A New Sweet Diminishment

Wrecking Ball: Race, Friendship, God and Football by Rick Bass; High Road Books, 224 pp., $27.95

In 1968, with the aid of journalist Dick Schaap, a Green Bay Packers offensive lineman published Instant Replay: The Green Bay Diary of Jerry Kramer. The book provided an insider’s perspective on what would turn out to be the final season of the Green Bay dynasty that had ruled the NFL for most of the decade. The dominant figure in a gripping narrative, full of ups and downs that nevertheless culminated in a third consecutive championship—something that has not happened since then and may never happen again—was the legendary coach Vince Lombardi. A short, chubby man with a titanic temper, Lombardi could inspire fear, hatred, love, and loyalty from his players. He was not afraid to brandish a desk chair at his 230-pound tight end, nor was he afraid to cry in front of his entire team and coaching staff. Kramer’s book sold 440,000 copies the year it appeared. In addition, it provided a template for many of the best football books that would be written over the next half century, including H. G. Bissinger’s Friday Night Lights, Joe Drape’s Our Boys, Nicholas Dawidoff’s Collision Low Crossers, and John Eisenberg’s That First Season. All those books follow a team through a single football season, focusing on the daily ebb and flow of events and emotions while providing novelistic detail about the games and the lives of the coaches and players both on and off the field. The authors also keep a keen eye on the scoreboard. “Winning,” as Lombardi famously remarked, “isn’t everything. It’s the only thing.”

A reader who comes to acclaimed novelist and essayist Rick Bass’s new book, Wrecking Ball: Race, Friendship, God, and Football, expecting the same kind of riveting experience offered by Instant Replay and its progeny is almost sure to be disappointed. Bass spent three seasons embedded (in more ways than one; more on that in a moment) with the semi-pro Texas Express, which competes in a spring league, The Dynamic Texas Football Association. Though the team was once a power—some of its players competed on scholarship at Division 1 schools like Texas Tech—they are already on the way down when Bass joins them in 2018, having become fascinated by the team and their coach while writing an article about them a few years earlier for Texas Monthly. By the end of the season, as injuries and incarcerations thin the ranks, the author, who played football more than 40 years earlier for Utah State, has suited up and taken the field at age 60. Few of his teammates stand out, seldom becoming more than names. They practice only once a week, on Thursday nights, and many of them don’t even show up for that, overburdened as they are by trying to provide the bare necessities for themselves and their families while staying out of jail. The most memorable figures, other than Bass himself, are a young man named Derion, the fastest player on the team, who ends up going to jail for cattle rustling; Bass’s high school friend Kirby, an EMT who doubles as the team trainer and in the not so distant past was the first responder at the equestrian accident that took the life of his daughter; and the head coach, a former linebacker named Anthony Barnes, who in addition to coaching the team holds jobs as the local dogcatcher, garbage truck driver, and city water inspector and is every bit as fiercely driven as Vince Lombardi. Long before Bass’s final stint with the team, during the Covid-curtailed 2020 season, we have stopped wondering whether it will win or lose. After all, Bass tells us, this is a squad that played an entire season in which he could not recall there having been a single offensive score. When the outcome of a narrative is never in question, a former agent of mine once lectured, a reader has no rooting interest.

But Bass’s book deserves to be read for what it is: a beautifully composed and deeply insightful longform essay dealing, as the subtitle suggests, with race, friendship, God, and football. And also with pandemic politics, the justice system, poverty, despair, resilence, and, above all, love for a sport that the author forthrightly acknowledges devastates bodies and, in all too many instances, minds as well. Indeed, during his final game, he is so badly concussed on a kickoff that his speech and ability to spell are impaired for the next two years. I suffered at least one concussion on the football field myself, and I have read a lot on the subject, but I have never seen the experience more viscerally described than in this passage: “The sound of our helmets was like that of a bowling ball colliding with the lone pin. My head snapped back on my neck farther than I would have thought it could go—all the way back, as if I’d been decapitated—and I heard and felt cracklings in my neck vertebrae, felt neck muscles rip—and I was blown backwards by a force so explosive I still marvel. The back of my head touched my spine.”

By the time he decided to strap on helmet and shoulder pads, Bass was well aware of the Boston University study of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) and knew that 96 of the 97 brains of former football players kept in a freezer at the BU medical school were riddled with it, “even the brain of a field goal kicker—a player who is hardly ever in harm’s way.” So what could induce a Montana State University writing professor to fly once a week to Texas, off and on for several years, for the pleasure of putting his life on the line? A cousin of mine, who played defensive back for Tulane in the 1960s, before going on to a career in coaching and athletics administration, once remarked that it is impossible to explain the lure of the game to someone who has never played it. Perhaps he is right. But I think Bass comes closer than any other writer I’ve read. “The four quarters of a game,” he tells us, “like the four seasons, and the splendid 60 minutes, replete with the ability to stop even the greatest force, time, in its tracks, through certain rituals—running out of bounds, or throwing an incomplete pass, or, most magically of all, calling ‘time out!’—are able to freeze the clock and all forward activity in its tracks.” He sees it as life distilled to its essence. “Me at 62, 63, wanting now simply to throw a good block, downsizing dramatically my ambitions from when I was spry … are a new sweet diminishment: wanting to serve my friends, my teammates.”

But though a football game is controlled by referees on a 57,600-square-foot rectangle, life beyond its boundaries is unruly. Ultimately, what separates Bass from his teammates and the coach he admires so much—for helping young men who live on the margins believe in themselves—is not just that he’s too injured to keep playing. It also has to do with the response to the nascent coronavirus. Whereas Bass understands what the virus is already doing, his coach and teammates view it as at worst a nuisance, if not an outright hoax. When he shows up to a practice that he’s too damaged to take part in, wearing blue surgical gloves and carrying a tube of green apple hand sanitizer, some of his teammates are already coughing, and his coach views him with something like disgust, having opined that “this coronavirus, or whatever it is, is something invented by a bunch of old white men that can’t be trusted.” Bass soon feels the rift widening between himself and these men he’s become so close to, young Black men, he tells us, “who had welcomed me in, placed their arms around me.” He understands “that a thing I love is being taken away from me by a thing I can no longer control: time.”

Another of Vince Lombardi’s famous lines: “Fatigue makes cowards of us all.” Time, with or without the aid of a deadly pandemic, will eventually make a loser of everybody who plays the game that Rick Bass loves.