I grew up in Alabama and I don't care a single whit about football. There, I said it. I think football is boring, a celebration of brute force and luck over strategy that's about as fun to watch as listening to my teeth grinding together whenever I hear Sarah Palin speak. This view was, needless to say, a minority opinion among my peers when I was young, and it's even more so now that I'm no longer young. I thought Alabama was crazy for football, but Texas, where I live now, likes not just pro and college ball, but also high school ball. You have to wonder what's next, little league fanaticism?
That said, Friday Night Lights has shown me that I'm a sucker for well-made football drama. The tv show, not the movie, I mean. The movie was a little too heavy on the fist-pumping and light on the social commentary. The tv show of Friday Night Lights - if you've never seen it, and why not? - is not really about football, of course, but the reality of living in a small town in Texas. Football itself is a metaphor. Most of these kids are going to reach an adulthood bereft of the heights of their high-school football careers, and everyone in their community knows it. Of course, this is a common theme in football movies, going back at least to The Last Picture Show, in which professional ascot model Peter Bogdanovich hammered home the notion that to be young in a small town is to be a sacrificial lamb on the altar of hometown football pride (substituting the popular regional sport, such as, say, hockey, for football where necessary). Most people burn brightest at 17 and spend the rest of their lives looking back.
Six Man, Texas is an indie documentary in the vein of Friday Night Lights that's currently playing the festival circuit. Many of the small towns in West and North Texas (and in other states around the country, as well as Canada) have too few young high-schoolers to support a regular football team, so they play a variant with six-man teams instead of eleven-man teams. Six-man football has been around since the Great Depression started slicing away at rural communities, and the current economic reality of rural America means that the sport is having a bit of a resurgence now. Well, a bit. As Six Man, Texas depicts, even as more rural communities are dwindling down and becoming eligible for six-man football teams, their small school districts are increasingly becoming candidates for consolidation with larger nearby districts. Granger Huntress, the proprietor of sixmanfootball.com (who is also, in the interest of full disclosure, a good friend of mine), explains in the film that a graduating class has to have fewer than 100 students to qualify for six-man football. That's a fine line that rural schools have to walk, between small enough for six-man, where they may actually be competitive in sports, but not so small that they cease to exist.
The documentary visits a number of small towns in Texas before settling on the town of Aquilla (pop. 136) in the northern part of the Hill Country. For those unfamiliar with Texas pronunciation, that's ah-KWILL-ah, not ah-KEY-ah, commie! (I kid! Here in the People's Republic of Austin, we anglicize all kinds of furriner-lookin' names, too.) Much of the movie is about the 2000 season of the Aquilla Cougars as they push for the championship against teams that tower over them. Theirs is indeed a scrappy underdog story, although given the parameters of the sport, it's unclear how many of their opponents could also be seen that way. Regardless, the film edits their games for maximum intensity, and the final game is full of emotional turmoil. The coach's post-game speech in particular is very affecting. He has earlier explained how hard he finds the inspirational halftime speech (and the movie makes it clear, as in Friday Night Lights, that the coach is not just an authority figure to these boys, but a combination of every authority figure, at least during football season), and the words that flow out of him after their biggest game are as powerful as any scripted words in any sports movie.
But football, like I said, is not the only goal of Six Man, Texas. The movie also documents to great effect the closing of Three Way School in Maple, Texas, when the school district is consolidated with a larger one. The students and teachers alike are tearful, as the students in the school are obviously close to the teaching staff and each other, and the film revisits the site years later to great effect. The building has been razed, rebar sticking out of the ground like dead trees in salted earth. The movie mentions the dependence of rural Texas on the cotton industry, stopping along the way to mention that the price of cotton is less than it was during the mid-century before taking inflation into account. The movie also talks quite a bit about the values the people in these close-knit communities see themselves sharing. Many of the young high-schoolers in the film speak reverently about small-town values, by which they mean the low incidence of crime and how close the people in their community are. For what it's worth, I think that they are mistaking statistics for values, but I understand why the notion appeals to them. As small, close-knit communities shrink, they need to assert their specialness to keep themselves bonded together against outsiders. That's basic political philosophy (Hobbes, to be precise). Statistics also say that a majority of the people in the film are supporters of McCain and Palin (who are polling at about 60% in Texas overall, and much higher in rural areas). I firmly subscribe to the idea that while the Sarah Palins of the world pay more lip service to the social insularity of small towns, the plight of the rural poor resonates more with the same social service-supporting liberals who watch Friday Night Lights. The movie nods to this disconnect by interviewing former Speaker of the Texas House of Representatives Pete Laney, who hails from Hale Center, a town of just over 2,000 in the Texas Panhandle. Laney, a Democrat who retired in 2005, was a bastion of Truman-style small-town pragmatic progressivism. He certainly knew what small-town values really are.
So, all this liberal mumbo-jumbo aside, does Six Man, Texas all gel together? Pretty well, yes. Obviously I'm exactly the kind of moviegoer who prefers my sports movies to be about something other than sports. The ra-ra-go-team charms of Friday Night Lights (the movie), Any Given Sunday, Rudy, Invincible, and their pandering ilk are all lost on me. Many of those I grew up with thought I was quite the pansy. That's probably true of some I know now, and some who might read this. And maybe they're right, because I am exactly the kind of pansy who ends a review of a scrappy little indie documentary about underdog football players in small-town Texas by citing a poem.
Autumn Begins In Martins Ferry, Ohio
James Wright
In the Shreve High football stadium,
I think of Polacks nursing long beers in Tiltonsville,
And gray faces of Negroes in the blast furnace at Benwood,
And the ruptured night watchman of Wheeling Steel,
Dreaming of heroes.
All the proud fathers are ashamed to go home.
Their women cluck like starved pullets,
Dying for love.
Therefore,
Their sons grow suicidally beautiful
At the beginning of October,
And gallop terribly against each other's bodies.