"You Will Weep and Know Why"

Eric ?

 

I came away more in the Creosote/LTL camp. It was a well-written piece, but didn't connect for me. But it's a personal enough narrative that I wouldn't quibble with someone who did find that meaning.

 

This.
A narrative he destroys in his opening graphs and fails to rebuild.
I didn't get the feeling the game was special to the players or the fans. Why should I care about the writer?

 

The PAT holder. Wasn't he the one who bolted for the goal line after the snap?

Maybe it was someone else. So many people to keep up with after 175 inches.

But someone got rung up inches from the goal line on the PAT, which is why it stayed 14-13.

 

There's some good writing in here, but it never answers the question, "Why is this story?" I'm reminded of the episode of SportsNight where Jeremy puts together an eight-minute baseball highlight package and tries to defend it by saying there's a simple beauty in a routine groundout to short.

There can be beauty, depth, meaning in the routine, in the mundane, in the ordinary. But sometimes an unremarkable, albeit close, playoff game between two fair-to-middlin' teams is just that, and sometimes you're the only one who finds deeper meaning in it. Water Valley isn't the only team to have lost a game on what might have a bad snap, and William Browning isn't the only person to have gone through an existential crisis in his mid-20s.

 

I'll go ahead and say that there's nothing in the world I can envision happening that would merit 200 inches of copy about a single high school football game.

I mean, 9/11 mainbars weren't even that long.

 

I Did Not Weep.

Had I Wept, I Would Not Know Why.

 

I kept expecting the big payoff, especially with how the writer kept mentioning unrequited love, love lost — and it never came. And what that had to do with a high school football game is ... unclear at best. Glenn Stout is not infallible.

 

In the end the story did not make me weep but it did leave me glad that I spent the time reading it.

I guess I'm a bit of a sucker for the "football as metaphor for life genre. Especially the ones that take place in the south. This one needed train whistles in the distance to make it a true southern football story though.

If I had a criticism of the story I would say that maybe the writer spent too much time describing the game and not enough on what he was really writing about. I expected a bigger payoff in the end which was short and abrupt. Perhaps a few more paragraphs might have done the trick in getting readers to understand that it was less a football story and more a story of life and loss.

Loved some of his observations including the men in heavy coats by the rail. Every HS game that I've ever been to has those guys. If you spoke to them most would say they
were "pulling guards in the single wing back in '57".

In the end this was no more a football story than The Last Picture Show or Irwin Shaw's "The Eight Yard Run". It was more a story of life through the lens of football, and one that I thoroughly enjoyed reading. Distant train whistles would have made it better though.

 

Dead on. You articulated exactly what worked for me and why it didn't completely land.

 

The issues described here are the issues for 75% of the SB Nation Longform stories I've read. I have up on the project entirely about three months ago, and I love SB Nation's main product.

 

Glad I'm not the only person to not love this story. It just didn't do it for me. At all.

The payoff at the end was terrible. If you are going to make me read all the way through that I need something at the end to make it all worth it. A lot of Browning's writing is like that, though. Some people love it. Personally, I think he badly overwrites and can't write a story without interjecting himself into it.