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Where Dreams Die Hard: A Small American Town and Its Six-Man Football Team

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As the August breezes begin to pick up, the days start to become shorter and thoughts return to fall, the end of the summer season brings about the start of another season, the high school football season.
Thousands of players will have participated in two-a-day practices throughout the dog days of August, all in the hopes of winning games, setting records and pursuing championships.
The only difference between most of the squads competing in the United States and the 112 public high school teams competing throughout Texas, is that they do it a little differently. For those smaller Lone Star Schools, whose student enrollment falls below 100, they play under their own Friday Night lights in the glorious game of six-man football.
Author Carlton Stowers became tired of his own newspaper's front pages, dedicated to the misdoings of others, bombings and mayhem he had seen from a news reporter's eyes. He made the decision to turn his reporter pen and pad towards a quieter town, in a quieter portion of Texas and follow the world of six-man football for a season.
His travels took him to the small town of Penelope and it's populous of 211 residents and the Wolverines six-man football team.
The railroad had left Penelope in 1960 and so went with it the cotton commerce that brought people to it. In 1963 the high school made the decision to abandon its football program. In 1999 a student, Marvin Hill, prodded by his classmates asked the superintendent requesting that football be re-instated in the Wolverines fall season.
The game of six-man football was established in the late 1930's as a sport for the small rural schools. It involves three lineman, three backs and a quarterback. Traditionally it is played on an 80-yard field, 15-yards are needed for a first down, 10-minute quarters are played and all players are eligible to receive a pass. Also included would be a 45-point mercy rule after the first half was complete.
With the help of the superintendent and an open board of education, donations flowed in to field a team that first season. As the interest continued year after year, a playing field, all two-acres of it, was purchased, grass planted and goalposts were acquired when a neighboring school moved up in class, they too were sent to Penelope.
It would be Hill who made history, scoring the first-ever touchdown for the Wolverines that first season.
Fast forward to 2004 when Penelope is led by coach Corey McAdams, the former state championship quarterback and college star at Hardin-Simmons University. It would be his job to bring the Wolverines back on a winning track, turning the tide on the squad's current 1 win, 31 loss record.
Stowers takes the reader onto the practice field, into the hallways of Penelope High and into the homes of the players, their families and their lives.
It is a different type of life in the small towns in Texas, something that many suburban readers may have a hard time comprehending.
When the entire town turns out for a football contest, they may not fill most local high school auditoriums, the coaches drive the bus to away games, that is if his players show up on time after they finish building a sheep fence.
"Where Dreams Die Hard" is not as hard hitting as the best selling "Friday Night Lights", but Stowers stills delves into issues that would make any towns population uneasy. It is the picture that Stowers paints of the small towns in Texas, the wins and the losses by the Penelope High Wolverines squad that make the book so enjoyable.
The length of "Where Dreams Die Hard," is also agreeable to the reader with its 201 pages, fitting for a sport which boasts just 12 players on the gridiron compared to the traditional 22. Stower's work has intrigue, history, heartwarming stories about the players, their families as well as the author's own relationship with his dying father.
While they may host smaller lineups, play in front of smaller crowds, the characters in "Where Dreams Die Hard" are focused on success every Friday evening under the Texas sky, proving that things in Texas are bigger, especially the hearts of those playing six-man football.

Texas is well-known for some of its big-time sports teams: the Dallas Cowboys have won five Super Bowls and are known as "America's Team," the Texas Longhorns have won multiple college football national championships in the last half-century, and the state's three NBA franchises have each won at least one world title.

But the Lone Star State is also known for a brand of football that is played on a much smaller stage by very small schools: six-man football, a variant of the game that engenders fierce loyalty on the part of those who play it and those who follow it closely. In "Where Dreams Die Hard," author Carlton Stowers spent the 2004 season following a six-man team, the Penelope High Wolverines.

The school had begun its program only five years earlier and had had very limited success prior to the season Stowers covered the team. Coach Corey McAdams had the challenge of working toward building a winning program, and this book tracks the Friday night by Friday night ups and downs of that effort.

The book is also about more than football: it looks at life in small-town Texas, in which people in close-knit towns band together in the face of adversity. There are also discussions of issues in teenage life and of challenges, both athletic and academic, that small-town schools face. If you like Texas football and enjoyed Friday Night Lights, you will almost certainly like "Where Dreams Die Hard."

I played six-man and eight-man football in high school, so this book was very interesting to me. It realistically shows some of the life in small towns.

I think this is a wonderful book, full of football history. It seems to me that most attention is centered on Professional Football and all the steps to get there are lost in the shuffle. The small schools that cannot field an 11 man team have developed a game of six man ball. The rules are a little different, but it is just as hard fought a game as any of the larger schools have. This is a story of the coaches and boys that compete within this league. Well written enjoyable reading. I gave this book to my son in law who is a coach and played 6 man football himself.

Having chronicled so much disaster, destruction and unspeakable horror committed by people against other people during his extensive writing career, Texas author Carlton Stowers was looking for something simpler in the wake of the 911 tragedy. As he writes in the preface of the non fiction book "Where Dreams Die Hard" on page XIV:

"When a young editor argued that what those of us under her charge had to provide readers was more `red meat,' more hard-hitting, finger-pointing controversy, I rolled my eyes and began considering my leave-taking. Though fully aware that there were endless fakes and frauds needing exposure and countless crimes begging courthouse justice, such tasks no longer interested me. It was time to let someone else try to sort reason from the unreasonable, spend days in the company of devastated victims, and chronicle the social ills for which there seemed no cure."

His quest was for a Norman Rockwall type America if it still existed. Where folks still cared about each other regardless of political or religious affiliation. Where crime was not a problem and where red meat referred to what was on the grill and not something literary.

He found what he was looking for in the small town of Penelope, Texas located about an hour south of Dallas. Penelope has a population of 211 and eagerly and actively supports their six man football team the Penelope Wolverines. As sports fans may know, six man football has seen a revival the last few years in a number of states including Texas. Much of the book covers one season in the life of the town both for the players, their families, and the surrounding community.

While he chronicles the struggles of the 2004 team, author Carlton Stowers does much more than that. Writing about the months before and after the season as well, the town of Penelope and its citizens are brought alive for the reader. Mr. Stowers' folksy style works wonders in this regard as the words flow and skip from point to point much like in regular conversation. Along the way he touches on the history of six mean football, the economy of small town Texas and such basic fundamentals as how to impart responsibility to today's youth among other topics. This is not a lecturing or antiseptic read but more of a good friend talking about life as he sits next to you on your front porch.

The result is an excellent 205 page read that provides a look at basically slightly more than a year in the life of a small Texas town and its citizens. The bad, the good, and everything in between are covered. At the same time it becomes uplifting as one knows no matter how bad the world news gets, folks that live in Penelope, Texas and thousands of other places are taking it one day at a time, prospering in their own way, and helping each other everyday. A little of that attitude goes a long way and Mr. Stowers book is a very refreshing and enjoyable read.

Kevin R. Tipple (copyright) 2006

What do kids do who want to play football and the town's too small to field a football team in the high school? More importantly, what do their moms and dads do, especially in a state like Texas where everything is football when you're a teenager. He can join the Penelope Wolverines and their brand of rural, thin population "six-man football," designed for school with 99 or fewer students! If you liked FRIDAY NIGHT LIGHTS, you'll appreciate the even bigger sacrifices made by the boys in this book.

Stowers tells the perhaps apochryphal story of a country in west Texas where one man refused to give up his farm and move to the next county, even though a prominent oilman dangled him a job with a salary far beyond anything he would ever be making if he stayed home. The oilman, you seem had designs on the farmer's son. No, not sexual designs, but he figured if he could get that boy enrolled in the high school of his own county, the boy was talented enough to score enough touchdowns to make the difference in the season. But his dad kept saying no, we're staying put. The oilman didn't understand the meaning of the word no and one night, while the family was away, their entire house was moved, lock, stock and housecat, to the oilman's county. The dad figured he might as well join em at this point. Because he would have to pay the cost of airlifting his house back to its original cellar and that he couldn't afford. So the boy joined the high school team and, sure enough, justified the oilman's belief in his nascent talents.

Why, I had never so much as heard of "six-man football" before picking up the latest effort of Carlton Stowers, a true crime expert whose own family was touched by tragedy some mite back.

Now I know plenty. His down home style goes down smoother than a Texas mojito. You'll crack up at another anecdote, in which Penelope plays its rival, Abbott. Now there's a town so proud it has erected a giant billboard with a grinning, full color image of musician Willie Nelson, who they say was born in Abbott. Town pride in Nelson has never diminished, but the fool billboard got too much for the "rebel" singer-songwriter, who one night, got pretty drunk I guess and tried to burn down the darn thing. The billboard remains, half-torched, a visual memory of people's mixed feelings about the little towns from which we fled but to which we return with smiles and tears all mixed up.

This is more a book about small town life than football. Another reviewed said it's a friendlier "Friday Night Lights" and that's true, but the football is far less exciting. That has nothing to do with the talent on the field. I know very little about Six Man, but played Eleven Man through High School and Semi-Pro and recently moved to Texas so I wanted to know more. This book gave the briefest overview stating it's 3 lineman and 3 backs with all lineman as eligible receivers. That's it. There was no discussion of how the game differs in more specific ways. The in-game action was exceptionally bland. It was "Lazano scored a 55 yard run". It lacked the imagery that I would have hoped for to help me feel the action. The subject matter is there, but I never really felt the on-field action. The small town life aspect was outstanding though and the author, I think, really captured it. In the end it's okay and at roughly 200 pages is a good plane read coming in to football season.

I grew up in a small town and the book definitely brought back memories. I enjoyed reading it, but at times there was too much detail and at other times detail was lacking. Not sure if this was caused by access to the people involved. If you like football or are nostalgic for simpler times, you will enjoy this book.

I thought this book was excellent and an incredible effort from an author that has only written non-fiction about violent crimes before. This is the kind of book that rekindles your faith in America and makes you realize there is another and maybe better way of life than how most of us live. While I felt like I escaped to a simpler place and time the book showed that even in a rural, slow paced, simpler lifestyle problems still exist. I didn't want the book to end not because of any special intrigue or what the final outcome was but just because it was such a good read. This is a book where the journey was better than the end result.