I have always loved Varsity Blues, a surprisingly good and great guilty
pleasure sports movie. To celebrate football season, I want return to the essence
of football, Texas high school football. I discussed this in my essay of the
great Friday Night Lights also set the land of Texas football. Varsity
Blues presents the homunculus that contains all of football’s glory and
pathology but illustrated in the lurid emotional and physical theater of high
school melodrama. This is NOT Friday Night Lights, but on its own
terms, Varsity Blues mixes comedy and drama while xrays the appeal and
perils of football fetishism.
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The movie is set in the barren forgotten town of New Canaan
Texas, the almost promised land. Like Friday
Night lights, it delves into a culture where football anchors community,
identity and intergenerational authority. It emerges from the land where Allen High School outside of Dallas just finished a 60 million dollar 18,000 person
high school stadium that is only the third largest high school stadium in
Texas.
The movie centers on the last six games of the quest of
legendary coach Bud Kilmer, a slick and mean Jon Voight, to win “my” 23rd
district championship and “my” third Texas state championship. With the
unwavering support of the adult fathers of his players, all ex-players, he
cajoles, screams and abuses his players who respond with worshipful resentment.
Like Joe Paterno his bronze statue looms over New Canaan stadium, remember in
the Bible Canaanites worshipped false gods. The team is built around all Texas
quarterback Lance Harbor (a golden Paul Walker) with a scholarship to Florida
State. Of course he dates the hot cheerleader (a young whip cream covered Ali
Larter—you have to see the movie to understand). Lance plays with four buddies
who have been with him since peewee ball.
We know Lance’s status because his father, an old wide
receiver for Kilmer, has built a huge billboard in his front yard celebrating
his son. The team, parents and town rabidly follow each play and truck out in
vans across the endless dead prairie for game after game. At the center of this
spider’s web of loyalty and power, Kilmer is building his own legacy and the
town cooperates. Lance has accumulated knee injuries and cannot play without
pain injections before each game, injections witnessed by his best friend and perpetual
backup quarterback John Moxon.
In a critical game Billy Bob, overweight, slow but big-hearted
lineman, suffers an obvious concussion but is sent back out on the field by
Coach Kilmer who screams at the player for malingering. We first meet Billy Bob
careening down the road in a large truck drinking maple syrup direct from the
bottle with his pet pig. Staggering on the field, he misses his block and a blind
side hit tears the Lance’s knee and ends the his season and scholarship.
Jonathon Moxon who has happily sat on the sidelines for four years
reading J.D. Salinger while pretending to master the playbook, is thrust into
the game. To everyone’s surprise, including his parents, he throws a touchdown
pass and saves the game. Suddenly he becomes the new idol of New Canaanites.
The movie plays out in a battle of wills between Moxon and Kilmer. Moxon has
always seen through Kilmer’s abuse and egoism. The movie and season reaches its
highlight at half time of the district championship. The black running back,
Wendell Brown, pulls up injured and the coach tries to convince him to inject a
pain killer and play even though the pain. Charley Tweeter, the endlessly
profane and horny the wide out, has heard a “pop” and worries about Brown. The compliant
trainer has warned the coach it is a serious injury. Moxon, Lance and Tweeter
confront the coach and warn Brown not to take the injection. Moxon states that
if Brown takes shot injection he refuses to play. The coach dismisses him and
turns to Tweeter to play QB, but Tweeter refuses. Lance warns Brown not to do
it and Kilmer turns on his all state quarterback calling him a “gimp” and
physically assaults Moxon in front of the team. The team refuses to follow
Kilmer onto the field. Stunned by their own audacity and paralyzed without the
coach, the team rallies behind Moxon and Lance Harbor. The team wins the
championship on a trick play involving Billy Bob catching a pass.
The movie depends heavily on a didactic voice over
commentary of Jonathon Moxon (James Vanderbeek,) the permanent backup
quarterback. Moxon represents what my nephew calls the classic “guy who plays
football.” Mox has the grades to escape New Canaan and dreams of being accepted
to Brown. He is putting in time supporting his friends and satisfying his
football obsessed dad who was a mediocre but reverential player under Kilmer.
To sum up his attitude, “fuck Kilmer.” Yet his sudden fame as well protecting
his friends like trying to get Wendell some touchdowns for recruiting purposes
put him in constant conflict with Kilmer who even threatens to sabotage Moxon’s
scholarship to Brown.
The power of football culture and the towering coach reaches
deep into the town through the fathers of the sons who now play. The sport
reinforces the patriarchy of the town and the fathers push, cajole and force
their sons to play for the man who shaped them, Coach Kilmer. He’s the kind of
coach who says and believes, “Never show weakness, the only pain that matters is the pain you
inflict.”
The fathers live through their son’s success on the field
while the supine wives run the household and go along with the football
fantasy, except for Wendell Brown whose mom must do his recruiting because
Kilmer will not help his sole black player. Lance’s father throws his son’s
success into the faces of all his old friends especially Mox’s father. When
Lance writhes in injury after blowing his knew, his dad mutters, “Lord, how can
you do this to me.” At the hospital Lance’s father does not ask hear about the
depth of Lance’s injury or how Lance has been able to play without any tissue
for the last year, all he wants to know is how soon before Lance can “play” and
get his scholarship. When Moxon receives his acceptance letter to Brown, his
father ignores it and demands to talk about the next football game. This ends
with Moxon telling his dad, “I don’t want your life.”
When Coach Kilmer grabs helmets to scream at players and
endlessly abuses them to achieve “my” championships,” the fathers lounge chairs
watching the practice. “It’s good for them,” they mutter as they celebrate rosy
memories of their own humiliation. This summer at least three high school
players died in practice while similar parents watched and celebrated the
cruelty that coaches and dads think shape players and men. The fathers
celebrate their own baptism under Kilmer’s abuse by claiming he is “making”
their sons “men.”
I think a couple lessons come through the entertainment that
remain true at all levels of football.
Football Glory is
Fleeting and Hollow—Bruce Springsteen’s song Glory Days reminisces about the fate of us who see all life as
shadow play compared to our Technicolor athletic memories. The reality is
worse. Lance sees everyone abandon him including his scholarship when he
injures himself. Even his girl friend Ali Larter tries to seduce John Moxon as
her way out of New Canaan. Lance’s coach simultaneously uses his injury to
insult and motivate his team but turns viciously on Lance and calls him a
“gimp.” Lance sits in agony in his room listening to everyone forget him when
Jon Moxon wins a game and displaces him as the new “hero.”
Football is not reality. It exists for a moment, a brief
transient moment, like all sports. Kilmer and the patriarchy heighten that moment
to the highest point of life to motivate young men desperate to get their
father’s and Kilmer’s approval. Kilmer relies upon the father’s collaboration
to abuse and exploit their children. Mox sees through it all and knows that if
Kilmer continues to win, his young and quite weird younger brother will be
forced to play for the tyrant.
At the end when Moxon rallies the team, he rejects the glory
for a life myth that sustains football’s dominant narrative. He stumbles upon
what the best athletes know—focus upon the moment, only the moment and not the
glory or the future. He pleads with his teammates don’t make memories, don’t
play for the future or creating a past. Summoning the great Greek myths of
western sport he yells,
“Before this game started, Kilmer said "48 minutes
for the next 48 years of your life". I say, "Fuck that". All
right? Fuck that. Let's go out there, and we play the next 24 minutes for the
next 24 minutes, and we leave it all out on the field. We have the rest of our
lives to be mediocre, but we have the opportunity to play like gods for the
next half of football.”
Guys Do Stupid Stuff—kind
of goes with the game, but we often forget that our college heroes are 19-year-old
guys. Mox, who should know better, gathers his four friends Tweeter, Billy Bob and
the straight-laced Wendell and rescues Lance Harbor from self-imposed exile, to
spend the night at a strip club. Leaving aside the fantastical moment when they
find their PE teacher at the strip club—I never said this was reality! —The
guys have a great and wonderful time and stumble out dazed and hung over. Kind
of like when this year perennial high school power Catholic high school De
Matha was playing a game in North Carolina and the five players snuck prostitutes into the hotel past 18 parents and coaches. Of course the team loses the next
game as the four play still hung over and encounter Kilmer’s wrath because the
“disrespect of a few” cost him “my” undefeated season.
We understand again how closely aligned power, violence, sex
and friendship merge in football culture. It also becomes clear that friendship
matters because Mox is the only guy to visit Lance Harbor. Lance has learned
how quickly not only glory but also all the fake friends disappear. It’s a life
lesson anyone with position or fame learns; football just etches it more
clearly. We learn friendship lasts past fame and glory.
The Abuses are Deep
Rooted—this should be no surprise. High school really is the homunculus of
the college and professional world, all the joys and pathologies exist in
smaller form. They will just scale up as the level of visibility and stakes
rise. Special treatment from police who are intimidated by the coach to ignore
drunkenness and theft—check; special gifts of illegal beer at no cost to the
players—check; driving injured players to play through peer pressure and appeals
to their manhood—check; players living out the fantasies of their fathers—check.
Getting captured in the hype even when
you see through it—check.
The seduction of football fame hits everyone. The usually levelheaded
Mox cannot believe his luck and the fun and rush of being treated like a
celebrity with free beer, seductive cheerleaders and swarms of girls as well as
media spotlight. After one game, a newscaster traps him and asks him if he
plans to play QB in the Ivy League. A flustered Mox shucks and “thanks God” and talks of himself in the third
person, “Jonathon Moxon is only one man.” Lance listens in agony in his lonely
room. Lance’s sister and Mox’s levelheaded girlfriend (a type cast Amy Smart) all
but leaves him after telling Mox how he just behaved.
And yet we can almost understand why star athletes refer to
themselves in the third person. It may be the only way they can separate their
own humanity from the bigger than life persona that the media and their fans
thrust upon them.
Despite its cutting critique of the tyranny of coaches and
collaboration of fathers and towns in exploiting their sons, the core of the
movie delivers a different message of football and guys. It begins with
guttering footage of four young kids playing peewee ball.
Late a night a despairing Billy Bob is blowing up all his
trophies, he tears he cries,, “we were just kids,” but coaches and fathers
screamed and pushed and demanded of them even then. Nothing they did could satisfy the lust of
parents and coaches for using them as pawns in their need for status.
But the four kids held together. They held each other up.
Different as planets, they shared the same orbit and protected themselves from
their parents and coaches. We move from that shadowing memory to Billy Bob’s
careening truck to the end of the game.
They have stood up for each other and protected Wendell,
helped Billy Bob through his concussion, stayed with Lance when everyone else
abandoned him. At the end, the moment of victory was “ours.” It belonged not to
bronzed coaches, not to incomplete dads, but to them. None of them would play
football ever again, but that did not matter.
In the end the value arises not from the game, not from love
of the game, not from the community’s misuse of the sport, but the small and
real love of the guys for each other—four kids, four friends playing an adult
game with each other.
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