Smart lad, to slip betimes away
From fields where glory does not stay,
And early though the laurel grows
It withers quicker than the rose.
—“To An Athlete Dying Young” (A.E. Housman)

Robert Downey Junior’s character Derek Lutz (in Rodney Dangerfield’s Back to School (1986)) may well have been poaching, with tongue-in-cheek, from Don DeLillo’s End Zone when he quipped that “violent ground acquisition games such as football are in fact a crypto-fascist metaphor for nuclear war,” but TC Boyle takes Lutz’s (or Delillo’s) conceit up a notch or two in “56-0”, which I jealously think is one of the most perfectly crafted stories that I have ever read. “56-0” can be found in Boyle’s  Stories, but it was previously published in his 1992 collection Without a Hero, whose title is a perfectly apt controlling metaphor for the story as a whole, since, with seemingly effortless grace, Boyle has somehow managed not only to revivify one of American culture’s most clichéd of plotlines (an underdog team’s attempted, “against all odds” heroic “comeback”), but also to bring the ossified Aristotelian unities magically back to life, such that his story gains a remarkable, athletic equipoise,  in which  humour is locked into a dialectical deathgrip with existential gravitas. And—somehow—Boyle  manages to make writing like this appear to be the most natural thing in the world.

1. Life is Football (and Football is Life)

The main character of the story is Ray Arthur Larry-Pete Fontinot, who was named by his father “after the three greatest offensive line-men in college-football history”(163), and who was thereby burdened with an ineluctable, but equally impossible destiny: to live an outsized, classically heroic life. The story opens, however, with a symbolic death, with a

[. . .] humiliation. Fifty-six to nothing. That was no mere defeat; it was a drubbing, an ass-kicking, a rape, the kind of thing the statisticians and sports nerds would snigger over as long as there were records to keep. He’d always felt bigger than life in his pads and his helmet, a hero, a titan, but you couldn’t muster much heroism lying face down in the mud at fifty-six to nothing and the other team’s third string in there.(156)

And, if he feels like he is at the end of his life and not at its beginning (at 22, he has “his whole life ahead of him, and he [feels] ready for the nursing home” after the pummelling that—quite literally—he has just endured),  something in us identifies immediately with Ray Arthur Larry-Pete’s (let’s just call him R.A.L.P. from here on) predicament: if to be a hero means to be “bigger than life”, what we all feel that we are really in for is a bit of, well, life-–which amounts, more often than not, to getting our asses kicked, and more. Thus, from the outset, Boyle has signaled that this story will explore the tension between what we can imagine (and thus what stories can offer us) and what we can or must live with (Beethoven’s famous Es Muss Sein, orIt Must Be”). Our imaginations structure the stories of our lives aesthetically: meaning is a form of compensatory artifice, as Milan Kundera has suggested in The Unbearable Lightness of Being:

Early in the novel that Tereza [MK’s main character] clutched under her arm when she went to visit Tomas, Anna meets Vronsky in curious circumstances: they are at the railway station when someone is run over by a train. At the end of the novel, Anna throws herself under a train. This symmetrical composition—the same motif appears at the beginning and at the end—may seem quite novelistic to you, and I am willing to agree, but only on condition that you refrain from reading such notions as fictive, fabricated, and untrue to life into the word novelistic. Because human lives are composed in precisely such a fashion. They are composed like music. Guided by his sense of beauty, an individual transforms a fortuitous occurrence (Beethoven’s music, death under a train) into a motif, which then assumes a permanent place in the composition of the individual’s life. Anna could have chosen another way to take her life. But the motif of death and the railway station, unforgettably bound to the birth of love, enticed her in her hour of despair with its dark beauty. Without realizing it, the individual composes his life according to the laws of beauty even in times of greatest distress. (54)

R.A.L.P. has certainly gone through a lot of distress over the past four years—his team, the Caledonia College Shuckers, have an 0-43 record, with this most recent loss clearly the worst in his career. In fact, pain, loss and humiliation have provided the only discernible pattern in this young man’s four year apprenticeship on this existential playing field, and after this most recent loss he finds himself “depressed” and “brooding about his college career, his job prospects, life after football”(160). [Wait a minute: life after football? Isn’t that an oxymoron—equivalent to life after life?] Well, if he is to be the hero of his own life, then he can only hope that his plot-line has reached its nadir, and that if his life is to be viewed “symmetrically”, if only by him,  he has to get out of the basement and make something of himself—redemption, that’s what heroes seek after reaching the basement, right?

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Note, if you liked this, you might want to check out  one of my own stories — thanks for reading.