(4.5 stars, if I had half-stars to give!)

Reading this from my personal standpoint (high school teacher with no children of my own) was, at times, heartbreaking, and also sadly unsurprising. High school football doesn't live on a pedestal in our region, but I drew a lot of parallels to what Bissinger shows us in this book. I see kids pushed so frequently to be good at a sport just to try to get a ticket to college. Academics get shoved to the wayside for the best athletes, grades fudged, etc. Funding for Athletics programs takes precedence over that of other programs in the school, like the arts-based programs.

Most poignant to me is seeing that the SAME EXACT disparities, inequities, racism, prejudices, poverty, and other issues still prevail today, just as they were when this book was written. And not just in Odessa, because Odessa could be small-town Anywhere, USA. The same mindset still exists in small, rural towns: political status quo, people voting against their best interests, instead errantly basing their politics on religious faith. I took so many notes on this book's middle chapters, where Bissinger details much of this content. It might have seemed boring or irrelevant to some readers; to me, it says everything about why things were they way they were, and are the way they are.

Seeing children -- actual children -- have that much pressure put on them, being expected to perform every week for everyone's entertainment, is too much. Bissinger does a good job of bringing in the details of the personal stories of these players and their families to show the reader just how acutely these pressures affected everyone involved.

Side note: The epilogue and prologue in this edition are well worth the read.