At 60, Rick Bass suited up to play semi-pro football. The result is ‘Wrecking Ball’

Rick Bass didn’t set out to resume his football career at the “somewhat desiccated age of 60.” It just kind of happened.

Bass, the journalist and author of books including “Oil Notes,” “The Ninemile Wolves,” and “Why I Came West,” wrote a 2015 story for Texas Monthly magazine about the Brenham Express, a semi-pro football team in the town known chiefly for its beloved food export: Blue Bell ice cream. Kirby Simmons, Bass’s best friend from high school, was a trainer for the team, and Bass was intrigued enough to return to his native Texas from Montana, where he now lives. 

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Bass, who as a young man played a year as a tailback for the Utah State Aggies, was fascinated by the program, and its coach, Anthony Barnes. Je noticed that the team was being “decimated” by injuries, and thought he might as well get off the sidelines and onto the field. “I don’t recall precisely how it happened, but I do recall in shuttered, fractured vignettes, suiting up with the ever-diminishing number of the team,” he writes.

Bass chronicles his experience playing for the team in “Wrecking Ball: Race, Friendship, God, and Football,” published by High Road Books. He talked about his book via telephone from Austin, Texas, where he was in town for the Texas Book Festival. This conversation has been condensed and edited for length and clarity.

Q: You grew up in Texas. Were you interested in football when you were a kid?

Oh, gosh, yeah. That was all there was. Yeah. Soccer was rumored to be a passing fad, like the hula hoop. I lived in Houston, so I followed Bum Phillips and the Houston Oilers, for better or worse. Usually, the latter.

Q: And then you went on to play college ball.

Yeah, at Utah State, and that was an amazing experience. I look back at some of the players that I practiced with, and hit, and was hit by, like Eric Hipple, who went on to play for Detroit, and Rick Parros, who played for Buffalo for a while. Our record was miserable, but we had some great individuals, and our coaches went on to coach for Dallas and Detroit and so forth. It was pretty strange just how you get to participate in these little dots of history.

Q: How did you first learn about the Texas Express in Brenham?

My best friend from high school, Kirby Simmons, was the trainer for the Express, and he told me, “This is an amazing group of young men. So I got an assignment for Texas Monthly to write about it, and went down there and met the guys and the coach and was just hanging out with them for a while. They were not overly clad with muscle, and I thought, These guys are smaller than the ones I used to play against. I could hang with these guys.” So I spoke to Kirby and Coach about it, and they said, “Yeah, jump on and see what you can do.” So it went from observatory journalism to [George] Plimpton’s famed participatory journalism.

Q: Is the team pretty popular in Brenham?

No. They’re incredibly unknown. Friends and family are the only fans, and it’s totally a shadow team, a shadow league, very insular. So that was wonderful, the anonymity, they’re just there purely for the love of the game, just accountable to each other and themselves. It was a learning process for everyone of us, each player on the team with regard to that. But I think what was most moving to me was the affection and dignity with which they received me across the age divide and the racial divide. It was really a beautiful experience for all of us.

Q: Did you find it difficult to get back into the groove from your college days?

It was hard. I had major knee surgery in January, a meniscus repair, and it was a six-to-eight week rehab. I went in still within the window of my rehab, but I had good surgeons, and it all worked out. I trained a little more, but I try to stay in as good shape as possible anyway. I was not prepared for the pulled muscles from the cleats and artificial turf. When we played at the Rock in Brenham, it was natural turf, but mostly rocks and gravel. But that AstroTurf in your cleats — I mean, you make a plant to cut and it’ll pop your groin every time. 

Q: Do you have any standout memories that stick out of your time on the Express?

I have a lot of them. The one that first comes to mind is that we had this giant offensive lineman, and we were getting beat badly by somebody. He just was a mountain of a man, probably 6’8,” 350 pounds. And he was just getting hammered, beaten down by the defensive line, and he just quit. At halftime, he walked off and there was just this archetypal view of this huge mountain of a man blocking out the setting sun, trudging with his helmet and his head down, dejected, toward the setting sun, and we knew he was not coming back for the second half. That was a real image, really sticks with me about who stays and who leaves and why. Another image, I can’t remember the linebacker’s name, but he tore his patella, and he was hollering out on the field, and the ambulance came and six of us carried him off the field with him screaming in pain. It was real.

Q: What do you think it is about football that has captured the imagination of America?

For me, it creates an alternative universe of accountability and cause and effect and good versus evil within a finite globe of time, in which time is able to be manipulated and controlled, unlike the real world. You can call a timeout to stop the clock. You can step out of bounds, you can throw an incomplete pass, you can manipulate time toward your desire, toward your goals, which is to advance the ball to the end zone or to stop the opponent from reaching theirs. And the complexity of it is really attractive. The permutations of 22 players on the field on any given play, in a 120-yard-long universe is like looking at a cell under a microscope with all the organic activities swirling within. It’s both organic and very intellectual and obviously very physical. It’s just an extraordinary game in its design and logic and rules. The unfortunate serpent in the Garden of Eden is the guaranteed damage it does to young men’s bodies and minds.