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Conquering Heroes

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Parent Issue
Month
September
Year
1998
Copyright
Creative Commons (Attribution, Non-Commercial, Share-alike)
Rights Held By
Agenda Publications
OCR Text

IF I DON'T SIX

ELWOOD REID

CONQUERING HEROES

Novel Rips College Football Culture

Interview with Elwood Reid, Author of "If I Don't six" By PETER WERBE

EDITOR'S NOTE: Elwood Reid was on the U-M football squad from 1985-87, when he was injured. Although Reid was on the roster, played in scrimmages and Blue-Gold games, he was never a starter and never got on the field during the regular games. The title of the book is slang for "86" and "Deep Six," and it's also a dice term in craps; you don't want a six. In the novel, the character is faced with the choice of either going with the program, which is playing football and becoming someone he doesn't want to be, or quitting, which would be 86-ing from the program. The term, "If I Don't Six," ultimately means the character in the novel choosing an even more painful option--a career ending injury.

Agenda: The protagonist of your novel sounds a lot like you. Is your book autobiographical?

Elwood Reid: I think the emotional truth of the novel is, but can you line up certain facts to my life? No. Like any fiction, it's 40 percent drawn from real life and 60 percent imagined. Like the character in the book, I played football, I'm from Cleveland, I'm big. Yes, those things are true. Once you get past that, the rest of it is where the realm of imagination kicks in. As much is drawn from my life working in a bar and the things I saw there applied to football.

Agenda: What's the dramatic tension in the book?

ER: It's being advertised as a football novel, but it's really a book about coming of age. It could just as easily be a war novel; it just happens that this character comes of age in this very intense experience which is big time college football. I was fascinated with what happens when you get young men together, joined in a common cause and you put pressure on them. Strange things happen. There' s a large body of war fiction and I wanted to do the flip side of this with sports.

Agenda: You said elsewhere that your book is not an exposé of the University of Michigan football program, but the experiences of your fictional character, Elwood Riley, suggests a fundamental corruption in the world of college sports.

ER: There's no one corrupting the character in the novel; he's as guilty as anyone else. It has a lot to do with peer pressure of wanting to fit in and wanting to belong. There's no big bad coach making him do anything; it's not the system, it's cultural. Certainly with me it was cultural. I bought into the football dream that hundreds of thousands of kids have across the country.

Agenda: Did you love to play?

ER: I did. But, by the time I got to UM, I realized that it was maybe 10 percent the game and 90 percent a vocation. I wasn't prepared to make that leap. I was a 19-year-old kid and that's the decision the character in the novel is faced with. Do you love the game enough to give everything up for this chance? Most guys go to these big time college programs not because they love the game, but because there's a chance they'll play in the NFL somewhere down the road.

Agenda: In a GQ magazine article you talk about being able to "ram a forearm so hard into your opponent's throat that the crunch of cartilage and the fear in his eyes gives you pause." ís there a high degree of sadistic pleasure in this sport? ís there enjoyment of destroying your enemy?

ER: Sure, that's the goal; to hit him as hard as you can, and the implication behind that is to hurt him. You're not going out to injure this guy, but if I can knock him down, that' s better for me. I liked to hit; that was the way I proved myself. Instead of getting straight A's in school or studying computers, my way was, I'm going to knock this guy down and hurt him.

Agenda: What was it like being a jock at a prestigious center of learning like U-M?

ER: Imagine being 19-years-old, big as a house, fast, popular, and being at a campus where guys with PhD's will do anything to shake your hand, and women look at you like you were just elected president. When I was 19, I was a dork in a monster's body. After a while it begins to warp your sense of entitlement. I wasn't prepared for people painting their bodies blue and going shirtless in 15-degree weather.

That's pretty crazy for a game and when you realize that you're the object of that adulation , it can go to a person' s head. In a football program, every aspect of your life is taken care of. It's very regimented and you're not out there in the real world.

I think you see so many professional athletes getting in trouble because they really don't think there's any consequences to their actions. Your sense of who you are in relationship to the rest of the world is seriously out of whack simply because you're big and can win football games. There's the sense, that, hey, if I go to a party, have too many beers, and punch some guy in the face, that's OK because I'm an important person.

For instance, professional athletes have a high percentage of spousal abuse. You hear about incidents where things are swept under the rug or a guy does something and is let back into the program.The real world doesn't work like that; you go to a bar and hit someone, that's assault.

Often times thugish behavior is rewarded on a peer level. You're not going to rise in the eyes of your peers if you're out helping someone with their homework. You do if you're the guy who can drink the most beer or won't back down from a fight or get the most girls. That's 19-year-old testosterone talking

Agenda: What are the elements of maleness that adhere to a project like a football team trying to win games? We've read a lot about it in books about war.

ER: You can apply all of the clichés you see in war movies and read in war literature to sports, and you can apply all the same behavior. A lot of it sterns from fear, I think. Many of these guys are operating under the dim knowledge in the back of their heads that any play could be their last. Some guy can come along and take your knee out and that's it; then what?

Agenda: At six-foot-six, 275 pounds, don't people expect a certain person based on your size?

ER: People look at you and the cliché leaps to mind, "strong back, weak mind." It's been a struggle of mine for a long time. When I was at the University of Michigan, I'd walk up to a professor in a classroom and his speech would slow down and he'd use smaller words. It's subtle things like that you pick up on and I' m not even sure it's done intentionally.

Agenda: Are you uncomfortable with your size?

ER: No, but my image of who I am has changed radically. I was built for football, but I'm this guy who cares more about books and writing and reading, and I was in this world where the physical aspect was prized above all else and I looked the part. I'm sure when I walked into a classroom, people weren't expecting me to start spouting about hermeneutics or something like that.

Agenda: How do you think people in Ann Arbor and the University will respond to your book? Is anyone going to say your fictional Coach Roe, the slave master who's working everybody beyond their endurance, represents Bo Schembechler ?

ER: No, the characters aren't intended to be any of the coaches. The book is fiction. If I had guys sitting around reading the Bible, it'd be over by page 30. Also, I'm not saying anything about athletes that's not a stereotype already out there. The stereotypes exist because, for the most part, people in the sport exhibit that sort of behavior.

In the book, the coaches don't play a real important role; they 're background authority figures overseeing the players. A lot of the bad behavior is committed by the protagonist and some of the other players around him.

Agenda: Are sexual favors easy to obtain because you're on the U-M football team?

ER: In the real world, women just don't come up to you and introduce themselves. It does happen with guys that are in the spotlight and people want to be next to them. You'd be naive to think anything different. It even goes for the chemistry geek who wants to do your homework for you because he wants to say he's buddies with a football player.

On that campus, football players are stars. I taught at the university ten years later and taught writing to incoming freshmen and got to know them as people. The importance of sports in their lives is staggering; the game on Saturday afternoon meant more to them than anything else; and these are non-players, basic students.

Agenda: Given the physical and psychological damage you outline in the book, would you advise a young person to go into a college football program?

ER: I wouldn't tell my son he can't play, but I'm certainly going to tell him what the cost is. I only played for two years at the college level and when I get up in the morning now, I have a hard time moving around. I have constant back and neck problems. I'm 32 years old and when I go to doctors, they say I have the body of a 50-year-old man. And, I'm relatively hcalthy. What they don't show you is that these guys who have pro careers need crutches to get out of bed when they 're 50.

Agenda: Can you separate what you call thugish behavior from the testosterone-driven competition you find in sports programs?

ER: As far as competition goes, you're not going to win football games if you field a team of Boy Scouts. When the whistle blows, any football player will tell you that you have to turn off your head and let your body go after the opposing player in a very focused rage. You cannot play the game halfway, and that's what makes it exciting--the intensity.

Agenda: Have you changed since you've left the campus from Elwood Reid the huge player to Elwood Reid, writer, where size is unimportant?

ER: I had to kill that person inside of me in some ways. I spent ten years as a carpenter, and working in bars. I drank a lot. I didn't know who I was. Slowly, I let myself come out of the closet and say, you know, I want to be a writer. I had lived my life excelling in athletics and after my neck injury, I was no longer able to do that. The alternative was to go back to Cleveland, sit in a bar and drink all day, drowning my sorrows that I couldn't play any more or to move on with my life. I was lucky. I had this passion which I pursued doggedly for ten years and got a chance to finally publish a novel.

Agenda: Do you still have an interest in football?

ER: I can't tell you the last time I watched a game; it's not important in my life anymore. It's filled up with books and writing.

Peter Werbe's interviews air Sundays on WCSX, WRIF and WXDG where he is the Public Affairs Director.

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