Twenty years ago, H.G. Bissinger moved to Odessa, Texas to write a book about high school football. The result was "Friday Night Lights," a book that showed the dark side of high school athletics and eventually led to a movie and a television show.
Now, Joe Drape of The New York Times has written a book that in some ways is a rebuttal to the caricature of "Friday Night Lights." In "Our Boys: A Perfect Season on the Plains with the Smith Center Redmen," Drape tells the story of how Smith Center, Kansas (population 1931) produced a record-setting high school football team:
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5go3vONit5Wj-Nn8_zIRtlrsgHGDwD9A2A2VO1
According to Drape, the book is very different than "Friday Night Lights":
"It was less about football and more about how hard work, patience and love can lift a community. ... It's in a quote I started one of the chapters with, about how people around Kansas can always recognize a Smith Center kid — because he's polite, confident and tough. It's about the way people in a small town in the middle of America want the world outside to view them."
Revealingly, the book's title comes from Drape's own affection for the small city:
"I said to myself, 'This is my team. These are my guys. They're 'Our Boys.'"
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