Review by James Montgomery Baxenfield

As the title suggests, the “undermanned Bulldogs are Friday Night Lights turned on its head. There are no lights here, no culture of winning, and little more than hope” (p. 17).* Through the McDermitt Bulldogs, award-winning journalist John M. Glionna depicts “how a struggling high school football team reflects the fate of a dying town where scholastic sports are the last bit of social fabric that still binds them [residents] together” (p. 57). He focuses on the relationships between the coaches, Richard Egan and Jack Smith—often assuming the roles of surrogate fathers—and the football team, where a deficiency of players presents a challenge to instilling discipline, and “familiarity breaks down the usual coach-player boundaries” (p. 51). From this initial focus, Glionna also charts the town’s history and its sometimes strained relationship with the adjacent Fort McDermitt Indian Reservation through an ensemble of personalities, past and present, including former Bulldog coaches and players.

McDermitt Combined Schools has 99 students, with more than 90% coming from the nearby Fort McDermitt Indian Reservation. In the 1960s, the McDermitt Bulldogs football team “was a bridge between the town and the reservation” (p. 74). By the 1980s, the “Bulldogs spoke Paiute on the line” (p. 178) so opponents could not pick up on their plays. However, the prosperity of McDermitt ended when the mercury mine closed in 1992, and a population nearing 800 plummeted to a little over 100 within a few decades, with the median income falling to half the national average. Being “among a handful of Nevada towns that closely neighbor a Native American reservation, mixing white and sovereign land” (p. 3), as the mines closed and the white population moved away, Paiutes came to comprise the vast majority of the students at McDermitt Combined Schools, and consequently, the majority of the football players.

Coach Egan, a Paiute-Shoshone, played for the Bulldogs three decades earlier, when they boasted 36 players and their eight-man team was among the ranks of the league’s winners. In the present day, with hand-me-down equipment and uniforms, they are “cellar dwellers” (p. 13) in Division 1A, Nevada’s lowest-level league. This league comprises 22 schools whose enrollments are so small they can only field eight-man teams in an unpopulated landscape that “demands the nation’s longest drives to contests between satellite communities so widespread that they have no business sharing a league of any kind” (p. 164). As families relocate, school enrollment decreases, resulting in a lack of students to compete in sports. Struggling to fill the eight starting spots, the Bulldogs are limited to a four-game season because of the likelihood that they will forfeit, leaving holes in league schedules.

Diminishing rural communities have been a problem for decades, a story not unique to McDermitt, an unincorporated border town community straddling Nevada and Oregon. “Hard liquor runs through McDermitt’s story like coolant through the radiator of an old ranch pickup” (p. 25), and Glionna also outlines struggles with alcoholism and addiction among both people from the town and the adjacent reservation. Twenty-three short chapters make up a patchwork of life in rural America, framed around a football team “filled out with reservation boys and scrawny white kids” (p. 13), exploring the past and present of the sometimes strained relationships between Native Americans, white settlers, and their descendants.

No Friday Night Lights is well-written, in a crisp journalistic style, containing a handful of typos and about the same number of saccharine clichés. Neither diminishes the read, and the latter is starkly offset by Glionna’s occasional bluntness, particularly while writing about the adolescent players (for which he was castigated by some parents during his research). Concerning the backmatter, while there are no references—which will irritate readers wanting to research the history of rural football, or the region and its inhabitants—a concise selection of 17 titles is suggested for further reading (p. 257). These titles are from an assortment of independent, small, commercial, and academic presses, published between 1916 and 2022, with seven of them being released within the last decade. Besides presenting a snapshot of life in rural America, the book is illustrated with 29 black-and-white photographs—one taken by Glionna, and the rest by photojournalist Randi Lynn Beach—many of which are stunning portraits.

*H. G. Bissinger, Friday Night Lights: A Town, a Team, and a Dream (Boston, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1990). A modern classic of sports literature in which Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Buzz Bissinger chronicled the 1988 season of the Permian Panthers from Odessa, Texas, a high school football team in a community which rallies to support their ambitions between September and December every year, as they set their sights on the Texas State Championship. Bissinger’s book inspired a Hollywood movie (2004) and television series (2006–2011) of the same name, in addition to the short-lived television series Against the Grain (1993).

James Montgomery Baxenfield is a Junior Research Fellow and doctoral candidate at Tallinn University, Estonia. Recipient of a Baumanis Grant and a Dissertation Grant from the Association for the Advancement of Baltic Studies (AABS), and former Herder Fellowship holder, he was guest co-editor of the special issue of Acta Historica Tallinnensia, Vol 28, No. 2, “Recognition: de facto and de jure” (2022). Baxenfield is a member of AABS, the Professional Football Researchers Association (PFRA), and an avid Tennessee Titans fan. www.jamesbaxenfield.com.