FOOTBALL

If I Don't Six

Elwood Reid (Doubleday)

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by Teri Bostian

It’s easy to believe the hype of Spike Lee’s He Got Game, given the carte blanche excesses of the past in college men’s athletics and the very public thrashings programs like Oklahoma’s and Auburn’s have suffered as a result.

The realities lately, though, contradict those colorful stories. These days, press reports tell us that the excesses in college athletics are not so much indulgent as they are sleazy and pathetic.

Elwood Reid’s first novel, If I Don’t Six, provides this latter, more realistic look at the life of a college football player – where recruiting consists of half-threatening meetings with coaches during the day and perfunctory visits to seedy titty bars with the fellas at night. No new Lexus and big cash here. Once signed on, even the Big Stars can expect no more than to shirk some of the more trivial edicts from on high.

Reward comes only to those who, the narrator believes, are willing to sacrifice their humanity: the guys willing to drink until their eyeballs swim; the gung-hos who pick fights on the field and off; those who steal, cheat, and rape. The rest is boredom and pain. One can’t not believe Reid’s sense of things – the author is a former University of Michigan player who, like the Elwood Riley of the novel, eighty-"sixed" after an injury.

Reid’s experiences here, however, would have made a much more compelling and meaningful memoir. As it is, this fictionalization allows us inside for a look – and, granted, it is interesting for a while – but ultimately there’s no reward for the reader either. There’s no growth or epiphany, because the protagonist never really believes in football.

The central conflict, created by Riley’s own inexplicable violent tendencies, goes unreflected upon and unresolved. That the focal character ditches an adoring-but-dim-witted cheerleader for a grungy philosophical type, and that his dilemma about sticking it out on the field is quickly decided for him by a back injury, might seem appropriate to those who’ve come to believe that big-time college sports, especially football, is morally bankrupt. For those who believe in literature, though, it seems only like deus ex machina.

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