A Big Decision in Flyover Country

The telephone call came a few hours ago. It was from a man who lives in rural Nevada, America’s flyover country, someone I now consider to be a very close friend. 

He wanted my help.

Richard Egan is a big man, a gentle man, now in his late 50s, who decades ago played high school football for the McDermitt Bulldogs, in a spec of town located on the state line between Nevada and Oregon. He is a Shoshone-Paiute Indian, part of a sprawling reservation couture that has not aways commanded respect from the local White ranching community.

When he played, Richard broke people’s bones, White and Native players alike. He was a kid who liked to hit hard. And he liked to win. In 1982, his team garnered the state championship in a division comprised of rural eight-man football squads, from communities that are too small to field the traditional 11-man teams.

Years later, Richard is still a Bulldog, now head coach of the football team he once played on. But these are different times in McDermitt and in small towns across the American West. Mines and other industries are closing. Families are abandoning town, leaving behind those who are left to hold things together, to cling to the fabric of life their clans have known for generations.

Richard is a main character in a book I published this year called “No Friday Night Lights: Reservation Football on the Edge of America” about his struggles to keep football alive in McDermitt. 

It hasn’t been pretty. Richard’s teams, comprised mostly of reservation kids, rarely if ever win. Sometimes, he can’t muster the eight players necessary even to have a season. But Richard does not give up. 

He teaches his boys how to play football. And if they are going to lose, which they almost always do, the teaches them to lose like men. He molds character. Years after leaving the team, those boys-turned men still remember Richard. And the lessons he worked hard to instill.

Richard is a proud man who doesn’t often ask for help.

So when I picked up the phone I knew this was serious.

Relations between Whites and Natives hasn’t always been easy. In researching my book, I leaned how Pauites were not even allowed in bars in the 1950s and 60s when the mine rumbled around the clock and McDermitt was a rollicking town with nearly a dozen drinking establishments.

For years, Native kids weren’t allowed to speak their own language. They were subjected to school texts written by Whites that portrayed their ancestors as warmongers and savages. As losers. 

 Then and now, there has been a sense that reservation residents are somehow second-class citizens around McDermitt, even as White families leave town and people with Paiute and Shoshone heritage dominate school enrollment and the high school sports teams that represent the community. 

Most live beneath the poverty line, but that yellow school bus still traverses the reservation’s roads each morning to collect those kids. They need them.

In a strange twist of fate, the presence of those Indian kids are critical just to maintain district funding and keep the school alive. Now there’s even an elective class in school where reservation kids can study their own language.

But Richard doesn’t care about the race of players he recruits to play for his Bulldogs. For the past two seasons, he has coached a girl on his squad. She has excelled. Because reservation girls are tough. They ride horses, tussle with their brothers. They can hit and hit hard, like Richard once did.

He just wants good players, kids who want to win, like he did. Male or female. White or Native.

In a way, the high school football field in McDermitt mirrors the community itself. It straddles the state line — half in Nevada, the other half in Oregon. 

Divided.

Now school district wants to give the field an official name, to honor a community figure in the whose efforts have helped make football happen in a town that is too often without enough players, a place that’s pretty much ignored by the rest of the planet.

The new name will no doubt last for generations to come. In a small town of 45 residents, with just a small casino, two gas stations a general store and a public library branch, the name on the football field is a very big deal.

The district is now considering its decision. And in my mind, like a lot of things in America, both urban and rural, the matter unfortunately involves race and class.

Officials are leaning toward a former Bulldogs coach and school principal who led the program decades ago, when Richard was a player. When researching my book, I interviewed this former coach, who is White. He is a fine man. 

But he long ago retired and has moved to another part of the state. McDermitt was a chapter in his long life, one that ended decades ago.

For most people on the reservation, Richard is the best choice, the only choice.

But they’ve been told that he is not qualified for consideration because he is currently employed by the district. They’ve asked that officials change that policy, but it seems that people who will make the decision— none of them Native American and none form the reservation — have their minds set.

They’re resting on a technicality that allows an easy decision: The White man over the Native.

Ignore the candidate who has been in McDermitt for his entire life. Richard is not a teacher, not a principal. For years, he has been the school custodian, whose office is a shack out by the field where cuts the grass and where he works his team. 

He has given his life to this town and this program.

Perhaps as important, naming the field after Richard Egan would help right a terrible historical wrong and mend the fractured relationship between the area’s Caucasian and Paiute-Shoshone communities.

Richard’s ancestor, Chief Egan, was a tribal leader in the 1960s, during the last days of conflicts between arriving White settlers and indigenous peoples who had been there for eons.

Following Chief Egan’s death from injuries sustained on the battlefield, soldiers severed his head from his body as a trophy. For more than a century, the skull of a great Native American leader was kept on a shelf at various Washington museums, including the Smithsonian.

A mere curioisty for Whites. An insult to Native peoples everywhere.

Then in 1998, the remains were at last repatriated and interred at a tribal cemetery in Burns. Richard Egan was present for that ceremony. His family have for generations run deep into this land. 

Naming the football field in his honor would go a long way in honoring a great family name and would further relations between communities that were once foes.

And most of all, Richard Egan deserves this honor.

Who knows how the board will decide?

Humboldt County School superintendent David Jensen is a practical man. He knows how it will look to name a football field after a White guy in a Native American community. Unfortunately, it’s not his decision.

Either way, I care what happens in distant McDermitt, even from San Francisco. I know about its importance because I have spent time in this part of the nation we liberals call flyover country, where folks in the recent election recently voted for the Other Guy.

I have met people in rural America I now consider friends. In the end, we must remind ourselves that people who live in Red America are no less complex than those in Blue America, no matter who they voted for.

I am hoping to one day soon to revisit McDermitt, and take a walk on the high school’s Richard Egan Field.

Only time will tell.