Wrecking Ball: Race, Friendship, God, and Football

by Rick Bass

Suit up with celebrated literary master Rick Bass as he writes, ala Buzz Bissinger (Friday Night Lights) and George Plimpton (Paper Lions), through the prism of battered semi-professional football and the refractions it casts on matters of race, masculinity, and yes, faith.

The Montana writer Norman Maclean wrote, “In our family, there was no clear line between religion and fly fishing.” Rick Bass, born and raised in Houston, knows that in Texas, there’s no clear line between religion and football.

In Wrecking Race, Friendship, God, and Football, award-winning writer Rick Bass chronicles three seasons on the field with the Texas Express, a semiprofessional team in the Dynamic Texas Football Association. This is unsung football. Light-years from the NFL, it has nowhere near the pomp of college football nor even of Texas high-school football, where hometown fans’ civic identity is always on the line. In the hardscrabble world of spring-season semipro ball, there are no fans. Eventually even the players’ families avoid these games. Most players are in their twenties, but some are older. Every year a few get to try out for the college game; others get scholarship money and a shot at another life. But for most, this is their last chance. Many—most—get hurt.

One hundred and fifty-five pounds dripping wet and forty-five years past his playing career as a one-season walk-on at Utah State, Rick Bass came to Brenham, a flyspeck town outside of Houston, to write about the Express. But with a disastrous season unfolding and injuries, incarcerations, and plain boredom claiming players every week, Bass was induced to suit up and take the field. Suddenly the writer became part of the story in a tale reminiscent of George Plimpton and Paper Lion. Rick’s experience on and off the field and his observations about the game, the terrible injuries, the expectations and pleasures of comradery, the overriding influence of the coach, and race, poverty, and, yes, religion on the field, are the unforgettable subjects of Wrecking Ball.

224 pages, Hardcover

Published September 2, 2025

About the author

Rick Bass was born in Fort Worth, Texas, and grew up in Houston, the son of a geologist. He studied petroleum geology at Utah State University and while working as a petroleum geologist in Jackson, Mississippi, began writing short stories on his lunch breaks. In 1987, he moved with his wife, the artist Elizabeth Hughes Bass, to Montana’s remote Yaak Valley and became an active environmentalist, working to protect his adopted home from the destructive encroachment of roads and logging. He serves on the board of both the Yaak Valley Forest Council and Round River Conservation Studies and continues to live with his family on a ranch in Montana, actively engaged in saving the American wilderness.

Bass received the PEN/Nelson Algren Award in 1988 for his first short story, “The Watch,” and won the James Jones Fellowship Award for his novel Where the Sea Used To Be. His novel The Hermit’s Story was a Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year in 2000. The Lives of Rocks was a finalist for the Story Prize and was chosen as a Best Book of the Year in 2006 by the Rocky Mountain News. Bass’s stories have also been awarded the Pushcart Prize and the O. Henry Award and have been collected in The Best American Short Stories.

Reviews

[Aleksha · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Desire is the root of all suffering, I think, and he desires to win."
-Rick Bass in Wrecking Ball: Race, Friendship, God, and Football.

Wrecking Ball: Race, Friendship, God, and Football by Rick Bass is a true sports novel following a rag-tag semiprofessional team and one mans journey and epiphanies through being part of it.

Am I the targeted audience of this book? Absolutely not, but I loved it. The way Rick Bass describes football and playing football is masterful. Despite not being a fan or follower of the game I was completely engrossed in the details of the book, especially as they were playing. The writing is definitely the strongest aspect of the title and Rick Bass' storytelling abilities is off the charts. I'm happy this happened to be the first sports novel I read all the way through. It's highly quotable, fun, and action packed. There were moments where I grimaced due to how explicitly detailed the book was.

The book isn't without it's faults though. Rick Bass has a tendency to go on tangents, especially political tangents, that don't have much to do with football or the topics he was originally discussing. These tangents can be very long and felt like they took attention away from the morals and core story. There was also a problem of having way too much unnecessary details that makes what takes place difficult to understand; the biggest culprit of this is when he starts naming names of the people who were there in list format when not enough information was given about some individuals to understand who they are.

Overall a great book but admittedly took me way longer to read compared to other novels.

[Marianne · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have loved Bass' writing for decades now, which made it quite difficult to read about him shifting from reporter to participant-observer on a small and scrappy semi-pro team, at an age where no one should be fool enough to do such a thing, especially once the inevitable major multiple concussion happened. I had so much frustration as I saw that coming, so much compassion for him but also for his loved ones when it did. The writing also sometimes (with self-awareness) shows the effects of the concussion, which is challenging in a different way. Fragmentary? Something. COVID also haunts this book like an oncoming freight train, you just start to hear the whistles before the book stops, but you know there is a lot more suffering around the bend. The topics the book is actually about, the ones named in the subtitle, are also discussed, and there is a lot of power and beauty in what Bass has to say.

This is an important book and a compelling book, and I'm glad I read it. Will it ever be the Rick Bass I turn to when I want to reread some Rick Bass? I do not believe so. I might reread the epilogue, which is by way of being a bit of a self-contained prose poem, but also does benefit from the context of all that came before.

[M. Sarki · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a complicated story of growing old, dealing with adversity, the sadness of death, prolonged and detrimental injuries, of being alone in the world and trying to connect, and true friendships and love: inside as well as on the borders of every experience. Please read my entire review here:

https://open.substack.com/pub/msarki/...