Your Hand in Mine — Explosions in the Sky

#365Songs: August 19th

My son, who is just now entering Eighth Grade, is suddenly obsessed with high school. We’re watching three movies a week, revisiting old shows like Freaks and Geeks and Wonder Years, and I’m fielding infinite questions about what it’s like, what to expect, what to fear. Yesterday, his closest friend, who just started Ninth Grade, asked him to go to Berkeley High’s opening football game a week from Friday. I offered to take them, not just out of obligation, but because I’m excited by the prospect. Perhaps it’s driven by my own nostalgia, but it’s deeper than that: it’s the best way I know how to introduce him to what high school feels like, the atmosphere in and around the event — an introduction to those who care, those who don’t. To experience, firsthand, something new and definitive.

Berkeley is so very different from where I grew up, but a devout love for high school football might just be the only similarity between Ohio and California.

There’s something wholesome about high school football, a sport that triggers a nostalgia that surprises me. I grew up in a Friday Night Lights town: economically depressed, a lower to lower-middle class population of hardworking, civic-minded families whose ceiling continued to lower as more and more industries fled the area. Boys were rough, excessively masculine, and your status was often defined not just by whether or not you played football, but how well you played it.

I didn’t play football, if that gives you a sense of me. I mean, I did play, and I was pretty good, but I hated physical contact as much as I did the toxicity innate within the sport. I suited up once, in middle school, got hit so hard I’m still seeing stars, and never played again.

And yet, I attended every game, home and away. Prior to high school, I went with my Dad and my sister’s future father-in-law, knew the players by number and name, memorized their stats, and held them in the sort of awe usually reserved for celebrities. For many of those players, the glory days ended at the final whistle of their final game senior year. A fast free fall into underemployment, the 9–5 grind, and physical jobs with low pay and high burden.

But on Friday nights for ten weeks a year, nothing else mattered but football.

There’s also a second reason why high school football is on my mind, and that’s Tim Walz. The Washington Post reported: “Coach Walz was like Coach Taylor,” one player said, referencing the beloved fictional coach from the series ‘Friday Night Lights.’ “Only a bit kinder and nicer.”

And, Friday Night Lights writer Buzz Bissinger wrote a New York Times OpEd last week. He said, “Coach Taylor was sensitive. Coach Taylor put his players first. Coach Taylor could motivate without screaming and denigrating. Coach Taylor took a back seat to the career of his wife. Coach Taylor was cool and handsome. He’s what we think of when we think of the ideal high school coach: empathetic, humane, with a drive to win but compassionate after a loss. He was the embodiment of masculinity without the obnoxious edge. If coaching experience was the only criterion in running for vice president — and it feels hard to remember that it’s not, given the media frenzy around Mr. Walz — Coach Taylor would be the hands-down choice.”

There’s so much toxicity in and around football that it’s easy to overlook the positive expressions of masculinity. Friday Night Lights revealed to perfection all the layers, life lessons, and community camaraderie — particularly when those are the only nights to look forward to in dying towns. It also represented the dark side, the Trump and Vance-like characters, the “boosters” who share Elon’s character, the misogyny and abuse. But for every dark moment, there was Coach Taylor to put things in perspective.

Tim Walz — and his fictional counterpart Coach Taylor — prove that organized youth sports exist to teach kids how to be human, how to overcome defeat, and how to rally around others whether through glory and disappointment. Sports culture, at its finest, is a place of individual and collective growth, an environment where lessons on and off the field can shape us to be better at life, to show up when we’re needed most — and to accept support when we’re at our lowest.

Friday Night Lights was as much about economic displacement as it was football, a holistic glimpse into what’s been lost after decades of globalization. Spend time in these towns and you’ll understand where the frustration lives and why it exists, and underneath it all there are still values that matter. I won’t feel that as much next week at a Berkeley High School football game, but Coach Tim Walz certainly will as he sets out on a Friday Night Lights campaign tour of his own, doing what every politician before him has failed to do: to prove that he is one of them, that he hears and sees them, that he understands what’s at stake for those who feel ignored by the Democratic Party. It won’t be a performance, as most politicians partake in, but an expression of who he really is, how he operates.

In other words, Coach Tim Walz is doing what Hillary Clinton failed to do. Rather than refer to a key voting base as deplorables — even when they act like it — and write them off entirely, he’ll go there and listen, and there’s no question in my mind that he’ll connect with these communities in meaningful ways. It’s at least a start, whether he wins their votes or not.

I’m certainly guilty of referring to most masculinity as toxic, but it’s not entirely fair to do so. To contemplate the negative requires a rethink on the positive expressions of masculinity, who is showing us the way and how. As always, the brilliant Ezra Klein summed it up perfectly last week in his column: “In Donald Trump and in Tim Walz, you have two very different, but very explicit, archetypes, visions of what it means to be a man. Trump’s pitch is built on what I would call an almost cartoonish over-performance of masculinity, which is aimed at alienated young men. Having Hulk Hogan and the head of the U.F.C. on your night at the convention really puts a sharp point on that. But in Tim Walz, Democrats have found their own version of a male archetype: a football coach, a soldier, a guy who will fix your car, but also an ally, a man comfortable being in the role of supporting women, a man unthreatened by social change, a man even excited by it.”

Sports prepare us for life’s bigger battles, for those moments when stakes are far larger than a trophy and bragging rights. Right now, we’re in the most competitive game in America’s Democratic history, and there’s no lesson in losing. And this is where the football metaphor dies, the moment when we package up all those life lessons and put them to good use. We need our Coach Taylor to co-lead us to victory, and then govern us for the next four to eight years back into a post-MAGA sanity.

Later in Bissinger’s OpEd, he joked, “If Mr. Walz wants to channel Coach Taylor under the glow of the Friday night lights, I say go for it. Coach Taylor’s most cited line in the television show occurred in a fictional speech in a fictional locker room in front of actors playing fictional roles when he said, ‘Clear eyes, full hearts, can’t lose.’ It is a beautiful phrase, crafted by professional Hollywood screenwriters. But I’m not so sure it will work if Mr. Walz reaches the White House and tries to use it to persuade certain members of Congress to act like sensible human beings. For that task, it might be better to draw on his experience in a high school lunchroom, monitoring disruptive brats.”

Coach Walz can’t change Washington’s poisonous culture anymore than Coach Taylor could change Dillon, Texas, but he can help show us a different way. He can be the contrast to our lowest expectations, the antithesis to Trump and Vance. He can be our mirror for the sort of man that can make men like me proud to be a man again: sensitive, honest, open-minded, a good listener, and an ally to all — no matter their gender expression, sexuality, skin color, or political leanings.

‘Make America Great Again’ implies that it was once great, and perhaps it was for the sorts of white men who tend to populate the stands at those Friday Night football games, for those who experienced their greatest glory on those fields. But it’s never been great for women, for queer communities, for anyone non-White and non-normative. And yet, there’s always been a greatness lurking within us, in our coaches and teachers and ordinary unsung citizens buried in every city and town in America. Tim Walz was one of those, for so long, and he’s just the sort of man who’ll reposition his spotlight on all our best qualities.

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