My ex father-in-law likes to tell a joke about a man who wagered unwisely and lost on a long list of hockey and basketball games and horse races but refused to bet on a football game because he didn’t know anything about football. I don’t bet on sporting events or play fantasy football or even keep score when I play golf, at least not all the time. But last night I played some sports. I became a fan for a day. The team was a borrowed team, and the score wouldn’t have mattered much to me on any other night—but last night mattered.

Friday Night in Texas is schoolboy football night. The games are often good; some Texans take them very seriously. Some think schoolboy football is the best football of all. It’s often dramatic and exciting, full of heart and guts and boosterism. I went to a schoolboy football game last night with my brother and sister-in-law. My sister-in-law teaches at Brewer high school in White Settlement, a small town that now gets lost in the northwest edge of Fort Worth. The Brewer Bears were the home team, it was their homecoming game, and the visitors were the Texans, from Northwest high school in Justin, another small town close by where there’s been a boot manufacturing operation for a long time.

It was 4-A football. The big 5-A schools like Plano and Odessa Permian maybe play better, but I doubt they have more energy or love of the game than the kids I watched last night. They played hard, though not always well—there were a whole lot too many illegal procedure penalties called on both teams—but nobody gave up until it was over. The Bears won, 31 to 7, which made my sister-in-law happy and all the folks around us in the stands. I found as the game went on that it made me happy too. I was on my feet cheering with the rest of the folks. "Git that muther!" I yelled at one point when it looked as if an opposing player might break away for a scoring run.

The star of the game was one Jermaine Griffin, the Brewer quarterback, who carried the ball 27 times for 181 yards and threw three touchdown passes, two of which were caught by Billy Bob Pride, whom I mention as much for his name as for his importance to the Brewer win. Billy Bob and Jermaine and a couple of other Brewer players played the whole game, offense, defense, and special teams. The coach wanted a win, and he played the kids he knew could win it for him, though the whole Brewer team is pretty pumped up right now. Two of their number were victims in the Wedgwood Baptist Church shootings, one dead, the other a paraplegic. The surviving players want to win it all this year for their fallen comrades.

There was a big crowd, stadium packed, every seat filled, junior high kids milling around by the fences watching each other not the game, the cheerleaders and mascots and drill teams and bands, drill teams kicking high and the big kids with the Sousaphones swinging as they marched. And the corsages—mustn’t forget those dinner plate sized chrysanthemums with fifty yards of ribbon attached, the ones I saw died Brewer blue--interestingly none of the homecoming queen nominees wore one. Then there was a ceremony honoring the class of ’79, who were throwing a big reunion party at the Country Club of Highway 80 (a local dance hall).

As we drove into the parking lot at Brewer before the game I felt we were leaving the real world of suburbia and entering a special arena marked by the pool of light in which the stadium sat. An empty football stadium in daylight is dead, is part of the real world, but a lit stadium at night with teams and noise and fans and sometimes fights is a religious place, a place for significant action of a certain magnitude. It was good to be there. It took me back some too. I mostly hated football games as a kid but got excited when my high school won the state championship in my junior and senior years, went to all the games, went on road trips on the trains--stuff like that, some of which I can’t tell.

Then as I drove back to Denton, past the lights of Alliance Airport and the huge Texas Motor Speedway wowsers have built at the intersection of I-35W and highway 114, I felt good, felt that I had participated in a significant ritual that connected me with a past I can safely love now, though I hated much of it when I was young and it wasn’t the past. "The life of significant soil," the poet calls it, though I doubt you’d get great Tom to a high school football game even if he wasn’t dead. My own experience is mostly an experience of change. In the face of that and particularly at times of great and disturbing change (such as now for me), it seems good sometimes to be reminded that one isn’t dead

I felt so good that this morning I went to eat breakfast at Ruby’s Diner on the square where they give me the senior citizen price for the buffet and I can sit by the stuffed alligator whilst he and I watch people coming and going on the street outside two big plate glass windows that open towards the old county courthouse, now a museum. I read the morning paper for an account of the exploits of Jermaine and Billy Bob and recalled lines from another poet, Richard Hugo, about returning to a dead town—an experience I have had more than once in my life.

In Hugo’s poem the town of Philipsburg, an old silver mining town, is dead but the returning speaker isn’t, though he might have been. "Isn’t this your life? That ancient kiss / still burning out your eyes?" That has to be some bottom line, always does I guess. But the speaker isn’t dead. Here are the poem’s last lines.

The car that brought you here still runs.
The money you buy lunch with,
no matter where it’s mined, is silver
and the girl who serves your food
is slender and her red hair lights the wall.

Even though my money is tin, and I served my own breakfast, I still had the stuffed alligator. I looked down at him there just at my ankle and watched as his left eye slowly closed and opened again; and his big stuffed alligator grin--the one they reserve for people they really bond with--watched that grin breathe and widen until he was almost laughing. I laughed for him so as not to spoil the fun and thought of what my brother had said as we drove out of the parking lot last night after the game.

We’d been thumping each other about some shit from high school, don’t remember what, and were laughing as we buckled ourselves into my brother’s Buick. As we left that special place and Friday Night and drove out into the familiar pan of suburban darkness, we both heaved big stuffed-alligator sighs. "Ain’t it great when your team wins!" my brother laughed.

[Posted at Howard Rheingold's Brainstorms,  2 October 1999]