Monday 8 March 2010

friday night lights

Every Autumn Friday, the Permian Panthers play high school football in front of twenty thousand fans. They are the biggest thing in their isolated community. Friday Night Lights follows the Panthers' 1988 season. It's an amazing microcosmic dissection of racial divides, rules perverted by economics and winlust, and the joy and despair of playing sport in the spotlight:
I also found myself haunted by something else, the words of a father with a son who had gone to Permian and had later become a world-class sprinter in track.

He saw the irresistible allure of high school sports, but he also saw an inevitable danger in adults' living vicariously through their young. And he knew of no candle that burned out more quickly than that of the high school athlete.

'Athletics last for such a short period of time. It ends for people. But while it lasts, it creates this make-believe world where normal rules don't apply. We build this false atmosphere. When it's over and the harsh reality sets in, that's the real joke we play on people ... Everybody wants to experience that superlative moment, and being an athlete can give you that. It's Camelot for them. But there's even life after it.'

With the kind of the glory and adulation these kids received for a season of their lives, I am not sure if they were ever encouraged to understand that. As I stood in that beautiful stadium on the plains week after week, it became obvious that these kids held the town on their shoulders.
Anyone who thinks it's just a book about what happens in schools probably doesn't understand much else either.

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