Play Like He Would

Lone Star Literary Life

Football has always been big in Texas, and there’s not much bigger in many small towns than high school football. Friday Night Lights. Family, tradition, and hopefully triumph on the field. In Play Like He Would, Heath Hamrick looks at the impact of a tragic loss on one high school football team and community. Jerry “Slugger” Hamrick came to the little town of Bremond, Texas, looking for a job. His family had moved several times, following his coaching career all over Texas. The Bremond Tigers had a winning history, but recent seasons had been unkind. Was this a place Slugger Hamrick could win? He believed it was. So when the job was offered to him, he packed up his wife and two school-age sons and took it. The 1999 season was Slugger’s third as head coach, and it was likely to be a “make or break” season. By year three, the football faithful expected to see a winning season, a trip to the playoffs. The odds did not appear to favor the Tigers—as practice kicked off, “there were no world-beaters in the room that Slugger could see.” But sixteen-year-old Jason “Meat” Yancy was the smiling, encouraging heart of the team. As the players worked to come together, Slugger saw Jason improving a little with every play and thought, “That boy…is the reason guys like me do what we do.” The tale Heath Hamrick weaves is part small-town history, part memoir, part remembrance. He weaves his own experiences in Bremond with family history, the shenanigans of local teenagers, and, of course, football. But the main focus of the book is how a team and a community grieve when they lose a player, a brother, a friend. To his friends, Jason Yancy seemed to lack his usual joie de vivre that day, but no one ever expected he wouldn’t see the end of the game. When he collapsed on the field, the town was in shock, and as with any loss, people dealt with grief in different ways. Hamrick draws on his own memories and conversations with Jason’s teammates, friends, and family, some held during the students’ high school years, to reconstruct how the team came together to honor their fallen friend’s memory. “Play Like He Would” became a rallying cry to remind those young men to play to win, as Jason would have. To treat each other with kindness, like Jason would have. To strive to be better people, like Jason would have. Before the fateful game on October 1, 1999, coach Chuck Caskey prayed, “Put angels on our shoulders tonight, and keep us from harm.” For the Bremond Tigers, Jason Yancy became the angel on their shoulder through what should have been the rest of his high school years. While the book faces a weighty subject head-on, it is not without its moments of humor. At one point, Slugger’s frustration with one of his young players overwhelms him, and he screams, “You make me want to crap in my hands and rub it in my hair!” Whether they’ve coached a sport or not, everyone who has ever worked with children, or had children, or been around children for any significant length of time, will likely find that relatable. And when Hamrick describes the good-natured jokes Jason Yancy pulled on friends and teachers alike, it is clear why his death was so profoundly felt. Hamrick also explores how even the deepest grief loses its sharp edges over time. Slugger mounted Jason’s helmet on the locker room wall as a memorial, and it became a tradition for players to touch the helmet on the way out to the field. He thought of future athletes continuing that tradition, with “a momentary vision of Tigers with faces he didn’t recognize, passing by the helmet, touching the memory of someone they had never known.” The book closes with an epilogue, in which Hamrick provides details of what some of the key figures went on to do with their lives. Clearly, Jason Yancy’s memory continued to resonate in the lives of those who had known and loved him and continued to inspire them to “Play Like He Would.” And that’s the best legacy any of us can hope to leave Heath Hamrick was born in Pasadena, Texas, into a third-generation coaching family. He grew up watching his father, Slugger Hamrick, coach in places ranging from Central Texas to the Rio Grande Valley and back again. A lifelong educator, Heath occasionally has time to dress up as a historical figure to produce videos as “Heath the History Guy” on YouTube. He is also just possibly the most naive political operative in American history, having co-written Worse Than You Think: The Mostly True Story of Two Teachers Running for Congress Deep in the Heart of Texas for TCU Press. Perhaps most importantly of all, Heath was present in Milano on that night in October of 1999 when an entire town mourned for a young man whose life had been cut tragically short. He was also there as those same young men who had sat with tear-streaked faces in the Milano locker rooms bounced back in the memory of #77 and brought a town and a team back to life.