by Chad S. Conine
Genre: Texas Sports History / Biographies
Date of Publication: September 6, 2016
Publisher: University of Texas Press
# of pages: 288
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Anywhere football is played, Texas is the force to reckon with. Its powerhouse programs produce the best football players in America. In The Republic of Football, Chad S. Conine vividly captures Texas’s impact on the game with action-filled stories about legendary high school players, coaches, and teams from around the state and across seven decades.
Drawing on dozens of interviews, Conine offers rare glimpses of the early days of some of football’s biggest stars. He reveals that some players took time to achieve greatness—LaDainian Tomlinson wasn’t even the featured running back on his high school team until a breakthrough game in his senior season vaulted him to the highest level of the sport—while others, like Colt McCoy, showed their first flashes of brilliance in middle school. In telling these and many other stories of players and coaches, including Hayden Fry, Spike Dykes, Bob McQueen, Lovie Smith, Art Briles, Lawrence Elkins, Warren McVea, Ray Rhodes, Dat Nguyen, Zach Thomas, Drew Brees, and Adrian Peterson, Conine spotlights the decisive moments when players caught fire and teams such as Celina, Southlake Carroll, and Converse Judson turned into Texas dynasties.
“This is a wonderful, well-written book, full of compelling details and stories. A ‘must read’ for any Texas football fan.” —DAVE CAMPBELL Dave Campbell’s Texas Football
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University of Texas Press
What did you enjoy most about writing this book?
Getting the interviews and doing the interviews brought all of these little victories along the way. There were sort of two stages for many of the chapters. First, I would try to figure out how to reach out to someone like LaDainian Tomlinson. When he said he would do the interview, that was a win. That happened a bunch of times with people like Adrian Peterson and Drew Brees and Lovie Smith, etc. And then I would follow up with their teammates. Most of the time, the interviews with the teammates were where the material really gathered depth and those interviews were a lot of fun. I’d end up talking to the follow up interviewees for most of an hour and it resulted in all these new contacts. I really think those people are going to make the book work when it comes to marketing because they were so excited about it. I’ve already had some of them email me and say, “I’ve heard the book is out. Send me my copy.”
How has being a Texan influenced your writing?
This is an interesting question, because I think I could answer it in sort of the abstract and credit some of the qualities that, as a (prideful) Texan, I believe inform the way I write. Things like toughness, independence, dry humor, valuing the economy of words, etc. But that would be a little bit pompous.
Honestly, when I was in high school, I wanted to write about football, so I covered the high school football team for the school paper beginning in my sophomore year. By my senior year, I was working for a local weekly paper, writing about the football team. So when I went to Texas Tech and wanted to cover high school games on Friday nights, Lubbock Avalanche-Journal sports editor Doug Hensley saw that I had experience and sent me out to games.
I haven’t lived anywhere else other than Texas in the fall, so I don’t know how extensively local newspapers in other states cover high school football. In Texas, we’re all over it and that created an opportunity for me to write when I was 16, 17, 18 years old. I’m 39 now and I’ve been doing it for more than 20 years. Obviously, I’ve written a lot of different types of articles and now books, so my writing experience has branched out from deadline writing on Friday nights. But, when you think about it, when you’re 19 years old and standing on a football field waiting to interview the head coach and you have about twenty minutes to write an article and find a way to send it (the internet was not as easily accessible back then), a lot of other types of writing seem easy after that.
All of that points to the fact that, in a very real sense, covering high school football in Texas made me into a writer. I want to write about a lot of different things. I’ve had the opportunity to write blogs in Scotland and cover college basketball Final Fours, so I’m not solely focused on covering high school football in Texas. But I always want to be at high school football stadiums in Texas on Friday nights in the fall.
What cultural value do you see in storytelling?
I love storytelling. It’s essential. I don’t know if there’s a people group in the history of the world where storytelling wasn’t an important part of life. My favorite bands are the ones whose songs tell interesting stories. I love to read and I especially like to listen to the audiobooks of my favorite books. I travel in my car by myself on average 30,000 miles a year, so I’ve gathered an extensive audiobook library. My grandmother used to tell me that she was amazed how I would sit and let her read to me when I was 2 or 3 years old.
So that value and love of storytelling came into play when I began interviewing people for The Republic of Football. In a lot of cases, my jumping off point was to ask a former player or coach, “What are the stories that you and your football buddies tell over and over again when you get together?” The high school football stories that these guys told were so great because there was no bullshitting. One guy couldn’t pump up his own story, and he knew he couldn’t, because I was going to call his buddy and teammate who was on the field when it happened. And if he tried to exaggerate his own role, not only would his buddy set him straight, he would never hear the end of it after that. Of course, I also followed up with newspaper accounts of the stories that were told and sometimes time factors or stats were a little bit off. For the most part, though, it was amazing how accurately the guys remembered what happened. The working title of the book was “Remember When” because that was the idea. “Remember when we beat Brownwood in the playoffs and the field was covered with snow? Remember how Coach went to the sporting goods store the night before and got us extra long cleats?”
Of course, old football players telling stories about the glory days is not a new concept. It might even be a cliché. I’ve certainly been cornered by someone telling me high school football stories and maybe I wasn’t that interested. But telling these stories and getting several sides to them and verifying the legends, hopefully puts a little bit of a new shine on this classic genre.
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