Friday Night Lights

There's something just so right about a great high school football game.

I just got Baby Kate back to sleep after an early morning feeding session which, frankly, wore both of us out. After five ounces of Devoted Wife's thawed-out "frozen gold" dispensed from two different kinds of bottles (winner: Munchkin Healthflow over Avent), a lot of screaming (mostly from her) and 45 minutes of patting her back while she lay on my chest, I finally got her to relax and go back to sleep. And during this process I watched a new t.v. show that became an instant favorite: Greatest HS Football Rivalries on Versus.

This is a documentary-style show produced by the guys at NFL Films, and each hour-long episode gives you the background of the featured high school rivalry, interview footage with coaches and players, and highlights of the rivalry game. This particular contest between the Jenks Trojans and the Union Redskins (both of Tulsa, OK) featured the two teams that have won, between themselves, the last 11 Oklahoma Class 6A prep high school state championships. This is serious high school ball, folks. After watching underdog Union come from behind to beat Jenks in an overtime contest that couldn't have been scripted better for a movie, I set my DVR to record all of the other episodes. And I thought, "How cool would it be to have your greatest high school victory narrated by the NFL Films guy?" That's a highlight film your kids would get sick of seeing, for sure.

I've been a fan of high school football since before I was in high school. I grew up idolizing the older guys in our neighborhood who played for the local high school (although the only "heroics" from them I really remember include one swinging his helmet, weapon-like, by the face mask in a post-game brawl and another faking a knee injury to get a time-out in a close game). In junior high I remember reading in High School Sports magazine (yes, there is such a publication) about the Permian Panthers from Permian, Texas, and when the book Friday Night Lights was written about that town's infatuation with their local team I quickly got a copy and read it. I saw the movie version, too, when it came out (all I recall now is that Tim McGraw makes a very mean drunk dad), and readily admit to being a fan of the Friday Night Lights television adaptation, which Devoted Wife likes to call my "man-soap-opera." Yes, its sappy and overly dramatic, but it captures the passion of West Texas high school football and how entire communities rally around their local high school teams. And is it OK if I have a crush on Coach Taylor's wife?

I played linebacker on a high school team that hadn't posted a winning season in at least ten years. In my senior year, after a few rough starts, we found ourselves 3-0 in region play, which was surprising enough to prompt the Salt Lake Tribune prep beat writer to come out to our school to interview me and our quarterback. At the time, I had not seen as many cheeseburgers as I have today, and at 5'9" and 160 lbs. I must have seemed to the writer a bit undersized to play middle linebacker. My response to his question about my size (I probably should have limited it to a simple statement about "size", a "dog" and a "fight") was somehow translated by the writer as "I'd like to have longer arms." When the article came out it quickly appeared on our locker room bulletin board with this one line highlighted, and our head coach enjoyed showing me how he could make his arms seem to grow right out of his shirtsleeves by holding his shirt at the shoulder and pushing his arm forward (this was comedy gold, apparently). Ultimately, we lost our remaining region games, lost to our cross-town rival (again) and lost in the opening round of the state playoffs, never having made it to the holy turf where the later rounds of the state playoffs were held.

One of my favorite memories from these days was the motivational speech our high school coaches liked to give us to get us psyched up for our rivalry game with our cross-town rivals. In particular, those of our coaches that had grown up in our town liked to tell us of a day that would certainly come, years after we played this all-important rivalry game, where we would unexpectedly find ourselves face to face in the frozen foods section of Dick's Market (our local grocery store), with someone who had played for the rival high school. "Win this game," the coaches would say, "and you'll always be able to look that guy in the eye, and he'll have to look away." Seriously! While I didn't necessarily expect to be living in this town in twenty years, I was at least temporarily persuaded that this was not a contest where I wanted to be on the losing side. I later heard from my younger brothers, who ended up playing for our dreaded rivals after the district changed school boundaries, that their coach gave them the very same speech, even down to the references to the frozen foods section of Dick's Market. Like Dan Fogelberg, these coaches must have known of the cosmic power of the frozen foods section for creating awkward reunions. In any event, we came up short in the big rivalry game, and thus forever yielded our rights to buy frozen pizzas and burritos from Dick's.

And my coaches were right: I avoid Dick's Market when I'm back home. Of course, that's mostly because I don't want to see anyone from my own high school. In years past that may have been partially because of the dominant culture in which everyone gets married relatively young, and I wasn't interested in addressing the topic with high school acquaintances who were shepherding their four kids through the frozen food aisle ("What? I can't believe that YOU are still single! What's up with that?"). And while I'm married with a child now myself, I doubt I'd recognize anyone who played for the rival high school anyway.

But I still shop at the new Albertson's on the other side of town.