Bleachers

Grisham further develops the theme of brotherhood among the Spartans in this section, as the former players all band together in the wake of Eddie Rake’s death. Neely, Paul and Mal all meet at Nat’s shop with the shared mission of getting another one of their own to join them at the funeral: Jesse Trap. At the detention center, Neely and Paul do what they can to get Jesse Trapp to come to Rake’s service. Regardless of where he ended up, he is still a Spartan, and Spartans stick together. Jesse is unsure of whether the people of Messina will truly want him there and declines their offer. That Jesse says he let the townspeople down suggests again that the football players aren’t high school students but role models.

During their drive, Mal asks Neely and Paul to finally tell him what happened the night Neely broke his hand. Now that Rake is dead, they oblige him and recount the story in its entirety. They “hated Rake, but he was still Rake” (113). They were afraid for what might happen if they told anyone and afraid to harm the reputation of the legendary Eddie Rake. So, they made a pact of silence. The events that happened during halftime of the 1987 championship game not only changed Neely’s view of Rake, but also of his teammates. The second half of the game was played without any help from the coaches, and they relied only on each other. This part of the novel strongly solidifies the theme of brotherhood among the players, but it also reveals that Scotty’s death might have been prevented. If the team had revealed Rake’s violence, maybe he would have been fired sooner or perhaps his behavior could have been curtailed. In their silence, the boys accepted the abuse as part of the football experience and allowed it to continue.

Cameron’s role in the novel is to voice the frustrations of the people who don’t worship football with the rest of the town. Grisham utilizes her to bluntly articulate the absurdity of idolizing high school football teams. Her speech, directed at Neely, is one of the most critical in his argument against the culture surrounding football:

It was silly. Grown men crying after a loss. The entire town living and dying with each game. Prayer breakfasts every Friday morning, as if God cares who wins a high school football game. More money spent on the football team than on all other student groups combined. Worshiping seventeen-year-olds who quickly became convinced they are truly worthy of being worshiped. The double standard—a football player cheats on a test, everybody scrambles to cover it up. A nonathlete cheats, and he gets suspended (133).

In one lecture, Cameron targets each facet of the dangers of hero-worshiping. She critiques the financial inequality that is rampant in Messina, one that had been brought up in “Wednesday” by Paul, who said “There had always been a very small group of people who were opposed to spending more money on football than on science and math combined” (58). These statements reflect a real and prevalent complaint among small Southern towns who show financial favoritism toward football, likely one Grisham witnessed himself when he was younger.

Cameron’s statement regarding the “Worshiping [of] seventeen-year-olds” directly supports the theme of the dangers of hero-worshiping (133). Her comment condemns the pridefulness of the football players, which will continue to be a flaw of the Spartans if nothing changes. When Neely visits his old high school, he observes that the current quarterback “had the customary strut of someone who owned the hall, which he did, if only briefly” (72). This is further explored later in this section of the novel, when Neely opens up to Cameron about how difficult it has been to move on since high school. “When you’re famous at eighteen, you spend the rest of your life fading away. You dream of the glory days, but you know they’re gone forever. I wish that I’d never seen a football” (129). Iterations of this phrase are said by different Spartans throughout the novel, but Neely is the only one who consistently adds that he wishes he had never been a football player at all.

Instead of wanting to relive the days where he was a star athlete, he begins to see the damage it did to himself and the people he loved. The decisions he made as a teenager to choose instant gratification only led to misery and pain. By choosing Screamer over Cameron, he subjected Cameron to a broken heart that took 10 years to heal. Additionally, his actions subjected Screamer to a secret abortion. He also brought her into his delusion of significance, leaving her to fall as far from glory as Neely did when their relationship ended. This also applies to his financial situation. He became accustomed to receiving thousands of dollars for winning football games and never saved any of it. His injury was even more devastating because the lifestyle he’d acquired as an athlete was shattered, along with his fantasy that he would be the hero forever.

With the unpacking of the past that comes in this section, the symbol of Neely’s busted knee as his emotional baggage becomes much clearer. Between his wife’s miscarriages and subsequential abandonment of their marriage, losing Cameron, who “loved [him] madly when [she] was a teenage girl” (130), and losing the respect, fame, and money he had gained as a football player, there was a great deal of loss in Neely’s life. While not all of it could be attributed solely to the game of football, and the attitude of his hometown toward the sport, it’s easy to see why Neely remarks that he sometimes wishes his life had not involved football at all.