Go Tigers! (2001)
Review by Doc Ezra
Film:
DVD:

Written, produced and directed by Kenneth A. Carlson

Features:

• Deleted scenes
  
• Interview with Chris Spielman
  
• Complete 1951 “Touchdown Town” newsreel
  
• Player update with photos
  
• Massillon Hall of Champions gallery
  
• Trailers
  
• Original music by Katrina Carlson
  
• Filmmaker bio
  

Rating: R

Anamorphic: No

My advice: Rent it. Scholars of the game might want to keep it.

Massillon, Ohio, may well be the high school football capital of the world. Football aficionados often credit the deep South or Texas as the place where the game is a religion, but this little blue collar town in the Midwest takes the cake. With a population of 32,000, average attendance on Friday nights for the high school games is 20,000. The booster club patrols the maternity wards, handing out little tiny footballs to all the newborn male children. Parents hold their kids back a year in middle school to let them play an extra year before advancing to the high school game. And crosstown rivalries stretch back over a century.

Go Tigers! focuses on the three captains of the 1999 Massillon High School Tigers football team, tracing their progress through the season. While the central focus is on the experience and the evolving leadership of these three, the documentary takes a much broader look at the town’s love affair with their high school football team over its 106-year history. Minutes away from the professional football’s Hall of Fame in Canton, Massillon eats, sleeps, and breathes football every fall, though the obsession doesn’t stop in the off-season. The “Tiger Lady,” a volunteer usher at the stadium, hasn’t missed a game in 44 years, and has a house decorated exclusively in Tiger memorabilia.

Running as a subplot to the football season is the political climate of the town, where a tax levy resolution to enhance the school’s budget has divided the community in half. With teachers and coaches looking to the levy to save their jobs, the players look to themselves to bring the community together around the team after a disappointing previous season, hoping that their success will help the tax resolution get passed.

Kenneth Carlson’s documentary has received quite a bit of acclaim, being selected at the Sundance Film Festival, lauded by critics, and making a tidy bit of cash (a fortune by documentary standards) in its limited box office run. Part of Carlson’s success comes from his “soft touch.” Throughout the film, the presence of the documenters is difficult to detect, much less point to as interference. Carlson simply steps back and lets the town and its beloved team speak for themselves. If he’s guilty of any kind of bias, it’s in giving very little play to the voices of dissent (though to his credit, there really can’t be that many in town, given the attendance numbers on game night).

The three “stars” of the film are plenty charismatic enough to carry the picture, despite their youth. The standout of the trio is Ellery Moore, defensive end. His commitment to the team and the game of football is borne out of his conviction that it has “saved his life,” by giving him a surrogate family and an option to the mean streets where he spent his childhood. Having spent his freshman year behind bars, he’s convinced that coming to the team has given him a new lease on life. He’s the emotional leader of the team, and Carlson does a fine job of showing those moments where he must take up that role and inspire his teammates to greatness and victory.

It’s easy to see why this film garnered the attention that it did. The subject matter has a built-in audience, and for those that didn’t play the game in high school themselves (or at least attend a school with a similarly fervent fanbase), this is the best look one can get into the strange world of high school football. It doesn’t really idealize the subject, but neither does it treat these people as freaks or misfits for being so enthusiastic about their favorite pastime. Either mistake would have been trivially easy for Carlson to commit, but he walks the line of objectivity fairly well. If anything, the issue of the tax levy and the football team’s influence on its success seems a bit of a stretch, but the townsfolk make that connection more than the filmmaker does.

The DVD is loaded with bonus material, including a fairly large number of deleted scenes (though in most cases the reason for their deletion is obvious). The only other extra I’d like to have seen on the disc is a director’s commentary from Carlson. It would be nice to hear his thoughts on the project, what led him to make a film about high school football, and what the experience of filming in Massillon throughout the season was like. Even absent this, though, the remaining extras are impressive (though I beg you to avoid the music extra, as the songs are all atrocious).

For football fans, this is a definite rental, and the truly hardcore may want to own it, as I don’t know of another football documentary of such quality. If you’ve never really been a fan of the game, but you’re curious about what life is like on the inside of that circle, check this one out.