One fumbles, one scores

Though it is twice removed from its nonfiction source, "Friday Night Lights" sometimes seems like a documentary compared to MTV's hugely successful reality show "Two-A-Days," which was just picked up for a second season. "Two-A-Days" (the title refers to the practice schedule) is about the Hoover Buccaneers, a team in an affluent suburb of Birmingham, Ala. (In the interest of full disclosure, I have firsthand knowledge of the high school football mania of the area, having graduated from nearby Mountain Brook High, where I was kicked off the football team before the end of the second practice.) Very little of "Two-A-Days" suggests reality as most people would define the term. First of all, as with all so-called reality shows, the air of unreality is accentuated by the participants' eyes constantly shifting to the camera and their self-conscious half-smiles.

Second, the private lives of the players and their girlfriends, as revealed on the show at least, don't seem to be like those of high school students outside the immediate culture of football. The girls have no apparent life aside from the boys, and the boys have no lives outside football. Indeed, how could they, since, in the words of former basketball great Bill Russell, athletes nowadays "have been on scholarship since the eighth grade"? The smug sense of entitlement and privilege is expressed by one of the Bucs' stars who, when chided by a teammate for some transgression, replies with a snicker, "It's not like I'm going to get punished."

What "Two-A-Days" utterly lacks any sense of -- and "Friday Night Lights" is about -- is what high school football means to the community. We see the aerial shots of the bumper-to-bumper Friday night football traffic heading for the stadium, but we never see or hear any of the fans who fill the seats and find out what dreams of theirs are being played out on the field. For that matter, we never really learn anything about what role the football team plays in the daily life of the school itself. I watched "Two-A-Days" with my daughter, a sophomore at Columbia High School in Maplewood, N.J. Her comment was, I think, interesting: "In real life, not everybody is involved with the football team. On this show, you never see anyone who isn't a player, a cheerleader or someone in their family." She's right, and the scary possibility that the teams in big-time high school football factories exist as entities entirely apart from the rest of the community isn't even touched on.

Scary, too, is the near-fanatical behavior of the Buccaneers' coaches, particularly head coach Rush Propst, a bargain basement Bear Bryant, who, after the team's only loss of the season, browbeat his boys mercilessly, threatening to hurt their chances of a college scholarship if they didn't turn things around the following week. (They did win the next week, by the way.) Unlike Bryant, the legendary University of Alabama head coach whose specter dominates all high school and college football in the South, Propst never gives the slightest acknowledgment that his coaching rather than his players' effort might be at fault.

A phony controversy has arisen regarding Propst's use of profanity: Dan Washburn, director of the Alabama High School Athletic Association, says he did not see the episode of "Two-A-Days" in which Propst was bleeped for cursing his players during a halftime tirade. But, Washburn recently told the press, "Profanity has absolutely no place in high school athletics." Washburn is either a hypocrite, or he spent his formative years in a seminary. Propst's language, and, alas, most of his bullying tactics, are standard practice by the overwhelming majority of high school coaches in the country.

What Washburn and other educators ought to be concerned with is a school system that puts young men through the tortures of the damned for no discernible good to most of them. Most of the boys who played ball for Bear Bryant were the first in their family ever to graduate from high school let alone attend college, and they all swear, to a man, that Bryant's discipline helped them succeed in life. The problem with big-time high school football now is that for most of these boys the lure is not personal fulfillment but rather a distant, and probably outright unattainable, carrot on a stick, an NFL contract.

Propst is correct when he says his boys are "starved for discipline"; all boys could use more discipline. "Friday Night Lights," though it is fiction, is about the kind of discipline that prepares them for life. "Two-A-Days" is about the kind of discipline that just leads to more football.

Story finder (3 ways to search Salon)

Search terms:

Salon the Web

Salon Directory (browse by topic)