Family Affairs

HIGH SCHOOL football remains a way of life. Seasons begin in sweltering August heat, move slowly through grim Septembers and Octobers and climax--or fizzle out altogether--around Thanksgiving. Respect and friendship are earned by how hard one hits, how much pain one can endure. A single word from a coach can evoke a sudden flood of joy or despair. For those with seasons still to come, the rest of the year is merely the off-season--football stories dominate small talk and big talk. But when the last season is played out, a truly remarkable, savagely beautiful experience is irretrievably lost, leaving only the tall tales.

Richard Woodley has meticulously recorded the season of one team. Beginning in the summer of 1971, he attended the skull sessions, helped out at the practices, and mingled socially with the coaches and athletes of a small (1500 students) high school in Westchester, New York. According to an agreement with the school district, he changed the names of the school and the team members. The disguise is thin--back issues of The New York Times reveal "Laketown High" to be Yorktown High School, and "Coach Buddy Fowles" to be Head Coach Buddy Douds. Probably intentionally, the real names of both Laketown and Fowles are slipped into the book as apparent typographical errors.

Woodley--whose last book was a portrait of a cocaine merchant--was too small to play football in high school. Fascinated with the world from which he was excluded, he played in the band, doing his best to remain marginally connected with the Saturday spectacles. A decade later, he slipped gracefully into the social lives of Laketown's athletes, drinking their beer and admiring their cheerleaders.

Nevertheless, he remained an outsider, though totally caught up in the day-to-day molding of the dissent-ridden collection into a surprisingly successful team. By maintaining his precarious distance, Woodley's journal of that football season manages to exemplify the very best of the new journalism, capturing the seemingly insignificant details that, added together, reveal the greater truths.

LAKETOWN'S season, though not memorable, was interesting. After a respectable 1970 season (6-2), only two starters returned. The replacements were small and unspectacular. Local predictions were grim. But the Laketown Harvesters turned out to be hard-nosed and--more important--lucky, and eked out sex wins, equaling the previous year's record.

Laketown games themselves are only minor parts of Team. More important is the "family" theme--the development of a group stake and an individual ethic of sacrifice. The prototypes that emerge on any team are there: the inspirational coach, the free spirits, the unskilled in ill-fitting uniforms and the infuriating naturals who merely don pads and look fast and mean. The varieties are universal. When the security of close-knit belonging ends so abruptly in November, the finality is like that of a best friend's death.

The 1971 Yorktown Harvester season was followed by the deaths of the fathers of two players. One of the players, who had always been cynical about "the family", looked back at the season and concluded that it had been wasted time that might have been spent with his father. The other simply ignored the past, stood with his mother and brother and assured Woodley that "we're all going to get along okay."

Reflecting on the end of one more season and the breakup of one more team, Buddy Fowles did not mull over the lost games, the player he helped and those he failed. He began talking about next year. "We're gonna do both," he said. "We're going to help kids understand important things about their own lives, and we're going to win football games...I know that as sure as I know the sun's coming up tomorrow morning."

The family, Woodley reasons, would go on.

Woodley is not a great writer and does not risk saying more. His prose is sometimes clumsy, seldom inspirational. But Team, like all teams, draws strength from its individuals.