End Zone. Don DeLillo.

End Zone
Don DeLillo
New York: Pocket Books. 1973.

Gary comes to a small Texas (football ambitious) college along with a number of other recruited young men, all of whom have weird obsessions. The pain of playing football--especially the pain of losing after doing all you could, all that the coaches had told you to do, your best effort--the Centrex game, when "they just kept coming," is vivid.

All the characters are weirdos. None of them is a living individual. They are just mouthpieces for words, many of which make no sense. When the characters are not intellectuals, philosophizing about life and the meaning of existence, they are presented as people whose lives are defined by football. When there is no game to prepare for, life is a series of rumors, discussed and embellished, relating to the team.

An interesting sequence is the pick-up football game in the snow. Gradually, the mime-like players reduce the complications of modern football to the straight run and hit--no deception, no passing. The players need the activity and rhythm of football to give their lives meaning. It is only when engaged in this rhythmic activity that they give evidence of being alive--in motion, but they go through the motions like robots.

Philadelphia Inquirer: "End Zone is no mere football novel any more than Catch-22 was a book about airplanes. Through it runs the same strains of madness, the same wit and wonder."

DeLillo's End Zone is a fictionalized view of a college football program. Ken Denlinger's For the Glory is a realistic account of the Penn State football program. As I read Ken's book, nonfiction, I realized how vividly DeLillo had captured in fiction the spirit of college football: robots, orchestrated by coaches, to go through the motions. However, Ken was able to give greater dimension to the individual players, able to help the reader see them as human beings, with lives outside of football.