In His Ohio, Tigers Rule the Earth

Had he not moved away from Massillon, Ohio, almost two decades ago, Kenneth A. Carlson easily could have been a character in his new documentary, “Go Tigers!,” which traces the 1999 winning season of the town’s revered high school football team. He grew up there. He played football there, though for another local high school. And, despite the changes in his life over the intervening years, Carlson admits that he is and always will be an Ohioan.

“I’m hard-wired to Massillon,” he says.

Forget Thomas Wolfe for a minute. Carlson can and did go home again, arriving as a slick Hollywood producer, and returning to Los Angeles “humbled” and reconnected to his past. Sitting in the Polo Lounge at the Beverly Hills Hotel, he points across the room. “I could sit here all day and not run into anyone I know,” says the 37-year-old filmmaker. “But in Massillon, 50% of the people know you by name. The care and love is great, if a bit obsessive.”

The obsession is the Tigers football team, the lifeblood of what Carlson describes as “a crumbling Norman Rockwell landscape.” Like many areas of the Rust Belt, Massillon lives in the past when Ohio was vital with industry.

Football is the remaining vestige of those glory days. Carlson had been thinking about telling the tale of the Tigers team for the past eight to 10 years--how for 10 weeks every fall in Massillon, “all that matters is Friday night.” Then, throughout the long, harsh Ohio winter, “that’s all they talk about, last season and next season.” Football is literally a cradle to death experience in Massillon, population 33,000. All male babies receive footballs in their cribs from the local booster club. The local funeral home offers a casket emblazoned with the image of Obie, the team’s tiger mascot.

In 1999, Carlson found his entree. A proposed levy to support Massillon High was on the November ballot for the third time, having twice failed. The team was coming off a disastrous 4-6 season. This was not just another season. Its outcome would determine the Tigers’ fate. If the levy failed yet again, Massillon High would face serious cutbacks: not only teachers, but coaches and other athletic support.

Carlson spent 70 days “living and breathing Massillon,” from summer practice through to the last game of the season against archrival McKinley High from Canton, a game that attracted more fans (about 24,000) than most college games and is offered for online betting in Las Vegas.

He ate breakfast at the local Bob Evans restaurant every morning and slept at the Super 8 motel every night. “Going back to Ohio was a humbling experience,” he says. “I’m used to a faster pace. I have five cell phones and six lines at home. But there everything happens in slo-mo. It’s frustrating but, in a way, very comforting.”

Using skills he honed for several years on Fox’s “America’s Most Wanted” (“my film school,” he calls it) and previous documentaries such as “Wild Bill,” a biography of director William Wellman, Carlson recorded his story in various formats. At the start, he introduces the rest of the world to the heart and soul of Massillon in cinema verite style, using a hand-held video camera to weave through the pep rally (5,000 residents strong) that kicks off every season.

“I wanted the audience to stumble into it [the rally],” he says, “to discover the story as it was happening.”

He also gave digital cameras to the three team members on whom the story focuses--quarterback Dave Irwin, linebacker Danny Studer and defensive end Ellery Moore--encouraging them to keep diaries of the season. For the football games, particularly the McKinley match, Carlson switched to multiple Super 16 cameras to get that slick NFL football telecast look.

After returning to Los Angeles, Carlson began shaping the 300 hours he had accumulated into a feature-length film, which will be released Sept. 28. Decisions about what to keep and what to excise were influenced by the time he spent in Massillon as well as by his own sense of responsibility to refrain from editorializing.

The experience of playing football during his own teen years came back to Carlson in a rush. “In the film, Studer talks about his first hit and how happy he was to dominate somebody, to make them weep--a visceral sense of accomplishment,” Carlson recalls.

Studer’s attitude recalled his own years of training, when the edge of Carlson’s horizon was the fourth quarter of every game. “Win, win, win and inflict personal pain at all costs” was his mantra, he says.

“My mentality was to get bigger and stronger. I remember practice days when the heat index reached 110 degrees. It was like boot camp. I can’t tell you how many salt tablets I took,” he adds, in reference to the recent player deaths during summer training.

His years at Brown University (on an athletic scholarship) broadened those horizons, but for the residents of Massillon, playing for the Tigers remains a life-shaping event. The friendship he developed with Moore also shaded his approach. Moore, the charismatic team captain, had a troubled past, having spent 15 months in jail. “He told me that football saved his life,” says Carlson. Moore casts a long shadow in “Go Tigers!,” verbally and physically dominating his teammates, a true leader.

And somewhere in between is Irwin, who like Moore and Studer went on to play college ball. Irwin, though, dropped out and returned to Massillon, where he works in a local mill. The star quarterback brought some real drama to the film, ripping open his finger the week before the McKinley match and suffering a mild concussion during the first half of the all-important game.

The film is steeped in genuine affection for Massillon, its traditions, its way of life, which to some might even be interpreted as an endorsement.

“I was careful not to come in with a sarcastic attitude because I had been away from that ‘rah-rah’ mentality for so long,” Carlson explains.

But throughout, he peppers the story with troubling details. For example, parents of many promising players interfere with their sons’ education, keeping them in eighth grade an extra year so that by the time they are high school seniors, they are bigger and more experienced on the playing field--and more likely to be scouted.

“One of the ironies is that these kids are not dumb,” Carlson observes. “Studer was a straight-A student and yet he was deliberately kept back. At Northern Michigan he’s been held back two times. He’ll be 32 by the time he graduates.”

A minister’s son, Carlson also shows several scenes in which the separation of church and football has been blurred to the point that the sport seems like a Christian ritual. If there are agnostics or members of any other religious group on the team, “they keep it to themselves,” he says.

A blowout party, in which the team members do some serious drinking--and vomiting--is also included, which didn’t go down well with some local politicos when “Go Tigers!” was first shown at Sundance this year.

The fact that the Tigers went 10-0 in 1999 also affected the tone of the film. For his own reasons, “I wanted them to lose at least one game, to show how they would pick themselves up by the bootstraps and go on. And even though I became friends with the team and wanted them to win against McKinley, I knew if they lost it would be good drama.” In fact, right after Carlson finished filming and left town, the Tigers were defeated in the first game of the state championship playoffs against Perry High, whom they had easily vanquished earlier in the season.

The otherwise perfect season was instrumental in the passing of the school levy, ensuring the uninterrupted continuation of the Tigers tradition. Again, Carlson lets the images do the talking for him, allowing the audience to make up its mind about the influence of sports on local politics.

There wasn’t room enough in the film to show the privileges of being a Tiger player, how some are rewarded with good jobs in town and other various perks (though Carlson includes a short segment in which boys who don’t play football comment on how ostracized they feel). Conversely, he didn’t include some footage he shot with “goats,” former Tigers who went down in disgrace. “If you’re a goat for a game, you’re a goat for life,” Carlson says. “If you’re an individual who drops a pass at a McKinley game, you’re no longer welcome in Massillon. You have to leave town.”

Carlson’s decisions on what to include were also guided by his sense of responsibility as a documentarian. He’s had to make several calls in his career, most recently when one of his subjects “fainted on me, started having dry heaves and convulsions. And there I was with a camera in my hand and what do I do?” He opted to put down the camera, he says, and help the distressed woman, knowing full well that if he’d kept rolling, “it would have made for great television.”

Having witnessed the progression of “reality” television shows--he recently participated in “Lost,” which is now on the air--he is uneasy about their popularity and what it says about voyeurism in society.

“It’s not reality, it’s staged. And one of these days someone’s going to die on one of those shows. The envelope is being pushed toward such a catastrophe. But until then, it will continue.”