Clear Eyes, Empty Town, Can’t Win

Will Leitch considers the heartbreak of small-town football in his review of John M. Glionna’s “No Friday Night Lights.”

By Will LeitchSeptember 23, 2024

• Nonfiction

• Sports

TO NAME A BOOK about high school football No Friday Night Lights is to throw down a gauntlet of sorts: it only encourages comparison to what many consider the masterwork of the genre.

Buzz Bissinger’s Friday Night Lights: A Town, a Team, and a Dream, about a single season of an oil-patch football powerhouse deep in the heart of Texas, inspired a decent movie and a justly revered television series. Though published in the distant year of 1990, it still holds a special place in the pantheon of sports books, a kaleidoscopic achievement of reporting and literature that changed the life of everyone involved, including the author. It’s also the type of deep dive that every ambitious sportswriter has told themselves they’ll write someday, whenever they can finally find the time.

John M. Glionna, the author of the aforementioned No Friday Night Lights: Reservation Football at the Edge of America (2024), was a respected reporter at the Los Angeles Times for nearly three decades before deciding, like Bissinger, to drop everything, move to a new city (in Glionna’s case, McDermitt, Nevada), embed himself with a high school football team, and try to figure out what the whole experience could tell him about the United States.

Glionna had already made his name writing about small western towns and the people who inhabit them. His choice of McDermitt, an unincorporated community with a population of just 114 people (at the time of Glionna’s writing) right on the border of Nevada and Oregon, is an intentional step away from the hyperintensity of Bissinger’s Texas high school football. But the notion is the same. What does football reveal? Glionna finds more than he might have expected—but also less.

He landed on McDermitt after a search for, in his words, “a team with so few players that its future was in jeopardy,” which is why, unlike almost everywhere else in high school football, McDermitt plays 8-on-8 football rather than 11-on-11. This is the best chance this K–12 school of just 99 students has to field a competent team for a full season. Most years, they can’t even make it through the schedule, thanks to fatigue, injuries, and disinterest. This is a rich metaphor for an area like McDermitt, a once vibrant mining community that has shed population since the last mine shut down in the early 1990s.

Many of the school’s students and most of the residents have long since given up on much of anything, let alone leaving their community. Several players admit to joining the team simply because there is nothing else happening. Can they hold together long enough to finish their season? Or will the death surrounding them come for the team too?

This is a welcome twist on the culminating Big Game formula of sports books and popular entertainment. But part of the problem with moving to a town where a ragtag bunch of kids try to stick together long enough to last a whole season is that, well, you might pick a season in which they can’t. It becomes rather clear early on that this is going to be a book about a football team that does not actually play any football games.

While it’s to Glionna’s credit that he sticks it out to chronicle the players and coaches, the missing narrative spin or forward momentum leaves the book feeling formless and at times meandering. Glionna is a dogged and straightforward reporter who never tricks the reader into thinking something is happening when it isn’t. Nor does he romanticize the dismal situation at hand. One of the saddest moments in the book comes toward the end, when the coaches must give their players the hard truth about the season, only four weeks into practice.

In an excellent reportorial touch, Glionna notes that most of the time, the kids didn’t even use the showers after practice: “Most quickly change out of their uniforms, throw on their street clothes, and flee this place and its strong smell of sweat and, perhaps, its whiff of defeat.” Glionna offers an unflinching and empathetic portrait of how lost this place is, how shrunken the shoulders of its inhabitants have become. But it also limits the number of places he can go.

Since there really isn’t any football to cover, Glionna visits with the locals instead. He sketches an excellent portrait of a community that accepted its withering years ago. He is initially met with suspicion, only exacerbated by his ill-advised decision to write a blog about his observations. But he’s a good enough reporter to still find some intriguing people, including members of the Fort McDermitt Paiute and Shoshone Tribe, whose quiet despair sets the tone for much of the book. Most of these stories feel more like out-of-context vignettes than connections to the larger whole, but Glionna was an award-winning features reporter for a reason: the man can write a narrative nonfiction profile with aplomb and confidence. At a minimum, the book works as a collection of compelling short stories about a community in its last stages, doing its best to hang on and hang together, with varying degrees of success.

The book is loose-limbed by nature; without a story arc panning out the way Glionna might have expected (or at least hoped), its primary virtue involves the small details and micronarratives that he discovers along the way. He may have moved to McDermitt to write the next Friday Night Lights, and that notion may have stuck so fervently that he dangerously begged the comparison with its title, but this book cannot stand with that classic of literary sports journalism. In fairness, few books could.

Taken on its own, No Friday Night Lights features a smart, sharp reporter taking us to a place we’d never be able to visit on our own—a place, frankly, we probably wouldn’t want to visit. Glionna finds humanity and community there, and occasional glimpses of hope. But only glimpses. And, alas, not much football.