciplined the program is - he will be fired. Of course in a town like Valdosta, the coach is richly compensated for the challenge and the pressure that accompanies it. Hopkins bears a deep admiration for these men who devote thousands of hours to teach and cajole and browbeat and encourage and support and push - in short, to coach - the young men placed before them each season. From the Head Coach down through the coordinators and assistants and equipment managers and trainers, these programs succeed largely through their hard work. One coach at one of the bigger, more successful programs that Hopkins visited calculated that his coaching stipend ends up paying him eight cents an hour when all is said and done. His state championship team was built largely on the fact that the coaches worked for more than 124 straight days, holidays and weekends included, to get them to that point.
It is not that the players do not come across in their full range of humanity in The Eighty Yard Run. They do. Hopkins likes these young men, admires the grit and spunk with which some of them play, and at times seems in awe of their toughness and dedication. But with a week to spend with each team, he gets to know the coaches best. They provide his entry, they are his gatekeepers, and they allow him access to an inner sanctum that few are privileged ever to see. If you have ever known and admired or loved a coach, this book will bring those feelings home.
It would not be surprising to find out that Hopkins is himself a coach, or would like to be one, or was once one, or that he was at one time a player. He writes not only with empathy but also with clarity about the game of football. He knows the sport, he understands the plays, and he grasps the strategy. He can delve into the psyche of a coach or player. He writes clearly and gracefully and passionately about a game with far less of a literary heritage than baseball or, in the rest of the world, soccer.
The Eighty Yard Run is different from Friday Night Lights in one crucial respect: There is no element of muckraking to it. Bissinger, of course, did not trek west to Odessa, Texas to insult or hurt a program that he clearly grew to admire. But inevitably, in spending a year in a town as football-mad as Odessa, he saw a dark side, and he wrote about it. Just as much as Friday Night Lights was about "a town, a team and a dream," it was also about racism and misplaced educational priorities and all of the other things that made Bissinger unwelcome for a decade or so after his book's publication. There is little of this in Hopkins' account. Hopkins does not much question whether there is not something askew about a community spending the money to take ten chartered buses to an away football game, or paying a coach more than any teacher, or any of the other moments that might have given him pause. That is not the book that he set out to write - fair enough. But in this sense, in its strict focus on the week of preparation leading up to a football game, there are times when Hopkins could have probed more deeply the ties between high school sports and society's values.
That said, The Eighty Yard Run is simply the finest book on football I have read since Bissinger's classic. It deserves a wider audience. It deserves an editor who can clean up some of the typographical and occasional writing missteps and give it the sort of packaging and production values it deserves. It deserves a chance to break free for an eighty yard run of its own. Given the chance, it will surely score a touchdown.
1 H.G. Bissinger. Friday Night Lights: A Town, A Team, A Dream. Da Capo Press, (2000 edition).
Theron J Hopkins. The Eighty Yard Run. Yachats, OR: Twenty Town Press, 2004. 320 pp. $25 (paper), available at http://www.eightyyardrun.com or http://www.twentytownpress.com
Copyright © 2005 by Derek Charles Catsam.