Nick Ripatrazone: End Zones

"Hit somebody."

*

DeLillo's End Zone--spare, smart, and authentic--is the best novel about football.

*

"Each play must have a name. The naming of plays is important. All teams run the same plays. But each team uses an entirely different system of naming. Coaches stay up well into the night in order to name plays. They heat and reheat coffee on an old burner. No play begins until its name is called."

*

I have read the above paragraph so many times. Page 118. It's nestled in the midst of a 30 or so page linguistic explosion, the big game against Centrex. It is easily strode over. But it's the most perfect paragraph I've ever read. For all DeLillo's metafictional, postmodern flair, he's absolutely refined at the level of the sentence, and End Zone allowed him to be absolutely athletic at every pivot of letter.

*

Supposedly they were going to make a film version of End Zone. Never happened. It would have starred Sam Rockwell.

*

And so it disappears from that possibility, and remains a book, and in that way, its meaning(s) is even further refracted. And it remains, for me, as much a work of horror as a work of sport literature.

*

End Zone has much in common with The Exorcist, but here's the glue for me. Father Karras, ever skeptical, begins to turn when he listens to the tapes of Regan's possession. The scene was filmed in Fordham University's language lab.

*

*

The scene is an example of a "breather" in a horror film. A few minutes outside of the setting proper of the horror, a necessary diversion. Those were the types of scenes I would hope for, reminding me that art is artifice, that maybe The Exorcist was not real, that Jason Miller was a nice guy in real life.

*

Of course Regan's voice shocks us back into the horror, but it's the location of the college campus that does it, that lets me think, OK, maybe this isn't so bad. The same feeling that makes me think of this paragraph in End Zone, that breather of the coffee, those slightly obsessed, slightly overweight coaches in a cramped room in an old athletic center at a desolate Texas campus, sipping the mundane until they reach the end zones of football.

Source: http://nicholasripatrazone.blogspot.com/2011/07/end-zones.html

cisco cisco nelson mandela jason momoa asia asia dark knight rises