Saving Graces - Elizabeth Edwards [137]
After an afternoon at the fair we went to Iron Mountain High School. It was Friday night, and on Friday nights on the Upper Peninsula, just like on Friday nights in Raleigh, North Carolina, your whole world is playing, or watching, high school football. The Mountaineers were playing Gwinn High School, also from the U.P. Gwinn was built as a model city for returning World War II veterans, and the team is burdened, or blessed, depending on your point of view, with the team name The Modeltowners. Fewer than five hundred students attended each school, and yet in the stands and rimming the field there were two thousand people, in black and gold for Gwinn or, confusingly, yellow and black for Iron Mountain. And there must have been more at home or at work listening to the game on the radio, because both teams broadcast the game on different radio stations.
After I posed with a group of four-year-old cheerleaders, dressed in perfect miniature replicas of the Mountaineer cheerleading uniforms, I sat down to watch some football. It wasn’t pretty. As the first half neared the end, the Mountaineers had scored at least three times, and I don’t recall a single Modeltowner first down. My press secretary Karen came down to get me out of the stands. “They’ll let you join them on the radio,” she said. As we climbed to the press booths high above the field I said, “That’s great.” And I thought, And what do you want me to talk about? I talked football—John playing high school and a little college ball, my Dad being a stand-out college player. The two Mountaineer announcers, who did terrific fast-paced color and play-by-play, asked a mild political question or two, and I gave a mild answer. I knew the people who were listening to this, and even if they liked politics, they were listening to hear football. So all I was really saying was who we were—Friday-night-football kind of people. And then I moved to the Gwinn booth. There was only one announcer, one exhausted fellow trying to find ways to convey any excitement over the airwaves when his team was getting so badly beaten. I sat through a play or two, as Gwinn failed to get a first down, listening to this overwhelmed but still game fellow try to do the play-by-play. It was painful. Had the regular play-by-play announcer abandoned him, gotten up in disgust at some point in this game and left him to carry the whole load? Whatever the problem, it was highlighted when Gwinn punted. “All right, there goes the punt,” he said. “It’s a high one. Number twenty-eight for the Mountaineers has picked it up in the end zone. He’s running it out. Now he’s down, and—oh, there’s a flag.” And then he stopped talking. The referees were conversing, but there was no sound going out over Gwinn radio. Nothing. It’s radio. Finally, I couldn’t stand it and I said, “Pretty much has to be a clip.” Karen was standing behind me, her lovely brown skin turning white, thinking, What is she saying? Does she know what she’s talking about? It was a tremendous relief to her when the voice came over the stadium loudspeaker. “Penalty on the Modeltowners. Clip.”
For me, it was a perfect night. Not for the Modeltowners, obviously, but it was crisp and clear, the setting was verdant and alive and, well, American. I used to sit in the YMCA in Raleigh and watch Wade, and then Cate, play basketball on Saturday mornings. Parents in sweatpants and glasses—no one having put in their contact