What was that eerie feeling that crept over me as I sat watching the climatic high school championship football game in the movie, “Friday Night Lights?”
Could it have been, in the words of renowned baseball manager and syntax mangler Yogi Berra, “deja vu all over again?”
“Friday Night Lights” — based on a 1990 best-selling book of the same name — is the story of how Permian High School’s football team makes a run at the state championship despite losing its star running back, Boobie Miles, early in the season.
Permian, located in the western Texas town of Odessa, has an integrated team. Several key players, including Miles, are black. But there are whites and Latinos in the mix. Permian’s opponents in the championship game are the bigger, faster, more intimidating — and blacker — boys from Carter High School in Dallas.
Carter is so black, in fact, that it becomes a bone of contention in the film. When Permian’s white coaches meet with Carter’s black coaches to discuss the game’s venue, the issue of what race the officials will be leads to a tense moment that comes just shy of a fistfight. One of Carter’s coaches makes it clear that the school is located in a black community, where distrust of white officials is a given.
Once those issues are cleared up and the game begins, the favored Carter team pounds Permian, whose players heroically fight against overwhelming odds and stage a valiant comeback.
If you’re thinking “I’ve seen this before,” you probably have. “Friday Night Lights” sounds like a rerun of the basketball film “Hoosiers,” doesn’t it?
In “Hoosiers,” Gene Hackman played the coach of lily-white Hickory High School in Indiana, which made it to the 1954 state championship game and defeated a team with at least three black players, a black head coach and a black assistant coach. The film was based on Milan High School’s victory over Muncie Central 50 years ago.
National Basketball Association legend Oscar Robertson, whose Crispus Attucks High School team played in the Indiana state tournament that year, remembers Milan’s victory over Muncie Central differently. There were, according to the Big O, only two blacks on Muncie Central’s team, and the coaching staff wasn’t “exclusively black.”
“Is the proverbial race card being played?” Robertson asked about “Hoosiers” in his autobiography, “The Big O: My Life, My Times, My Game.”
If the race card isn’t being played, then, at the very least, there’s a downright irritating pattern developing.
Sports movie. Underdog white competitor or competitors. Favored, sometimes arrogant and obnoxious, black opponents. The formula varied somewhat in both “Hoosiers” and “Friday Night Lights,” but you get the idea. And where did it all start?
The “Rocky” movies, at least the first three. There was the white underdog, Rocky Balboa, struggling against tremendous odds to defeat black opponents. I might have found the first “Rocky” movie original, even compelling, if it weren’t for the outrageous rip-off involved.
Rocky, a converted southpaw slugger, lived in Philadelphia, worked in a slaughterhouse, trained by using slabs of meat as heavy bags and put a boxer who suspiciously resembled Muhammad Ali through 15 rounds of hell.
“Wait a second,” I said after seeing the first “Rocky.” Converted southpaw? Slugger? Lives in Philadelphia? Works in a slaughterhouse and uses slabs of meat as a heavy bag? Puts an Ali-type fighter through 15 rounds of hell?
Isn’t that Joe Frazier?
Of course it is. Sylvester Stallone took a genuine black hero named Joe Frazier, whitened him up and packaged him as a hero for whites. Whose statue stands in front of the art museum in Philadelphia: Joe Frazier, the real-life heavyweight champion, or the fictional Rocky Balboa’s?
It’s Rocky, of course. For some in Hollywood, whiteness still sells, especially if it’s heroic white athletes struggling against black ones. But here’s an idea for the next great sports movie featuring white underdogs. How about the story of Mississippi State’s 1963 basketball team, which had to sneak out of the state to play Loyola University of Chicago in the NCAA tournament because the latter team had four black starters?
The only villains in that one will be those reactionary bubbas in Mississippi trying to bust the hump of a bunch of white guys trying to play a little hoops.
