Racism In John Grisham's Bleachers

John Grisham’s Bleachers causes one to beg the question, is any one person too far gone to be redeemed? The man the novel puts in question is none other than the coach of the town’s football team, Eddie Rake. Coach Rake has done horrible things to his players during the thirty plus years he coached, but has he done too much? Eddie Rake has not; based on the love his players have for him, gone too far to be redeemed. Grisham shows this in the instance of Collis Suggs’s statement at Rake’s funeral, “he truly did not care about the color of my skin, then I knew I would follow him anywhere. He hated injustice” (Grisham 215).
Many players hold a love-hate relationship for Coach Rake but there are two of his players who stick out from the rest, Jesse …show more content…
Jesse Trap is mentioned by Neely to have been one of the strongest players to play underneath Coach Rake. At the prison Neely states, “They had seen him set every Spartan lifting record. He looked twice as big now, his neck as thick an oak stump, his shoulders as wide as a door. His biceps and triceps were many times the normal size. His stomach looked like a cobblestone street” (Grisham 167). Even though Jesse Trapp is an enormous person, probably the largest to travel through Rake’s program, he still holds Eddie Rake in extremely high regards, as shown during the prison visit. Jesse states, “I loved Eddie Rake like I’ve loved nobody else in my life. He was in court the day I got sent away…But what hurt the most was that I had failed in Rake’s eyes. It still hurts” (Grisham 170). Eddie Rake is written to have done horrible things to his players. Yet, though while he makes himself easy to hate and hard to love, Eddie Rake has made a lasting impact on many of his players. Rake has been established in Bleachers as having been loved by quite a few of his players, Jesse Trap being just one of