North Dallas Forty

 

North Dallas Forty – Peter Gent

It might be hard for any sports fan under the age of 50 to believe, but there was a time in professional sports when athletes didn’t make a lot of money.  Even today, traditionalists scream that all star athletes shouldn’t be making millions and they should be playing for “the love of the game”.  Reading Peter Gent’s semi-autobiographical take of the life of a member of the Dallas Cowboy football team during the late 1960s, these traditionalists just might change their tune.

The story here is supposedly fictional, but anyone other than the most highly gullible can read between the lines. Phil Elliot is a wide receiver of the Dallas “professional football team” and author Gent leaves little to the imagination that this story is based on his real-life episodes and travails of being a professional football player.  The story here takes place over a one-week period – from the end of one game to the end of the next game the next week.  We’re exposed to what the ball players go through during any given grueling week as a professional football player, and it simply isn’t pretty.

A lot of what this story focuses on – too much really – is the goings on outside of the football field, the locker room, and the intense practice sessions.  A lot of it is repetitive and after a while, simply isn’t that interesting. The first episode we’re exposed to is one of those high-profile parties where the players gather the evening after a hard fought game to let off steam.  There is plenty of dope smoking, womanizing, smashing up of things, dope smoking, infighting among the players, dope smoking, alcohol imbibing, and even more dope smoking.  This pretty much sets the tone for the whole book, each and every evening. It gets to be a bit much, and it simply isn’t that entertaining to read about this behavior over and over again.

Now, being that these guys are professional athletes, they have to stay employed. To stay employed means to play through the pain.  So we see a lot of episodes where, in addition to being numbed by ingesting cannabis, there are plenty of hard core, illegally obtained pain medications ingested as well.  Throughout the whole week.  Throughout the whole week.  Over and over and over again. I couldn’t help but wonder, how can these guys survive being so highly medicated with so much controlled substances? Oh sure, it’s well known that these players are breaking into the medicine cabinet in the trainer’s room during practice, but it’s best for all involved to look the other way.

This seems to be the overall theme of the book.  Sure, these guys are slowly dying on the field and they’re not doing their bodies any favors by filling up their bodies with various pain medications, but business is business. If a guy can’t play on the field, someone else who’s willing to numb his body with plenty of narcotics will be glad to fill their place.  And when athletes aren’t being paid much, the professional players are very easily interchangeable.

This is where most of the book is focused, the drugs, the pain, and the fact that drugs will hopefully kill the insistent pain.  If they can’t, well, just double your intake, smoke a few more joints, and don’t think about the consequences the next day.  It’s sad that this is where so much of the focus is, because other areas of the game and the lives of athletes aren’t really exposed in as much detail as possible.  One example: when Elliot is “demoted” to the bench, he sits watching the game hoping that his team will start to lose and play poorly.  Why? Because that’s the only way he’ll get into the game.  And if he doesn’t get into the game, there’s no guarantee that he’ll be around next week at all.

It was fun to see so many of the characters on the team who were very obviously lifted from real personalities. The team’s quarterback (and Elliot’s best friend on the team) Seth Maxwell is such an obvious replication of Cowboy quarterback Don Meredith, that you wonder why Dandy Don never sued.   Let’s say that his squeaky-clean all-American image was somewhat tainted, but such is the life of a professional athlete.  The Head Coach of the team, B.A., has quite a few similarities to real life leader Tom Landry, and it leads the reader to believe that as “holy” as Landry was, he also looked at his players as submissive pieces of meat whose job was to play until they dropped – regardless of the physical or emotional consequences. It’s football folks.

I should also add that I watched the movie shortly after reading the book and this was one of those cases where the movie was much better than the book.  The story, message, and characters were the same. The main difference is that the movie focused much more on the on-the-field activities.  I would say it was about 50-50 on-the-field vs. off-the-field whereas the book was more 20-80 with too much focus on the repetitive partying, weed smoking, taking pain killers, etc.  So if you’re curious, start with the movie. 

A grim reminder that a life as a professional athlete isn’t all glitz and glamour.  Especially when the players never made any real money.