Rick Bass is the author of the new book Wrecking Ball: Race, Friendship, God, and Football. His other books include With Every Great Breath. He lives in Montana.
Q: What inspired you to write Wrecking Ball, and how did you end up focusing on the Texas Express football team?
A: I was inspired by the saga, the charisma and paradox, of Coach Barnes, and by the passion of the players who chose to continue to keep alive their dreams of youth and power and strength, marginalized though their circumstances might have been otherwise. I focused on the Texas Express because my best friend of more than 50 years, Kirby Simmons, was their trainer.
Q: How was the book’s title chosen, and what does it signify for you?
A: I love the Bruce Springsteen song by the same title, which is about passion outlasting physical diminishment, and “taking pride in the struggle when the cause is just,” to borrow a phrase from Montana Congressman Pat Williams.
Q: In the book’s introduction, you describe football as “a living system.” Can you say more about that?
A: Other than the fact that it breaks bodies and cripples all who play it, the rules of football and the game itself is a fantastic concept. Watching it—much less playing it—requires a tremendous amount of denial. But so too does a navigation of life itself in which one thinks wounds can be avoided.
Everything is connected, there is exquisite cause-and-effect, split-second adjustments and compensations, camouflage, misdirection, desire, creativity—football throbs with a creative vitality; no two games are ever quite the same.
The story lines change week by week—which ex-coach goes up against his old team, which mentor faces which mentee… In this way it is the antithesis of artificial intelligence; it is one of the most organic processes we participate in, these days.
Q: What impact did it have on you to write this book, and what do you hope readers take away from it?
A: I was impacted by the trust and friendship the young men gifted me with the minute I went out on the field with them. The game, the system, forces trust; it is an instant proving ground, composed of actions, not mere words or platitudes. It was an incredibly humbling and joyful experience.
My hope is to provide readers an accurate portrayal of the extraordinary gifts of the game, and the staggering costs. The way the players—in their breaking—are incandescent with life in a way not many people get to experience. But always, at cost. My hope is that readers experience deeply both sides.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: I’m writing a short novel, Whitebark, about the endangered whitebark pine. I hope to convert the novel to a musical. I’m working with a young musician at NYU’s Clive Davis School of Music, Siri Saeteren, who’s composing an alum for it.
In the novel, a young girl eaves her home in Bozeman, Montana, appalled by the gentrification/Yellowstonization of her hometown. She meets a young grizzly bear who is being forced to leave the Yellowstone ecosystem due to the collapse of whitebark pine, his species most critical food source.
Together they travel north and west—the girl (and only the girl) can hear the songs of a magical guitar made from a piece of wood in the oldest forest in Montana, in the Black Ram region of Montana’s Yaak Valley: a cool refuge in a burning world.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: I am working hard to protect the ancient forest at Black Ram in the Yaak, with two groups, the Yaak Valley Forest Council and The Montana Project.
Jeff Bridges and Breedlove Guitars have commissioned six craft guitars to be made from a piece of ancient spruce from the Yaak and are sharing the guitars with musicians around the country, who play in support of designating the world’s first Climate Refuge in the Black Ram region.
Old-growth forests can absorb up to 12 percent of the globe’s carbon emissions each year.
Pearl Jam’s Jeff Ament, Texas folk rocker James McMurtry, singer-songwriter Maggie Rogers, and others have played the guitar. U. S. poet laureate Ada Limón and Mississippi poet laureate Beth Ann Fennelly and others have visited and written poems; Wendell Berry and other writers are offering their support; and painters Monte Dolack and Clyde Aspevig have made paintings of the forest.
Independent scientists are studying the mysteries of this unique forest as well, but in a time of paralysis and no leadership, artists are stepping forward to celebrate and lead.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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