A City in Thrall to Its Football Team

Facing an SRO crowd of screaming, frenzied, near-hysterical pro football fans in Washington, D.C., three decades ago, the gifted late sports commentator Heywood Hale Broun turned in the press box and looked around. “To the eternal question, ‘Who am I?”’ he said simply, as the crowd roared and roared again, “‘I am a Redskins fan’ provides a convenient answer.”

Kenneth Carlson’s energetic and absorbing documentary “Go Tigers!” demonstrates that as it was (and still is) for Washington and its Redskins, so it is, with even more intensity and fervor, with Massillon, Ohio, and its legendary high school football team, the Washington High Tigers.

Massillon is a blue-collar steel town where the high school game has been played for more than 100 years and Tiger football is literally a cradle-to-grave experience. Booster club members visit maternity wards to dispense tiny footballs to newborns, and customized Tiger caskets are available for those who want to take their allegiance with them to the next world.

In Massillon, a 1951 newsreel called “Touchdown Town” explains, football is more than a sport, it’s “a cult, a religion, a civic enterprise that knows no season.” One of the stresses today’s community faces, it turns out, is attempting to live by Eisenhower-era traditional values in increasingly complex and rancorous modern times.

Director Carlson, a veteran documentarian whose previous work includes the excellent William Wellman biography “Wild Bill” and the Academy Award finalist “Amargosa,” grew up and played football in Massillon (though for another high school) and has been thinking about making this film for years.

Carlson’s familiarity with the Massillon experience helped him gain entree to the community and also kept his look at a season of Tiger football balanced, neither as gee-whiz as that old newsreel (the sport’s detractors get a bit of screen time) nor as cynical and dismissive as an outsider might have been.

Carlson also knew enough to pick a pivotal time span to focus on. Not only did the 1999 season follow a rare losing year for the Tigers, it also coincided with a key tax levy going on the ballot for one final time, a referendum on whether the residents of Massillon would be willing to pay more to prevent massive financial cuts in the school budget.

The levy had been voted down on three previous tries, all in years when the Tigers were doing poorly. One of the strengths of “Go Tigers!” is its examination of how sports intersects with the real world, how something as specific as high school football can provide insight into what our sports-crazed society considers important and what it does not.

Key to the kind of season the Tigers would have was head coach and athletic director Rick Shepis, a forceful man we get to see mainly through his masterful halftime locker room exhortations, each a small model of skillful team manipulation. The film largely focuses on the team’s three co-captains: Dave Irwin, the confident, laconic quarterback; Danny Studer, a pumped-up linebacker and third-generation Tiger; and the charismatic defensive end Ellery Moore, who had brushes with the law when he was younger and says “it’s safe to say football saved my life.”

“Go Tigers!” follows these players through what turned out to be a very eventful season, capped by the 106th game against archrival (if that’s not too mild a word) Canton McKinley, which, in a coincidence stronger than fiction would dare, took place three days before that crucial tax levy election. Though it’s not the film’s main objective, “Go Tigers!” inevitably asks the question whether the importance sports has in our culture is a good thing--not that we have any choice about it.

Yes, success does bring a community together, but on the scholastic level it can make education seem unimportant. Should a high school player’s choice of school be the subject of lawsuits? Should the future of a school system depend on how well a football team does? “Go Tigers!” doesn’t pretend to have the answers, but it frames the questions in an engrossing way.

*

MPAA rating: R for language and a scene of team drinking. Times guidelines: considerable profanity and vomiting during a beer-sodden victory party.

‘Go Tigers!’

A Triple Play Pictures production, released by IFC Films. Director Kenneth A. Carlson. Producers Sidney Sherman, Kenneth A. Carlson. Executive producer Todd Robinson. Screenplay Kenneth A. Carlson. Cinematographer Curt Apduhan. Editor Jeff Werner. Music Randy Miller. Running time: 1 hour, 52 minutes.

In limited release.