Go Tigers! Reviews

A fascinating, if slightly overlong look at a uniquely American obsession: high-school athletics. The subject is Massillon, Ohio, an otherwise unremarkable suburb whose civic pride, for over a hundred years, has been inexorably entwined with the fortunes of its celebrated high-school football team, the Massillon Tigers. It helps, of course, that the team has been extremely successful for most of those years; we're told in an aside that the Tigers are the only high-school athletes on whom Vegas gamblers have ever given odds. Director and Massillon native Ken Carlson chose to focus on a particularly interesting year in the team's history: As the players rebound after a rare disastrous season, the town is facing a budget crunch that threatens the Tigers' survival and, with them, Massillon's self-image. Carlson's direction alternates between slick multi-camera coverage of the team's games and practice sessions, and more conventional talking-head interviews with members of the team and various Massillon natives. To his credit, Carlson doesn't stint on certain darker aspects of the story: There's a hilarious (if appalling) scene of kids puking after a post-game beer binge, and we learn that it's common practice at Massillon High to hold back team members academically so they'll be stronger and faster in their senior years, a practice which may not be as dangerous as giving the kids steroids, but at the very least seems unsporting. And we also learn, fairly late in the film, that likeable team captain Ellery Moore spent a year in prison on what he calls (without real explanation) a trumped-up rape charge. Those moments aside, the film is at heart a look at a unique slice of Americana, particularly an opening montage in which we realize that football here is a cradle-to-the-grave proposition — literally. Within the first five minutes, we see both a group of team boosters bringing Tigers paraphernalia to a mom and her newborn baby boy, and the local undertaker showing off a coffin customized with the Tigers logo. What a way to go.