History, Football, and America
The best books show why these two things are so interconnected
It’s easy to say that sports are an integral part of American culture. The Super Bowl dominates TV ratings (copied, to an extent, by the NBA Finals and the World Series), and the three major sporting leagues are a constant source of analysis, speculation, and entertainment. One can even point to publicly-funded stadiums as an example of sports being far more engrained in this nation’s culture than they should be. For good or bad, evidence of athletic popularity is everywhere.
But, as easy as it is to say that sports are popular, engrained, or any other adjective of choice, it’s quite difficult to do it well. In many ways, this quality is similar to the broader history of America. It’s easy to say that this nation’s wars, or racial problems, have left lasting impacts and scars. It’s rather difficult to write an indispensable history of these things, or to truly show why they matter so much.
And this long, roundabout introduction leads me to my central point: the best books about America and football show just how important this sport has become from a cultural perspective. But they also do so much more — they show how deeply ingrained football is in American history. From small towns in Texas and Pennsylvania to colleges in Alabama, football and the history of this nation share so much in common.
I recently finished S.L. Price’s Playing Through the Whistle, one of two books that I want to highlight. Price writes about a small town in western Pennsylvania, one that has the improbably distinction of hosting a perennially elite football program (and an impressive array of professional athletes) despite its small size. Through football, crime, steel-working, and a host of other elements, this author paints a beautiful picture of one town’s history.
Reading Playing Through the Whistle, I was struck by its similarities to H.G. Bissinger’s Friday Night Lights. Price’s book hasn’t sparked the movie and TV show that Bissinger’s journalism inspired, but the subjects of these two books are eerily similar despite their geographic difference. Both authors, for example, write about high school football in small American towns. Both authors cover programs that have grown accustomed to success and starpower. Finally, both authors cover strained racial issues, economic struggles, and any number of other problems that have been endemic in many small towns.
Aliquippa, the subject of Price’s excellent work, lived and died based on football and steel. The story of America’s rise and fall as a metalworking empire has been well-documented in numerous places, and Price shows how it elevated and crippled this one specific place. People in Aliquippa found unprecedented opportunity through working in the factory, and then saw all of that disappear in later decades. The one tie that remained, one that kept the community together through good times and bad, was football.
Bissinger, in contrast to Price’s wide scope, only covers one season in Odessa, Texas. But the history is still there. Texas oil fields were perhaps even more volatile than Pennsylvania steel, and the boom/bust cycles just as severe. Just as in Aliquippa though, football kept everyone together. Football, when nothing else worked, seemed to be enough.
There are other similarities in these two works. Both towns struggled with racial issues, and these problems played out on football fields just as much as they did in streets, high school classrooms, and everywhere else. Sports can often act as a salve to cool racial conflict, but they can easily ignite long-standing tensions as well. Without getting too far into the weeds on the specific issues in each book, I’ll just say that each author shows the racial elements of high school football incredibly well.
What strikes me most about the similarities of these two works is how much history is in them. This element, as I said before, shines a little brighter in Price’s book, but it is present in each. And the history of these two places reflects just how integral football is and was to each of them. It would be impossible to write a good history of Aliquippa without understanding the centrality of its high school football team. And that, I think, is significant.
It’s books like these that ultimately show just how important football is to America. And they do so in ways that are beautifully unromantic (though not unsympathetic). Concussions, corruption, racism, sexism, and any other number of sins are rightly associated with football at many levels. It’s easy to point a finger at the bloated bureaucracy of the NCAA, or the willful ignorance of the NFL. As the TV series Friday Night Lights shows, bad things can happen when people care too much about something like high school football.
But beyond all this, the sport can also act as a powerful cohesive element, one that is inextricably tied to this country’s history. Aliquippa and Odessa aren’t alone — there are countless other small towns across the country with similar stories. There are plenty of other communities that are tied together because of high school sports. And despite all of the bad things that we often associate with football, it’s impossible to ignore how much this sport has shaped towns and communities across the country. In some ways, this host of problems underscores the importance of the sport.
So perhaps, more than anything else, football just is a huge part of this country, both in past and present. It can be good, and it can be bad. But whichever one of these things it is, its simple existence is significant enough. I wrote above that it’s a quite difficult task to adequately explain the importance and centrality of sports to American culture. It’s a task that I’m not sure I could do. But Bissinger and Price have, and in so doing have shown a powerful part of American history as well. For so many people, football is everything.
