Robbie Wright

Mrs. Fung

ENG4U

Wednesday October 29th, 2014

The Spartan’s Story In Messina, football is not just a sport. Football is the town’s mayor, the town’s mascot, football is Messina. “On Friday nights, the entire town of Messina waited for the gate to open, then rushed to the bleachers where seats were claimed and nervous pre-game rituals were followed.” (2) Messina brought ginormous pressure down on the football program, and a diamond was formed. John Grisham weaves together a set of embedded stories to construct a beautiful tapestry of not only the town, not only the glorified coach, but of the legend shared by the Messina Spartans.

In the novel Bleachers, John Grisham effectively employs internal conflict to reveal how easy it is to be fooled by fake happiness. Neely Crenshaw’s life has gone anywhere but where he originally dreamed. “I don’t want to talk about football okay? I don’t want to hear about how great I was.” (71) Crenshaw has gone through tremendous suffering, and it is visible here that he has spent much of his life milling over his high-school self, yearning for the years where he was a God in Messina, the years where he was truly happy with himself. Through these years Neely had nothing to be conflicted by; he was winning all of his football games, the hottest girl in school was on his arm, and every D1 school in the state wanted him. Neely left Messina with a vow to never come back, on his way to Tech University, drawn by the “fifty thousand bucks in cash,” (28) and not by the true love for the game. After Crenshaw is injured, his life quickly turns bitter. Grisham uses this scenario to convey to us that material items, the fifty thousand Tech paid him, the five grand every week, the new car, are not going to bring us internal happiness, but instead they will only bring you temporary joy. The happiness will fade as the money does. The girl leaves when you stop winning. When Neely was injured and taken off the payroll, when his brand new car got surpassed by newer and better cars, when his model girlfriend dumped him, and he realized his only love was the one he left in Messina, Neely was left with nothing. Nothing but his Spartans.

Grisham effectively uses round characters to prove to us that a football team is so much more than a ‘team’, but a brotherhood. Eddie Rake drilled the Spartans day in and day out. He worked them like dogs, expecting nothing less than perfection, nothing less than victory. Nat Stewardson was called the Spartan’s worst punter, being compared to an “ungainly gazelle.” (89) Rake cussed Nat out every game for his errors, game-costing mistakes. We originally see Rake as cold, a coach focused strictly on victory with no care for his players at all. Nonetheless, when Nat becomes the first openly-gay coffee/book shop owner in Messina, the bond of the football team brings them together. We see a different side of Eddie Rake, as he rounds out to be empathetic and friendly, as he strives to open up to Nat. Rake begins to visit Nat every morning, and in exchange for Rake’s company Nat influences him to read detective fiction, a hit with Rake. The past Rake and Nat shared allowed them to come together and bond so easily, ignorant to the fact that they were both outcasts in their own way. Rake’s snub-nosed, hold nothing back personality didn’t hold Nat back from befriending Rake, like it had for the rest of Messina. Rake knew Nat very well before he opened up, Rake had not been afraid to tear a strip out of Stewardson before on the football field, so Rake had no fear of offending Nat and his sexuality, even though any Messinite had been immobilized by the thought of saying something they should not.

The brotherhood of the Spartans reached far beyond the sidelines of the football field, and even further past the open doors of Nat’s coffee/bookshop, the love Spartans shared for each other reached as far as Mal Brown’s police cruiser could go. When Mal would lock up anyone who played for Eddie Rake, they got a special treatment; old Spartans would play a card game with the Sherriff, where Mal would reminisce, showing that a football team is a memory that sticks with you forever, the joy of playing with your brothers and then being able to share it years later. The prisoner would receive weekend passes, a better cell, showing that for this brotherhood, becoming a Spartan gave you near immunity.

Grisham does a great job of using embedded stories and the passage of time to show that in order to enjoy the future, closure is a necessity. Throughout Bleachers, many stories of the past, most involving conflict, are told by the characters. Neely is at the heart of many of these conflicts, but the main conflict in focus is the one between him and Eddie Rake, the conflict that made him go against the amount of times he’d “sworn to never come back” (6) After Neely was assaulted by Rake, he felt nothing but hatred for Eddie. Ultimately though, it is shown that unsolved conflicts came back to haunt Neely. He came back to Messina against all odds, he went to the one place he swore to steer away from for the rest of his life, because he subconsciously needed closure with Rake. These feelings were obviously subconscious, as Neely had plenty of time to physically go and talk it out. But the closure came when Neely gave his eulogy at Rakes funeral; it came through the final goodbye. When Neely had no option but to speak positively towards Rake, he realized that he forgave his coach. That he sympathized with his coach in the way that after Neely had time to mill over his mistakes, he could accept that Rake was only human, and he too made mistakes. On the other hand, Neely had yet another conflict he could not run away from. Cameron. The girl Neely dumped to make room for his new cheerleader girlfriend. When Crenshaw lost his chance of a football career, he lost his girlfriend. Now that he is back in town, and he sees that Cameron is too; there is no way Neely can live the rest of his life without at least talking to her. Neely makes a very weak attempt at conversation, doing nothing but prodding Cameron on to go up one side of him and down the other. Neely let’s her leave after the onslaught is finished, and he is content with how the conversation went. This proves that Neely needed nothing but to have one more conversation, to get one more chance to let Cameron know he is sorry deep down, and to reach closure.

Especially in a town like Messina, where in the town’s finest diner “the walls were covered with old football schedules, framed newspaper stories, pennants and autographed jerseys,” (63) the Spartans formed a family. Through the elements of fiction, Grisham walks us through the victories and failures of the Messina Spartans, a program praised by its fans, and through this we are shown that there are much more meaningful victories in life than the ones you win on a football field.