Lewis Lapham says that sports must preserve an illusion of perfect innocence. Sport activities are described as a ¨ritual portrayal of a world in which time stops¨. Lapham is absolutely right when he says this, games are not just games for a lot of spectators. High school sport games are something else, they do not exactly provide hope, but a false or temporary hope. People always know the game is going to have to end, but they still enjoy what they have left. In H.G. Bissinger’s Friday Night Lights, there is a small town called Odessa that experiences this erroneous hope every friday night. It is known that the town has problems with the oil, crime and murder rates, but once you step into the stadium, all the problems just disappear.
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All these dilemmas do not matter when their eyes are fixated on teenagers running around with a ball or swinging a bat. But, the deceiving hope mentioned in the above paragraph depends on how the game goes as well. If the spectator’s team is losing, it is like the whole crowd loses something. When the team makes a good play or wins, then the temporary hope comes into play. The crowd knows that the game is not going to last forever, it is going to have to end and they are all going to go back to their jobs and humdrum lives until next friday. This thought can also be applied to the student athletes in Bissinger’s book. Playing football not only brings them joy, but gives them that sense of false hope. When the players are out on the field, they are not worrying about college or whether they aced the test they took. They are focused on the game. In Friday Night Lights, Jerrod McDougal’s passion for football is described,“After the season there would be plenty of time to think about college and careers and all that other stuff that a high school senior might want to start thinking about. But not now, not when the most important moment of his life was about to take place. Friday night is what he lived for, bled for, worked so hard for. It sure as hell wasn’t school, where he shuffled from one creampuff to another” (Bissinger,
All these dilemmas do not matter when their eyes are fixated on teenagers running around with a ball or swinging a bat. But, the deceiving hope mentioned in the above paragraph depends on how the game goes as well. If the spectator’s team is losing, it is like the whole crowd loses something. When the team makes a good play or wins, then the temporary hope comes into play. The crowd knows that the game is not going to last forever, it is going to have to end and they are all going to go back to their jobs and humdrum lives until next friday. This thought can also be applied to the student athletes in Bissinger’s book. Playing football not only brings them joy, but gives them that sense of false hope. When the players are out on the field, they are not worrying about college or whether they aced the test they took. They are focused on the game. In Friday Night Lights, Jerrod McDougal’s passion for football is described,“After the season there would be plenty of time to think about college and careers and all that other stuff that a high school senior might want to start thinking about. But not now, not when the most important moment of his life was about to take place. Friday night is what he lived for, bled for, worked so hard for. It sure as hell wasn’t school, where he shuffled from one creampuff to another” (Bissinger,