Football As Religion

In 2018, Rick Bass took the field as a member of the Texas Express, a semipro football team based in the city of Brenham. It was his first season on the squad, a feat made all the more remarkable because of both his age—60, several decades older than his teammates—and his day job. As an environmental activist and award-winning writer of more than 30 books, Bass had little to gain from playing football (indeed, despite the team’s semipro designation, the job didn’t pay at all), and much to lose as a person who makes his living largely via his noggin.

Bass figured his doctor wouldn’t approve of his decision to play for the Express, let alone any football team in a state like Texas, where the sport is akin to a religion and where fans like big, brain-rattling hits—the bigger the better—so he didn’t bother to ask. “I don’t think my doctor would support much of what I do anyway,” he tells me in a phone interview from his home in Montana.

Bass played two seasons with the Express, an experience he chronicles in his new book, Wrecking Ball: Race, Friendship, God, and Football. As its title implies, the volume is about much more than football: why the United States’ most popular sport is also one of its most brutal; the connection between the game’s on-field mayhem and domestic violence; football’s enduring “race problem,” including the muted response of college coaches to the murder of George Floyd; why so few players ever go out “on top”; and so on.

Bass’s time with the Express began when the writer was doing a story about the team and the so-called shadow world of minor league football for Texas Monthly. The more he watched the athletes on the field, the more he began to think, Hey, I could do this. He had played for a year as a walk-on at Utah State, after all, and the Express always seemed to need players. “And the skill positions, they just weren’t that big,” he says. “They were fast, but they weren’t that darn big. I thought, Heck, this reminds me of the game I knew 40 years ago. I wonder what it would be like to be out there.”

The team’s glue was Coach Barnes, who labored as a garbage truck driver, dogcatcher, and city water inspector when he wasn’t exhorting his players to come to practice, goddamn it. Coach saw them through good times (the rare win, say) and bad (one player went to the pen after shooting a bullet through the wall of his ex-girlfriend’s apartment; another did time for cattle theft). He also excelled at oratory. During one particularly moving team prayer, Coach extolled the virtues of the wolverine, supposedly the meanest animal in North America. You men need to be wolverines, he told his players, then spied a line of ants marching along the ground. And ants, he told them. You need to be like those ants. “There was a lot of free association going on in his speeches and prayers and pep talks,” Bass says. “It was an amazing and singular thing to witness.”

Bass did not leave the Express unscathed. In one game, a helmet-to-helmet hit left him mixing up words for nearly two years. Molasses became morasses; residents became representative. Y’s turned into T’s. “It was really concerning to somebody who works with words so completely and extensively,” he says. “But I got better, so that was a relief.”

That particular scene comes in a 41-page-long chapter about a single game, a bloodbath of a loss against a vastly superior team that resulted in broken ribs, torn neck muscles, and two concussions for the writer. Bass named the chapter “Ass-Whipping.” (It’s also the basis for his Alta Folio: Of Ice Packs and Men.) Bass is a masterful writer, generous with character description and evocative scene setting, but his chapter titles tend toward the terse: “Last Year.” “Court.” “Winter Practice.” And yes, “Ass-Whipping.” “I mean, that was the essence of that experience,” he says. “It was an ass-whipping.”

Beyond the cracked ribs and temporarily addled brain, Bass says, “I got to push my body beyond where it would have been pushed had I stayed at home, sitting at my desk. That was a gift. I got a lot of memories. I got to inhabit life a little bit beyond the normal borders and boundaries.”

But when asked if he learned anything new about himself—his capacities for enduring pain, say, or his strength of will—he balks. “You get to be in your 60s, and there just aren’t a lot of surprises about yourself anymore,” he says. “Not to say a person knows everything, but with regard to oneself, there just aren’t a lot of surprises left.”•