His boys

Authors can have a delicious time manipulating their readers’ minds. Joe Drape, while dealing with very real people, may have gotten away with a little trickery. I’ve never met a Smith Center resident, nor had I heard about the Redmen before diving into this book (although, there is some little guy with a clipboard poking me in the back of the brain, asking me to remember a brief segment on Sportscenter about some hayseed kids who’d held their opponents scoreless for an entire year). While I have nothing against anyone from Smith Center, and, in fact, I think I may start rooting for them after reading this account, I’m starting to wonder if Drape did in fact manipulate his readers; after all, does anyone ever truly root for the best: the Yankees, the Lakers, the Red Wings, the Patriots, Duke, USC? Unless one is a diehard fan of the aforementioned dynasties, that answer is most likely no. So why did I want a team who’d I’d never heard of, stacked with players I’d never cared to meet and coaches who I would normally assume to be hardass jerks, to continue finding the win column after five years of never even sniffing an L? It’s because the author wanted me to.

Sure, Drape has every right to do this, and from what we read it seems like the kids were players we could love as our own little Rudys, Rockys, and Underdog puppies. But that’s exactly what gets me. They are not underdogs, but corn fed stallions barreling down on a historical precedent. It’s hard for me to imagine that I actually wanted to see these Barta-Boners go the distance and rewrite the Kansas High School scorebooks. I love the cliché underdog story, and the Redmen were anything but; in fact, they were the best, the kings of the shoulder pad shuffle, and Drape actually turned them into something quite quixotic, an idealized version of Rocky Balboa, when in fact they are more Mean Joe Greene than Rudy Ruettiger. I mean, it’s actually quite impressive that I can feel bad for a squad that routinely obliterated its opponents (and, not to mention, a team that once scored 72 points in one quarter). When I was a sports writer, I would have loved it; as a fan, it kind of makes me want to head to a message board and rant anonymously.

While Drape was given an excellent story, he did an amazing job of amping it up even more. Our Boys, shamefacedly, made me go against my athletic morals.