In the Shreve High football stadium,
I think of Polacks nursing long beers in
Tiltonsville,
And gray faces of Negroes in the blast furnace at Benwood,
And the ruptured night watchman of
Wheeling Steel,
Dreaming of Heroes.

All the proud fathers are ashamed to go home.
Their women cluck like starved pullets,
Dying for love.

Therefore,
Their sons grow suicidally beautiful
At the beginning of October,
And gallop terribly against each other’s bodies.

I wish I had read this poem when I was a Swain County High School student in 1979, the year Boyce Deitz’ undefeated football team won both the Smoky Mountain Conference and the state championship. Or I wish I had read it in 1981, the year the football team’s record was 11-2, yet another year the team went to the state playoffs. But I didn’t. I didn’t read James Wright until I was in an undergraduate poetry class in 1986, and when I did read it, I had already begun what was to become a steady and driving interest in all aspects of power and class. Had I read this poem in high school, I might have realized sooner that football, for Swain County, is more than mere sport.

Just a couple of weeks ago the season ended for Swain fans when they lost the game in the second week of the state playoffs, thus breaking a number of hearts, but not before adding one more win to Swain High School’s remarkable record of 58 playoff wins and only 16 losses since 1972 (based on records provided by Toby Burrell, Swain teacher, archivist extraordinaire, coach, sports reporter, etc.). Even though I am not a football fan, I am a fan of the student-athletes at Swain. Actually, I am not a fan of any team sport, except maybe rugby, and that might have less to do with the sport than my own fondness for big guys who like adrenaline and beer.

But that’s beside the point. More to the point is that I spent my high school years with a distaste for Swain football that bordered on the obsessive. I blamed the typical rural neglect of the fine arts on the equally typical and rural love of football, and to my unsophisticated mind, Swain football was one of the primary obstacles that stood in the way of the cultured life I read about in the Marianna Black Library’s subscriptions of New Yorker and Vogue. And so it was that when a troop of Shakespearean actors came to perform in our gym, I was infuriated when the football team clomped down the bleachers to make practice on time, even though the actors were still in mid-scene. Outraged at their rudeness, I took it upon my 15-year-old self to chastise them, writing an article for the school paper in which I postured egregiously and borrowed freely, calling the team “oafs” and “unlettered louts.” Within hours of the newspaper’s distribution, I found myself crying in the girls’ bathroom while a friend removed a rather shocking sign from my back that described my body and sexual orientation in graphic and unflattering terms.

Even though the incident blew over, my near-hatred of Swain football grew to ever-larger proportions, continuing to blind me to the fact that this same football I hated gave most of my fellow students the same kind of hope and comfort that art and literature gave me. My blindness was so complete that it wasn’t until college that I began to see clearly, and even then it took the combined efforts of a Beowulf scholar and poetry professor (who had played high school and college football), a great poet (James Wright), and the man I married (he loved to watch Swain’s “scrappy mountain boys” play) to show me the error of my ways.

While I still see that there are inequalities in the support the community and school system offer for other sports, and although I am still uncomfortable at pep rallies, (or any gathering of “true believers”), I also believe the benefits football offers are worth most of the inequities. Toby Burrell, as softball coach, golf coach, and sports writer for all of the high school teams, explains, “There are and there are not inequities. Football gets the most attention and support, but it also funds itself and a number of other sports at the high school level.” So even though I feel terrible for the lack of attendance at the soccer games when I sell tickets, and even worse at the complete absence of support for the track team, I still see that, in football, Swain County’s racial demographics are proportionally represented, as are good and bad students, along with kids from “rough” families and kids from “good” families. My awareness of these factors, an awareness I lacked as a student, has completely revised my view of Swain County football in the four-and-one-half years that I have taught here. At this point, I realize I will never become a football fan, but I both accept and admire what the sport has done and continues to do for the county that ranks 97th economically out of North Carolina’s one hundred, but first in number of state playoff wins in public high schools, (and what’s worth noting is that this record includes all high schools, not just 1A.).

As a football outsider but a Swain County native, my theory is that the first ranking has wielded enormous influence over the second, and therein lies the link between Swain football and my own interest in poverty and power. Swain’s head coach, Rod White, agrees with this theory, but assures me that there is still more to the picture. Listening to Rod talk about football is a little like listening to a good sermon by a minister who, having only recently adhered to the call, is more aware than most that strengthening the spirit first begins in the weak and perishable flesh. Further, White knows how to convey this in colorful terms that anyone can understand (even one as ignorant about football as I am).

To start with, White told me, “There are only two rules I ask the team to follow: 1) Don’t embarrass Swain’s football program, and, 2) Do what I tell you.” Based on our conversation, my impression is that the most important part of what he tells them is this — no one, no matter how much bigger or faster, is going to “outhit” or “outgrit” them. And this is saying a lot when one considers the rest of the gritty and hard-hitting Smoky Mountain Conference teams, whose style of no-holds-barred-physical football is, again, according to White, “feared throughout the state.” Further, White says that “if a team wants to survive in the SMC, it has to consistently play at a level most teams don’t play at,” and that means “a week-in, week-out level of intensity, one that boys have to love just to survive it.”

He adds that kids also have to love the game to put up with him and the fans and the incredible pressure placed on them because of those three factors. But what he says comes out of all this is a pure distillation of nerve and passion, and the distilling process is one that involves first teaching the necessary skills, then providing the safest equipment, and finally asking for all the kids can give in intensity, discipline, and sacrifice. What the kids get out of this, he elaborates, is the capacity to accept wins with humility, and adversity with determination, and the discipline and raw courage that eventually become a deep-seated belief in themselves and their own abilities as a team and as individuals. Like the best preachers, White uses a lot of metaphors. One metaphor he uses to describe the process of turning callow mountain boys into a respectable football team is “turning puppies into hunting dogs — making dogs that will hunt — weaning them from their mamas and making them more than what they were,” and still another is “when a coach sees that the kids are responsible for what they have become, when they no longer need the coach to win, when the coach can aim the kids and pull the trigger, then he knows he has a team.”

Among these kids Swain aims so well is Earl King, a boy in my English Honors class, whose sister is a team manager and whose family has played Swain’s main game for three generations, beginning with the now 70-year-old grandfather. When I asked him to write something for me about what football means to his family and Swain County, he wrote, “The best thing in the world to do is get together with my grandpa, my uncles, and my dad and talk football. All the men in my family are part of the chain crew on Friday nights.” He also wrote, concerning what football means to the county as a whole, that “people would probably quit their jobs if they couldn’t get off to see an away game or a playoff game.”

And I guess that’s where James Wright’s poem and my love for underdogs and lost causes connect with this tiny and fierce 1A team. In a county where the three main social classes are lower middle, working, and welfare class, forces outside the people’s control have created the economy of poverty. For the Cherokee, an oppressive poverty began with European immigration. For the immigrants, that poverty was sealed by the National Park Service, the Forest Service, TVA, Alcoa, and the tourism industry that wields a two-edged sword, adding money to the economy but only doing so through the poorly paid service industry. However, the economy has, in many ways, had an inverse effect on Swain’s schools. One might even say that the economy is the chip on Swain’s shoulder, the one that forces it to perform as well as it does in so many areas. From SAT scores to football scores, the schools in this county have something to prove. As Coach White says, “Football gives the county something to hang its hat on.” Even more than that, football gives people who have too long been marginalized a way to let the mainstream know, even if only through the most physically punishing of sports, that they do exist.

James Wright believed that fathers mend their own broken dreams by living vicariously through their sons. When I work the gate at a Swain game and I watch the people filing in, I know the reason behind all the support isn’t just fathers living through their sons. Although I know that’s part of it all, there’s more to the excitement than just that. Watching a fierce group of wild-eyed boys bravely “gallop ... against each other’s bodies” is something about which the fathers (and mothers) can be proud, but it’s even more than that. When Wright describes the young players as “suicidally beautiful,” I am moved because he is speaking the metaphoric language I understand. I wish I had recognized a long time ago that if one gets past all the football hype and the pep rallies and even the excessive testosterone, one arrives at the simple and elegant fact that all people really own is their own body, and what one does with the body represents the spirit inside. And that, I think, is a fine metaphor.

That is why economics don’t matter, and why the football field is, for Swain County, the great equalizer. On that level playing field, even the poorest boy can prove himself if he’s given the right training, a good helmet, and a certain willingness to fling caution to the wind and himself at the opponent. Winning at football is a means, neither political nor economic, that one county can prove its worth to others that are far more prosperous. As a teacher, I have a perspective that was unavailable to me as a student, and what I see is this: in a poor rural area, football is an ongoing epic, a hero’s journey. And with the odds always against the small team, the battle to prove oneself becomes as symbolic as Beowulf and Grendel’s struggle was to my professor years ago. Now that I teach, I think I understand the metaphoric “suicidal beauty” of Wright’s boys. Their bodies are what they have, and all the game requires is everything they can give.

(Dawn Gilchrist-Young teaches in Swain County and lives in Cullowhee. She can be reached at youngericyoung@cs.com)