49 pages • 1 hour read
John GrishamBleachers
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2003A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Part 1Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 1: “Tuesday”
Part 1, Pages 1-24 Summary
Bleachers begins with the arrival of Neely Crenshaw, former Spartan football quarterback, to the small town of Messina. He parks his car at Rake Field, walking down the sideline as he approaches the bleachers. He remembers how they looked in the past: “ten thousand people once gathered on Friday nights to pour their emotions upon a high school football team” (4). It has been 15 years since Neely was number 19, the hero of the football team, and his return to Rake Field brings back a flood of vivid memories.
Neely recounts the reason Rake Field is considered “sacred turf” (4). Neely himself never lost a game in his time as a quarterback, but what really put Messina on the map, and Coach Eddie Rake in the position of town savior, was The Streak. The Streak was over a decade of wins—84 in a row—earning the team a national record. Ever since then, the town of Messina has an insatiable need to win. Neely passes a new, bronze statue of Rake that lists his incredible stats. Not far in the distance is Rake’s home, where his family is gathered around his death bed. Neely imagines that while there are also probably many friends in the house, each with flowers and nice cards, there probably isn’t a Spartan football player in sight.
When Neely finally arrives at the bleachers, his former teammate, Paul Curry, greets him. In high school, the two of them were co-captains and “practically unstoppable” (9). Though they went their separate ways after graduation, they manage to communicate a few times a year. Paul is now a banker and married with three kids with a fourth on the way. Neely pokes fun at Paul for putting on weight, and Paul responds: “I’m a banker and a Rotarian, but I can still outrun you” (10). Paul feels immediate remorse when he remembers that Neely suffered a knee injury in college that ended his football career. Neely smiles at Paul reassuringly, and the two continue to sit and reminisce.
They recall how football seemed to be their destiny from the beginning. Even if they hadn’t wanted to play, they “had no choice in this town” (10). The boys were groomed from the sixth grade to start training as future Spartans, memorizing each of Rake’s plays. Paul describes the grief that comes from being a forgotten hero in a small town. They had a few years of glory, only to be replaced by the next round of players after they left high school. Neely asks Paul if it still hurts, and Paul says, “Over time, I forgot about being a hero and became just another fan” (12). He tells Neely that he and his family have season tickets to the Spartan games and enjoys watching the games with his wife and kids.
Neely and Paul fall quiet as more former Spartans arrive, all from different generations and sitting in different parts of the bleachers. Paul receives a call from another of their former teammates: Silo Mooney. Silo didn’t graduate high school, and for a while he was involved in selling drugs until it nearly got him shot. After that, Silo wanted to “go straight” (15) and began working as an entrepreneur. Eventually, he bought an old junkyard and converted it into a body shop. Paul describes Silo as “a mess” who is into drinking, women, and is prematurely aging. Most importantly, Paul cautions Neely: “Be careful what you say around Rake. Nobody loves him like Silo” (16). Silo is known for fighting and is like Rake in his unashamed love for violence.
The men continue to go down the list of former players, including Jesse Trapp, who is still in jail. Eventually, Paul finally asks Neely something that has puzzled him for 15 years. He asks Neely why he went to college at Tech. The answer is $50,000 cash, which was left in the trunk of his car one night before he graduated high school. Money kept coming once he was playing, so Neely felt no need to save any of it. Every game he won, there would be an envelope of cash that arrived in the mail. Neely continued to benefit from football longer than some of the other Spartans, making his sudden fall from glory even more painful.
Soon, Silo joins Neely and Paul, and it isn’t long before Silo, who was in the Army stationed in the Philippines during Neely’s college career, is asking how Neely injured his knee. Neely recounts the accident to the two of them. It happened during the game against A&M, and Neely laments that he “should have stayed in the pocket like [he] was coached” (24), even though Silo says that Rake never told him that. Regardless, the injury ended any future in football, which is part of why Neely vowed to never look back at his life in Messina. Yet he, Paul, and Silo all agree that it seems like those bleachers on their high school football field is the place they need to be that night.
Part 1, Pages 25-42 Summary
The conversation shifts to the most dreaded conditioning exercises of the year: the Spartan Marathon. Every year, the Spartans would get into the best shape possible to prepare for this event. They would lose weight not to impress anyone, but it was instead a means of survival. Rake would have his players, in the middle of summer, run “until [they] dropped” (25). Most would puke, pass out, or both. The marathon was also a competition, and the Spartans always remembered how many laps they ran. The three men are remembering their own grueling marathons when Neely asks about the kid who set the record of 83 laps, Jaeger. As he speaks, Jaeger himself arrives and joins Neely, Paul, and Silo on the bleachers.
They watch other men, former players who have been jogging on the track below, as they slowly make their way toward the bleachers. Some of them played during The Streak, while Jaeger was a senior the year Rake was fired in 1992. The four of them are in awe at just how many years, and players, Rake coached. Paul mentions a story the paper did on the subject once, titled “Eddie Rake and the 700 Spartans” (29), which commemorated his career of coaching 714 high school players over the years. Jaeger speculates that most of them will attend Rake’s funeral.
The night grows darker, and a “tall gawky man” advances toward the scoreboard (30). It is Rake’s right-hand man and assistant athletic director, Rabbit, who taught for 11 years at Messina High School until it was revealed he never graduated from high school himself. Rake promptly gave him a job, and ever since Rabbit has remained loyal to him and to the Spartan football team. His loyalty is so deep that “Rabbit had become partially crippled during a game in 1981” (31) when, in a moment it seemed that Messina might lose to Greene County, he hurled himself onto the field and into a running back on the opposing team. The blow merely stunned the running back, Lightning Lloyd, but Rake was left with multiple injuries. Rake used his injury to push his team into stepping up, and the Spartans ended up winning that game. Rabbit, meanwhile, lived to have an annual award named after him and established himself as a staple to the Spartan football team.
The sun goes down even further, and more players arrive. Silo asks Neely when he last saw Rake. Neely answers that it was in the hospital when he was injured in college, and Rake visited to cheer Neely up. Silo asks if Rake mentioned the 1987 championship game. The game was one shrouded in mystery, as Rake and the other coaches disappeared after half-time until toward the end of the fourth quarter. None of the players or coaches ever mentioned what really happened during that game. When he visited Neely at the hospital, “Rake had finally apologized, but Neely had told no one” (34). There is some discussion among the players on the bleachers as to whether Neely hates Rake, as rumor has it. Neely denies it, though his feelings toward Rake are certainly complicated.
The last character to arrive to the bleachers on Tuesday is Sherriff Mal Brown, who is a great deal older than Neely, Silo, Paul, and Jaeger. Mal, who played during The Streak, was one of Messina’s best players back in the day. Mal has never met Neely but is still quick to drill him on why he hasn’t returned to his hometown in 15 years. Desperate to change the subject, Neely prompts the group to wonder who was Rake’s worst team, and before long it’s time to go home. As they depart, Neely realizes his knee has gotten stiff, which makes it hard to walk. Like always, he shuffles around until he can walk almost normally and pretend like it doesn’t bother him.
Part 1 Analysis
In the first part of Bleachers, Grisham establishes the importance of football to the town of Messina and introduces the theme of the dangers of hero-worshiping. As Neely drives through he takes in the expensive football practice fields with lights, a rare luxury for other towns, “but then no other town worshiped its football as thoroughly and collectively as Messina” (3). However, in the years since the infamous Coach Rake’s firing, the fields are not kept as meticulously as they once were, and it’s clear that “[t]he glory days were gone. They left with Rake” (3). The glory days appear throughout the novel and are memories that none of the characters can seem to escape. For Neely, “the games came back to him, though he tried to block them out” (6), and the same is true for most of the players and fans. The glory days occurred when the Spartan football team was under the leadership of Rake, and the more games the town won, the greater their idolization of both the man and the game.
The players, too, were worshiped, including Neely, who was a “high school, all-American…with a golden arm, fast feet, plenty of size, maybe the greatest Messina ever produced” (4). All the heroes of Spartan football are elevated to great heights, only to suffer terrible falls. These falls from glory drive the plot in Bleachers. Rake’s fall from glory is what divides the town of Messina. Neely’s fall from glory affected his confidence and expectations of life after his football career ended abruptly, and he carries the weight of his former life in the same way. The inescapability of what most of them consider to be the best days of their lives is what keeps them trapped in the past.
The physical space of the bleachers serves as a place where many of the former players share their memories together. Most of the reminiscing in the novel happens on the bleachers, both in the present and in the past. Paul recalls how he used to sit for hours by himself remembering the games, until “it hurt like hell because it was over, our glory days gone in a flash” (11). The bleachers represent the duality of Spartan football: It’s a place of victory and brotherhood for the players, but also the site of Rake’s abusive conditioning drills. It’s the place where all the former players from multiple generations gather as they wait for Coach Rake to die.
In addition to establishing the setting and some of the themes, “Tuesday” allows the reader insight into most of the characters. On the bleachers Paul and Silo join Neely. It is evident that the friendship they built during their time on the team is incredibly strong, all of them “members of a small fraternity whose membership was forever closed” (13). They have shared memories of Rake, both good and bad, and it is during this part that the championship game of 1987 is first mentioned. While this part of the book reveals few details, it clearly was a major event during Neely’s time at Messina High School and something that strengthened the bond between him, Silo, and Paul.
Bleachers exposes a corrupt, darker side to football. Toxic masculinity and violence are prevalent themes that Grisham especially explores through the characters of Rake and Silo. “Rake liked to hit” and had a reputation for getting violent with his players on the field. Twice in his career, he hit players “off the field,” one of which was in the 1960s between Rake and a player who quit the team, and “the second was a cheap shot that landed in the face of Neely Crenshaw” (22). Rake may be a winning coach, but he is both verbally and physically abusive to his team. This behavior is widely ignored by a town that prioritizes championships. Silo shares Rake’s love of violence, and longs for “the sight of blood on the poor boy lined up against him” (16).
Another disturbing element of football culture that we see in “Tuesday” is financial politics. During Neely’s senior year, schools offered cash for him to choose their college and play on their team: “Every school offered cash” (19). One night after Neely got out of seeing a movie with Screamer, he found “Five hundred one-hundred-dollar bills, stuffed in an unmarked red canvas bag and placed in the trunk of [his] car […] Next morning, [he] was committed to Tech” (19). Even after he started playing, with each win he would receive more cash in the mail, accompanied by anonymous notes whose “message was clear-keep winning and the money will keep coming” (20). The blatant and unapologetic bribery, which put thousands of dollars under the table into the hands of an 18 year old, fuels the industry. Additionally, local funds are exploited to enhance the football team and the football team alone, as “[n]o expense was spared, not for the Messina Spartans football team” (7). The novel will continue to address the town’s financial favoritism of football as the story progresses.
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