Remember Why You Play

I’m not a football player – weighed 115 pounds on high school graduation night.  But I love a good game, especially when I know something about the team.  And I’m a sucker for feel-good-in-the-end sports stories.  Remember Why You Play (Tyndale, 2010) by David Thomas delivers on all that – except to turn me into a football player.

The story that brought the Faith Christian Lions to national fame isn’t told until the final chapter and by then, most of the main student characters have moved on.  But by then, you’ve fallen in love with this team and understand why the game with the Gainesville State Tornadoes was not just a fluke, a blip on the perennial Friday night Texas football scene.

Disclosure here.  I’ve known Thomas since he was a cub reporter in high school.  And he comes by his writing skills, love of sport, and feel-good endings rightly by his own dad, who died just as the book was coming out.  Which makes sense why son/author affirms the concept of fatherhood so strongly in the book.

Thomas has honed those cub skills into some fine nationally-recognized credentials as a senior writer and sports humor columnist for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.  Remember Why You Play reads like the reporter-embedded-in-team that he was for a season.  There’s enough emotion already in the do-or-die world of high school football without a reporter’s own lather.  Thomas provides the setting, the real-life characters and their own actions and words, then lets the inevitable feelings build of their own accord.  

While Coach Hogan sometimes comes off as too good to be true, cynical me, Thomas shares enough to remind us that even the best coaches don’t start off that way, that skills on and off the field are honed through time, grit and focus – and remembering that Friday night is only once a week, even in Texas.  

Whether or not David intended the book in this way, it is a fitting tribute to his father and friend of mine, Larry, who himself was almost too good to be true.