ESPN.com - 'Go Tigers' balances passion, fanaticism

ESPN.com: Page 2

Tuesday, October 9, 2001
Updated: October 10, 5:57 PM ET
'Go Tigers' balances passion, fanaticism

By Eric Neel
Special to Page 2

"Go Tigers" is a documentary about high school football, but it opens in a hospital maternity ward. We're in Massillon, Ohio, and two men from the local booster club are wandering the halls, eager to greet the town's newest baby boy and give him a small plastic football decorated in Tiger orange and black.


	Tigers devotion can be heartfelt and disturbing.

"We understand you have a new Tiger," the club president says to the boy's mother, placing the ball in the baby's bassinet. "We give out these footballs to all the baby boys born in Massillon. We hope to see him throwing it in a couple of years."

Though she's obviously tired, mom smiles and says, "I hope so, too."

It's an amazing scene, heartwarming and frightening all at once. On the one hand, the tiny ball is a symbol of community pride, a token of togetherness, a genuine welcome made in earnest, a gift of love. The booster guys are a bit clumsy and overeager, sure, but their hearts are in the right place -- they believe in Tiger football and can't wait to spread the good news. On the other hand, resting beside the infant's sleeping head, the ball looks like a claim staked on the boy's heart and soul, a demand for his allegiance to Tiger Nation just days out of the womb. The kid might not grow up to play football, of course, but he will always know that he should have, that the town hoped he would.

	Where to see it
	"Go Tigers" debuted in late September and is now playing at theaters in New York City, Chicago, Minneapolis, Milwaukee, Green Bay, Louisville, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Cincinnati, Columbus, Dayton, Toledo, Los Angeles and Seattle. The film opens Friday in San Francisco, San Jose and San Diego, and on Oct. 26 in Boston.

In places like Massillon -- industrial and agricultural towns somewhere beneath the radar of big-time college and professional sports -- high school football is played on a grand scale. Seventeen-year-old kids are treated like heroes, wins are glorious, losses are devastating. People identify with their teams almost completely.

It's in these communities that you see the depth and range of the American feeling for sports. These are the places where games aren't just entertaining diversions, they're ritual dramas in which a community's self-respect and hope hang in the balance.

"Go Tigers" tells the story of the sort of wonder and weirdness such high-stakes football inspires. It's a smart, caring film about how the game can motivate people and bring them together. It's also a sharp, biting film about how it can consume the lives of those who dedicate themselves as players and fans.

The movie follows the Massillon High School Tigers throughout the 1999 season, a year removed from an abysmally atypical 4-6 record and at the heart of a fight to pass a tax levy that will fund county schools. The levy has failed twice before, but Tigers fans and players are convinced a winning season will help it pass on the third try.

The players know they're playing for the levy -- their coach tells them so -- and for the community's sense of self-esteem, and they understand that unreasonable pressures and expectations are par for the course in Massillon. "There's a lot of pressure on our kids to win," one mother says. "But they're used to it. They know that that's their job." The seeming ease with which the players carry the hopes and dreams of the town is both impressive and chilling.

By the time we meet them, the Massillon Tigers have been playing football for 106 years, a history that includes the legendary Paul Brown, who coached the team in the 1930s, 22 Ohio state titles, nine mythical national high school championships. "Go Tigers" concentrates on Massillon's tri-captains -- defensive end Emery Moore, quarterback Dave Irwin and linebacker Danny Studer, each of whom is steeped in that legacy and completely dedicated to the idea that it's the Tigers that make life in Massillon worth living.

"Once somebody says the Massillon Tiger football team," Moore explains, "people say, 'I live in Massillon,' and they're proud about it. Somebody says, 'I'm from New York.' I say, 'I'm from Massillon,' you know."


	Many things give you hope, a sense of confidence or make you want to wake up in the morning. For many in Massillon, it's football.

Pride is hard to come by in Massillon, a Rust Belt town whose citizens have seen hard times of late. The football team gives folks from every corner and every level of the community something to feel good about. As one steel mill worker puts it, "There's a lot of things in Massillon to be ashamed of, but (the Tigers) bring people together."

The strength of "Go Tigers" is that it takes this sentiment seriously. It would have been easy to condescend to these people, to tell them their priorities are out of whack, that football is just a game. Instead, director Kenneth A. Carlson, a Massillon native, demonstrates a genuine affection for the people who have their heads and hearts all tied up in what happens on the field every Friday night.


	Tigers football is the uniting force for both the players and the people of Massillon.

In addition to being a Division I-prospect defensive end (he's recruited by Penn State during filming), Ellery Moore is the most devout member of the church of Massillon football. Once jailed for rape (charges he steadfastly denies), he thinks of the Tigers and the town as a second family. Football, he says, literally saved his life. When he tells his teammates they can't lose because they are "one heart -- they beat together," you believe him and you believe in football. "There's many things in life that can give you a hope, a sense of pride or confidence, that can make you wake up in the morning," he says. "But in my life, and in this town, it's football."

Moore's honesty and enthusiasm help "Go Tigers" reach beyond Massillon, Ohio, toward broader themes. In his earnest voice, and in the proud declarations of his teammates and the townspeople who root for them, all our most romantic ideas about team sports seem true: They do encourage collaboration and self-sacrifice; they are crucibles for citizenship and maturity; they do allow people to connect with each other, to revel in the joy of triumph and to share the burden of loss.


	The line between enthusiasm and fanaticism is thin.

Football isn't a game in towns like Massillon -- it's the heart of a culture. Communities rally around the trials and triumphs of their teams and, as the head coach at Massillon puts it, "People draw their identity from the team." This identification works in part because the game rewards middle-class American values, because it endorses the idea that hard work and discipline pay off.

In tracking Massillon's attachment to the Tigers, "Go Tigers" suggests that football is a staging ground where the ideals that matter to many American communities get tested and reinforced. We see in Massillon a town that has gone mad for its football team, but we also see a game that neatly represents the traditional values that have long defined that town, and hundreds like it across the country.

Throughout "Go Tigers," players, families, and fans devoted to the team make a heartfelt and often eloquent case that football has been a unifying force and source of inspiration in their lives. But if the town's deep feeling for the team is touching, it's also unnerving. The line between enthusiasm and fanaticism is thin, and Carlson's generous approach to Tiger devotees is balanced by the movie's attention to those left out of the football family.


	Moore

The party line is that people in Massillon think football is life itself: "We're bred to play football," Moore says. But that's only true of the strong and the quick, of course, those whose dads played before them, and those ready to surrender their identities to become Tigers. For kids who don't play, the game is oppressive, or just stupid. One girl tells Carlson the only thing more useless than football is rodeo. A kid in the school parking lot punctures the Tiger hero balloon by suggesting football players are "just the stars of this puny little town." Another boy says he "can't wait to get out of this dump."

There are adults in town who've fought off Tigers fever, too. Instead of supporting the levy, they talk about cutting money from a bloated football budget to pay for school improvements. Rather than recounting players' on-field exploits, they describe other talents the young men have, and wonder aloud about the common practice of holding boys back in eighth grade so they can be big enough to compete as high school freshmen.

Listening to these people, you realize that the nasty underside of love for the game is a tendency to suffocate individuality and obscure what might otherwise be thought of as essential priorities. The community funded a 20,000-seat stadium in the early 1990s, for example, but hasn't been able to drum up money for its schools.


	Whether home or away, the folks of Massillon are on board with the Tigers.

Rooting, for all its exhilarating communalism, is always a kind of exclusion, too. As "Go Tigers" details the incredibly sophisticated training the players go through in preparation for a game (the scenes are mesmerizing and overwhelming in their intensity), you can't help but wonder what sorts of resources and attention are left for the other kids in school. What if you're an artist who doesn't want to memorize crossing routes and blocking schemes? What if you're a girl who would rather write or dance than cheer?

As he does with Tigers boosters, Carlson presents rather than judges the perspectives of those on the outside of the football machine. As a result, "Go Tigers" achieves a subtle, ambivalent feel for both the pleasures and perils of the town's fascination with its team. Particularly when the film concentrates on Tigers fans, you get a number of scenes that can be read in two directions at once, such as the opening scene in the hospital. They're both examples of the virtue and appeal of home-team enthusiasm, and evidence that love of team can become a creepy, partisan obsession.

There is a lot of drama in the 1999 Tigers season -- can the team rebound from a losing record, will the levy pass, will Irwin and Studer recover from injuries in time to face McKinley, will Moore pass the ACT exam so he can play college ball? Ultimately though, "Go Tigers" is more concerned with the long-standing relationship between the town and its team than it is with a single season. Thanks to Carlson's balanced, empathetic direction, the story of Tigers football transcends any one place, too. In the end, it offers a telling glimpse of the idiosyncratic but powerful ways high school football shapes the imagination and identity of the communities that gather around it all across the country.

Eric Neel is the former managing editor of SportsJones, an online magazine for sports culture. He holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of Iowa.