2 commentsFort Worth — Just two short weeks ago a large cross section of Americans sat down with friends and families at their televisions to watch the number one rated television show in the world, the final game of the National Football League's season otherwise known as, the Super Bowl.
The 46th Super Bowl to be exact. But, there was a time in the country's not so distant past when football was seen as a novelty and perpetually second to "America's pastime," baseball.
In Larry Herold's sharply comedic The Sports Page, the winner of Stage West's 2010 Texas Play Competition now getting its first full production at the theater, two golden age sportswriters are confronted by their worst enemy─progress─as the world of television threatens not only to turn football into a sport of superstar athletes and female reporters but to end their way of life as they know it.
Zinc (Chuck Huber) and Doyle (Mark Fickert) are members of the old guard of sportswriters. They come from a that romantic time in American sports when everyone wore a suit and fedora to work, their press pass tucked in the ribbon of their hat, notepad and pencil in hand, crowding around the chiseled Adonis' of the gridiron gathering quotes so that they might pen an inspiring tale of conquest for their eager readers.
However, at the Dallas Cowboys training camp at Waxahachie Bible College in 1966, their world is threatened when the team's public relations man Red Gage (Jeff McGee) informs Zinc that he'll have to take on a roommate in the dormitories in order to accommodate a female television reporter who is soon to arrive.
Zinc and Doyle are aghast at the incursion of estrogen into their august boys' club, but that's just one of the duo's many headaches, not the least of which is the new star running back Pick Waters (Bryan Pitts), the first Cowboy with a big contract and also the first one to refuse to speak to the media.
But the fun is only just beginning for Zinc, who is also in quite a bit of debt to a certain bookie who, in turn, sends some muscle after him for collection in the form of the not at all threateningly named Crusher (Bob Allen).
Luckily, Zinc is given another option to pay off his debt. The Cowboys are currently underdogs for their upcoming game with the Washington Redskins. However, if Waters is playing they'll become the favorites. And if Zinc can find out if the young running back, who is coming off a long rehab of a torn up knee, is actually going to play and can get that information to the bookie, his debt will be forgiven.
The one small problem is that Waters won't talk to him. Enter Zinc's new roommate, the bright and ambitious Scott Young (Joshua Buehler), reporter for a small town newspaper and former tutor and friend to Waters. And, the new era of football on television is heralded in by the former beauty queen turned sports reporter, Jane Jordan (Sherry Hopkins).
What follows is a zany surface tale populated by well-crafted characters and brimming with well-orchestrated comedy. But in the process, Herold's story also plumbs a deeper commentary on the nature of journalism and professional athletics.
Zinc and Doyle came from a time when journalism meant newspapers, they made the same money as the players, and televisions were a luxury household item. But, in the mid 1960s that was all changing. As with all technology, televisions were steadily becoming more affordable. And for the first time, people were able to put faces with the names they'd read about and heard on the radio all those years.
And if the Nixon/Kennedy debate taught the world anything, it was that looks mattered. Suddenly, it behooved television stations to put pretty people in from of the camera, not haggard old sportswriters. And it made athletes more noticeable, iconic and powerful. They started commanding bigger contracts as their presence on the team could now attract more than just the 60,000 people that could be crammed into the stadium. Now, millions of people could watch them on television, which ultimately means more money for the team and them.
What's funny is the doom and gloom the play paints on sports writing didn't actually have the nail-in-the-coffin effect that's foreshadowed. But, it did signal the broader theme of progress that eventually did get to the newspapers in the form of the internet. Case in point, you're reading this piece because the local papers pared down their coverage of the arts and thus fomented the birth of this website.
The combination of Herold's thoroughly funny script and the cast assembled by director Jerry Russell is as perfect as Troy Aikman laying a 50-yard pass into the waiting arms of Michael Irvin.
Huber is smarmy yet endearing, a man fighting his own demise on multiple fronts just wishing things could go back to the way they were. Fickert is the even older school stalwart of classic journalism who is just young enough to still be passionate about his job but just old enough to be jaded by it too.
Buehler is bright eyed and bushy tailed, honored to be placed near two of his journalistic heroes, yet opportunistic and imminently aware that the TV train is about to leave the station and he's trying to get a seat.
And Hopkins is the Erin Andrews of her time, using her intoxicating beauty to get closer to the action than the old writers can. Hers is a role that could easily have come off as a near-sighted gender stereotype, but Hopkins oozes charisma and flashes an underlying cunning when using her natural assets to assert herself in the formerly all-male fraternity. She may, in fact, be the smartest one of the bunch.
Ultimately, this is a story of juxtapositions. The transition from print to television, the transition from women being cheerleaders—in the lovely forms of Morgan McClure and Chelsea Ryan McCurdy—to the serious female journalist, the diverging paths of the media and the superstar athlete. Even the show music reflects the contradiction in culture of the time as the pre-show and intermission music is all Beatles but the show music is classically triumphant orchestral pieces that anyone who has ever watched NFL films is familiar with.
But what is not juxtaposition is the intermingling of sports and theater. Both the grandest concert hall and the most colossal stadium are performance venues filled with an audience eager for entertainment and excitement. And with the crafty combination of engaging writing and visual spectacle, Herold has, let's say, scored a theatrical touchdown and turned Stage West, however briefly, into one of the best stadiums in town. 
