Friday Night Lights TV series proved Canton McKinley’s discipline problem is a shared one
When Canton McKinley football coach Marcus Wattley and some of his assistants disciplined a promising player inappropriately and subsequently suffered harsh disciplinary consequences, it felt as if this were an episode ripped from the former television series Friday Night Lights. There were, however, important differences.
Friday Night Lights was fictional, despite its realism and the fact the series and its movie antecedent were drawn from H.G. “Buzz” Bissinger’s 1990 nonfiction book about a Permian High School season in Odessa, Texas. What happen in Canton, where football can be taken as seriously as it is in Odessa, was all too real: For the player. For Wattley and assistants. For Canton City Schools. For the larger community.
A second important difference between the McKinley incident is that a person could follow what happened on Friday Night Lights with their own eyes and judge the events that the camera captured. Such understanding is elusive when privacy laws in the name of student protection cloak the event and circumstances from prying eyes, a shield the schools seem only too happy to embrace and hide behind. Wattley and several of his assistants were fired or their contracts not renewed for what Superintendent Jeff Talbert deemed “demeaning” behavior during a “misguided attempt to instill discipline.” The decision and its justification, Talbert said, was based not only on a weeklong investigation but also on a revealing surveillance video. (Someone is watching.)
In other words, the firings are based on visual evidence that, of course, the public cannot see. Talbert said federal privacy regulations prevented release of the video and he refused to provide details of what influenced the decision. Not exactly Friday Night Lights and its klieg-light bright exposure of the discipline exercised by coach Eric Taylor (played by Kyle Chandler) at fictitious Dillion High School (Permian’s stand-in). Dillon discipline is shared in bright, living, breathing color.
During an episode titled “Wind Sprints,” the third of Season One, Coach Taylor puts his players on buses and heads for the hills, literally. There he addresses not so subtly the behavior of two of his star players—fullback Tim Riggins (Taylor Kitsch) and tailback Brian “Smash” Williams (Gaius Charles). Riggins walked out on his coaches and team during practice, and Smash all but accused Taylor of incompetence.
Since things are going so swimmingly, Coach Taylor comes up with a way to punish such behavior, demand self-discipline, and bring together his struggling team. In the middle of the night, he hauls everyone out to a hill behind a muddy creek in the midst of a rain storm and sets the team to running wind sprints through the creek, up the hill, and back. Over and over and over. A reviewer, Mark Oshiro, called it “perhaps the most ridiculous display of an overreaction.” Of course, this was in 2013 and Oshiro couldn’t know how things would transpire at 2021 Canton McKinley.
There are multiple versions of what happened at McKinley—from the school, the attorney for Wattley, the player’s father who has threatened to file a lawsuit—but if Wattley attorney Peter Pattakos is accurate, Friday Night Lights’ Coach Taylor could be viewed as more of an ogre than Wattley or assistants and teammates who aggravated the situation by yelling at the player during his punishment, which was described as sitting in the middle of the gym and eating an entire pepperoni pizza. After Coach Taylor had his players’ tongues hanging down to their ankles, he ordered Riggins, as further penance for walking off the job, to walk home. He had miles back to town to think.
The McKinley pizza incident may sound tasty, if greasy, punishment for missing a voluntary strengthening and conditioning session compared with what Tim Riggins endured. But a person must consider that the player said he told Wattley as many as 10 times that his family does not eat pork—pepperoni is usually a mix of pork and beef but can be all pork—because their Hebrew Israelite religious beliefs prohibit it, as well as consumption of pork residue. Though Wattley’s attorney said the player was allowed to pick the pepperoni off the pizza, the player’s attorney Ed Gilbert, from Akron, countered that a pork residue remained. Such arguments, of course, miss the point: the punishment violated the player’s religious rights—not to mention he “missed” a session that was voluntary because he was injured. Please explain what voluntary means? If unable to do so, consult the National Football League Players Association. Any number of professional players have decided to forgo voluntary Offseason Training Activities.
Pattakos said the player could have left—that’s what got Tim Riggins into trouble, among other things—and that Wattley had offered chicken nuggets instead of pizza. Food choice based on religion may be Issue One but being verbally harangued by teammates and coaches can leave emotional scars. Teenagers—the player is 17—want to fit in, to be accepted, supported. Some players have shown up to back their teammate’s version of what happened. But the player’s father, Kenny Walker, according to Kelli Weir of the Canton Repository, has said his son, who is receiving psychological counseling, has expressed anger, frustration, hurt, and a feeling of being ostracized as a result of the incident. Is this how coaches discipline their players?
Eric Taylor’s unorthodox discipline seemed to bring his Dillion team together. Players come together because they want to win and the benefits that brings personally and to their team. The teams I played on did it for one another—at least that’s what we thought in the old days—and sometimes because they had strong feelings for and about their coaches. The feeling could be love. Or, just as easily, it could be hatred.
One of the things that made Friday Night Lights special and great is that it showed us both. We could see ourselves in the characters. Their failures. Their successes. And these were not limited to the football field. Though imperfect as marriages can be, Eric and Tami Taylor (Connie Britton) showed us how marriage is supposed to work. How to keep going through tough times, how to sand off the rough edges, how to take another person’s rights, even preferences, into consideration. They took responsibility for their actions, their mistakes, and they worked together to help students they coached and counseled. They proved discipline goes better for all concerned with a dollop of love, not trying to cram it down unreceptive throats. When Wattley spoke out for the first time, he claimed that his intention was to offer redemptive love that he hoped would help. He and his attorney told what attorney Gilbert labeled a “bizarre” story. What is, in fact, bizarre is that valid evidence might be found on the surveillance video, but it isn’t public.
Maybe Canton should hire Eric and Tami . . . if only they were real.
