I Can See Your Feedsack, Pa!; or
Hey, You’re the One Who Slept With Noël Coward
(a recap by Will Kaiser)
Title: “Fight Team Fight!” [sic]
Airdate: October 13, 1980
Written by Don Balluck
Directed by Michael Landon
SUMMARY IN A NUTSHELL: The other football one.
RECAP:
WILL: Do you think people assume Walnut Groovy is AI-generated? Because the writing is so “hip” and “with-it”?
DAGNY: I don’t think you have to worry about that.
DAGNY: So, how deep into the bad stories are we?
WILL: Not too bad yet. Worse than we’ve had in a while, but we’ve still got a ways to go before the Decline and Fall.
So, you might remember a conversation in the comments last time about a Hollywood musicians’ strike which affected the majority of Season Seven’s episodes.
The strike began in the summer of 1980. Actually it began as an actors’ strike, with the unions pissed about the poor/nonexistent residuals actors were getting from the new phenomena of home video and cable TV.
On July 31st of that year, the American Federation of Musicians also struck, asking for similar fair compensation.
The actors’ strike ended in October, but the musicians didn’t come back to work until January. (The results were apparently unsatisfactory to most AFM members.)
Reader Ben, who’s helped us out several times with historical info about the show, says that all the episodes from “A New Beginning” through “Goodbye, Mrs. Wilder” contained no original music, but rather repurposed David Rose scores previously written for the show.
Sometimes this will be difficult to tell – last week, for instance, I thought the score sounded good enough to be new. (Ben assured me it wasn’t.)
I think this time it’s much more clear that the music is repurposed. And today, we begin with a tinny “old-timey” recording of marching-band music.
Such music is normally reserved on this show for parades, circuses, county fairs, Founder’s Day, etc., and of course sporting events.
We’re tipped off that today’s story falls into that last category, since the first thing we see is a scrapbook of old-timey sports team photos.
DAGNY: Did people clip stuff out of newspapers like that at the time?
WILL: Oh, I think so. It seems like a pretty Victorian thing to do. Like, “A Treasury of Cherished Reminiscence,” or something like that.
DAGNY: Oh, yeah. A remembrance book.
The scrapbook also contains clippings of sports-related headlines. (There are some complete articles in the scrapbook too, but they’re about agriculture and business, so never mind them.)
Our final tipoff that a sports story is imminent is that the title of the episode is “‘Fight Team Fight!’” (In quotes.)
A hand turns the page, and we see even more headlines relating to Princeton, Harvard, Dartmouth, Yale, and the names Pete Ellerbee and “Big Rock.”
As you all know, Princeton, Harvard, Dartmouth and Yale are Ivy League American universities.
The camera backs out to show the page-turner is a man who looks like Kurtwood Smith, even in profile.
A woman’s voice says, “Pete, it’s getting late,” and the man rises and walks around the room. (I will tell you this “Pete” is the Pete Ellerbee of the headlines.)
Decorations include many team photos on the walls, at least one large football trophy, and what looks like some kind of heavily ornamented phonograph horn – presumably the source of the tinny music.
Mr. Ellerbee heads to the (also heavily ornamented) dining room, where a blonde woman and a dark-haired boy of about thirteen are having breakfast.
Balding, thin, and sunburnt, Ellerbee says, “You know, I think I like my study better than I did the one in Boston.”
The boy shows his mother a picture he’s drawn of the family horse, named “Cap.”
The mom praises him, but the dad says he’s disappointed the kid’s abilities don’t “extend to football.”
“Dad, I’m getting better,” the boy says, and the mom, who’s pretty and seems quite a bit younger than her husband, gives Pete a look.
Apparently the Ellerbees’ son, “Dan,” failed to get into private schools because of his inadequate sports skills.
But the mom says she doesn’t care about that.
“So you’ve said on numerous occasions,” Pete says stiffly.
The boy, who looks like a cross between Matthew Labyorteaux and Jack Wild, looks at his father sadly.
The dad says Dan’s problem is mental, not physical, adding, “Maybe moving back to Minnesota will help the boy.”
But he immediately follows this up with “Maybe not.”
With feeling, Dan says, “Dad, I’m gonna try – honest.”
Pete gives him a disingenuous grin and says, “Well, that’s all I can ask.”
Then, in case there was any doubt this guy’s an asshole, he says with a laugh, “You won’t be growing up here like I did. We’d have to be poor for that!”
The mom doesn’t like this comment, either.
DAGNY: She looks like Jane Seymour.
Apparently the move to Walnut Grove is intended to “toughen Dan up” country-style, à la Peter Lundstrom in “The Stranger.”
(That worked great, if you recall.)
Then we see a bunch of boys playing football, with Albert calling out commands. (I don’t know football terminology, which I apologize for. I actually hate U.S. football, which I don’t apologize for, but I know I’m in the minority about that in this country, and no offense intended. Everyone loves it, so clearly I’m missing something. I’ve often wondered what.)
The team members are all wearing knit “toques,” as Dagny calls them, which if the photographic record tells an accurate story was a custom for football players in the Olden Days.
DAGNY: But it’s so hot! Why would they be wearing wool hats at all?
WILL: Well, to tell the teams apart.
DAGNY: But they’re all the same team.
WILL: I guess it must be a scrimmage.
DAGNY: . . . Oh, come on.
We see Willie is also amongst the players, getting plowed under immediately.
DAGNY: Oh, I remember this one! Somebody gets BLINDED, don’t they?
None of the other players, of whom no one seems younger than fourteen, are kids we’ve seen before, as far as I can tell.
DAGNY: Where did all these teenage guys come from?
On the sidelines of this practice (I assume it’s a practice) are Nels, Mr. Ellerbee and Dan.
Ellerbee smiles and says Albert’s a pretty good player.
Nels calls Albert over and introduces them. (Apparently Nels is coaching? I suppose Coach Garvey, who didn’t know anything about football anyway, is gone now.)
(And remember, Nels did play on his college “scrub team,” whatever that is.)
Albert and Dan hit it off at once, but Nels frowns when he hears Harriet squawking from town.
“The meeting’s ready to start, come put your coat on!” Mrs. O cries with cheerful smothering motherliness.
(I just read a book by Ruth Rendell, and in it there’s a smothering mother who herself gets smothered. Weird story, worth a look.)
DAGNY: I remember this one. Someone gets badly hurt.
WILL: You do seem to have some instinct for where it’s going. But I’m not sure if you remember it, or if it’s just the setup is so obvious.
This meeting Mrs. Oleson mentioned is of the Walnut Grove School Board, of course. Apparently it’s Nels’s turn to play Chair.
Every time we’ve seen this governing body to date, it’s had a mere four members, which, as we’ve already seen, presents difficulties in the case of contested decisions.
Yet today it appears the board has been greatly expanded, including not only Charles, Nels and Harriet, but also Carl the Flunky, the Rosy-Cheeked Grovester Woman, Bald Will Ferrell and Dark Bonnet (his wife?), two gray-haired guys we’ve never seen before (father and son, perhaps? or perhaps not?), and a comely woman in a velvet bonnet/choker combo.
That makes ten members total. I’m not sure why there’s been such a huge expansion – it isn’t explained – but ten’s still an even number, so no easier for tie-breaking than the previous structure.
Nels reports that new textbooks are being ordered, then makes a speech containing some remarkable info to unpack:
. . . I would just like to take this opportunity to welcome back a native son. Pete Ellerbee there left these parts years ago to become one of the great heroes of college football. I can attest to that myself, because I was playing for Princeton when Pete – “Big Rock,” they called him – was making Rutgers a great power. I was only third-string [is that the same as “scrub team”? – WK], so I rarely had to face him myself, but I can tell you, the team was pretty nervous anytime they knew they had to face Big Rock! Well, anyway, Pete, welcome home!
So, several interesting things about this:
2. When we did “The Winoka Warriors,” we noted that Nels probably attended university in the late 1840s and/or early 1850s.
(As if imagining Nels playing football isn’t difficult enough, we know he also boxed at college.)
At that time, there was no such thing as American football as we know it today. However, there were similar games played, with varying rules, and some of them were on college campuses.
3. Rutgers University, then known as Rutgers College, is called “the birthplace of college football,” because it hosted the first-ever intercollegiate football game.
And indeed, that first game was played against Princeton University. (Until 1896, that school’s official name was “the College of New Jersey,” but apparently it was called “Princeton College” by the mid-Nineteenth Century.)
The “football” that was played in the game was more like soccer than like modern American football.
4. While that game “kicked off” college football as an American campus institution (good, yes?), it didn’t actually happen until 1869 – long after Nels would have graduated, if my calculations are correct.
(Here’s a fun write-up of the game from the Rutgers student newspaper, the Targum.)
(This line in particular captures my own sensibilities about football: “To describe the varying fortunes of the match, game by game, would be a waste of labor, for every game was like the one before.” You said it, bruh!!!)
Well, I guess that if it’s 1885 and Nels and Pete Ellerbee are both in their fifties, we must conclude that in the Little House Universe, college football emerged as a phenomenon about twenty years earlier than in the real world. I can live with this.
5. The revelation that Nels attended Princeton is also noteworthy. (Oleson Family History is always fascinating, isn’t it?)
We know Nels grew up in a wealthy family, but that was (probably) in Minnesota.
That doesn’t make it impossible that he went to college in New Jersey – obviously there would be more and better educational opportunities on the East Coast at the time than here in the Upper Midwest.
Still, it seems strange to me that with an Ivy League degree, he wound up a smalltown shopkeeper in Lower Buttcrack, Minnesota.
Anyways, Pete Ellerbee stands up and makes a speech.
DAGNY: Why is this happening at a school board meeting?
WILL: I have no idea. I don’t know why he’s even there.
Ellerbee says nice things about Groveland, and about Nels, then launches into a panegyric about football and the positive role it can play in individual and community development.
Pete announces he’d love to contribute if possible to the local team’s success.
Surprised and delighted, Nels at once offers him the coaching position.
(This is absurd on a couple levels. First, though we’ve followed goings-on at Groveland Elementary/Middle for a long time – nearly 65 years in LHUT – there’s never been any depiction or mention of football or a football team in Walnut Grove.)
(Second, even if the kids did play football, why would the school board have anything to do with it? We’ve never known this school to have an athletic program of any kind, unless you count recess.)
(Any o’cat games, as far as we know, have been independently organized.)
(Third, Nels seems surprised by Ellerbee’s announcement; but if so, why would he have invited Ellerbee to this meeting in the first place?)
Well, everybody’s thrilled. They don’t sing “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow,” but the general atmosphere is jubilant.
More marching-band music fades in, then abruptly stops. (Nothing but marching-band stuff so far.)
DAGNY: Are these real school fight songs?
WILL: I don’t think so. I looked up the Rutgers fight song, and while it’s kind of similar to the first march they played, it isn’t the same.
Next we see Ellerbee addressing the team, which, in addition to Albert, Willie and Dan, comprises no fewer than thirteen boys we’ve never seen before. Thirteen!
Ellerbee’s speech (by Don Balluck) is satirically written. It’s a dumb, macho defense of winning that might have come out of the mouth of Pete Hegseth, if it were crueller, stupider and substituted killing for winning.
DAGNY: No, I remember this one. Doesn’t the guy’s son wind up in a wheelchair? That’d serve him right.
With some effort, Ellerbee gets the boys fired up to play.
Ellerbee himself is played by William Traylor, an actor who had recurring roles on Days of Our Lives and Dynasty and who also appeared on Daniel Boone, Flipper, Mannix, Kung Fu, The Rockford Files, Lou Grant, Riptide, and many other shows.
He was also in the movies Colossus: The Forbin Project (a cautionary tale about AI taking over the world – like that could happen!), The Towering Inferno, The Postman Always Rings Twice (the Jack Nicholson one), The Man With Two Brains, Buckaroo Banzai, and Chevy Chase’s Fletch series.
Traylor’s personal life is interesting – he reportedly once had an affair, eventually fictionalized as a play, with Noël Coward. (!)
But eventually Traylor settled down with a woman, had kids, and founded a distinguished acting school. His students included Johnny Depp, Ellen Burstyn, Jeff Goldblum, Lily Tomlin, Annette O’Toole (of Cat People fame), Sean Penn (of Little House on the Prairie fame), Anjelica Huston, Nicolas Cage, and Michelle Pfeiffer.
During the team’s practice, we get something other than marching-band music at least. More chugga-chugga-type.
DAGNY: I like the music in this one.
WILL: It’s only been this and a fake Sousa march! Plus it’s just repurposed music from other episodes.
DAGNY: Oh, no one cares about that.
Hm. Ben and I do.
Much of this story is the team practicing or playing. I know nothing about football, which in addition to being an objectively pleasant state of being, frees me from having to describe the proceedings in detail.
At one point, Ellerbee runs out onto the field to yell at Dan for a mistake and play head games with him.
We’ve already met the actor playing Dan once – he was Friend #1 to the doomed Timothy Dodds in “The Faith Healer.” (Dan is obviously a different character, though.)
I feel like I recognize this kid from something else – it might be The ABC After School Special, or Mork & Mindy.
Or it might be the fantasy wannabe-epic (and Robert Tessier/Jeff Corey/George Murdock vehicle) The Sword and the Sorcerer.
Oh, and his name, if you haven’t caught it from the captions, is James Jarnigan. (In the credits, his name is misspelled Jarnagin.)
Dan, of course, looks sad that his dad is such a hardass. (Well, he kind of looks sad all the time.)
Albert looks sad too.
On the sidelines, Rando Sue also looks sad, but I’m not sure why, or what she’s even doing there.
At dinner that night, Mr. Ellerbee talks about how excited he is to be working with such a fresh team.
“Did I tell you our first game is with last year’s champions?” he says. (From where? There are no other schools nearby to compete against. The closest we’ve seen was in Currie, twenty miles away.)
Mrs. Ellerbee, who seems to have the same affinity for this topic as I do, says, “Yes, I believe you did.”
DAGNY: That’s some lacey top.
Yes. The actor is Terrence O’Connor (yes, Terrence), a beauty who acted on Ironside, Quincy, Hart to Hart, Simon & Simon, St. Elsewhere, The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, and Melrose Place, as well as in Star Trek: The Motion Picture.
Ellerbee then starts criticizing his son for lack of enthusiasm.
With frustration, Dan says actually, only Albert has any ability.
DAGNY: Why do they expect us to buy Albert as a football player? He’s a pipsqueak and a nerd.
WILL: Because Albert is the best at EVERYTHING. It’s quite annoying. It almost makes you glad he becomes a murderer, an addict, and dies.
Almost, almost!
In particular, Dan adds, Willie Oleson is a terrible player, which makes Mr. Ellerbee laugh.
“Even I play better than most of ’em,” Dan says, then his dad praises him for the improvements he’s been making.
Pleased by this unexpected compliment, Dan excuses himself to go to bed.
Mrs. Ellerbee says it’s great to hear Pete compliment their son; but Ellerbee says, “If he deserves it, he’ll get it.”
DAGNY: Boy, you can tell Landon hated parents like this.
Mrs. E expresses the opinion that he’s working the boys too hard, but he shrugs it off.
Next we see Pa in the barn driving nails into something, seemingly at random.
Albert gets home from football practice, dirty and tired.
DAGNY: Oh, does Albert get hurt and then Charles kicks the guy’s ass?
WILL: You’re getting warmer.
DAGNY: Yeah, I remember this one.
DAGNY: WHOA.
WILL: What?
DAGNY: You can really see Pa a-hangin’.
Albert tells Pa he preferred playing for Nels, since Nels always told them football was about having fun. Mr. Ellerbee, he says, ruins things by focusing so much on winning. (I never played sports, but in my younger days, I played in a competitive musical ensemble and I’m familiar with that tension.)
Pa says he’s proud of Albert for sticking with his teammates, but says he shouldn’t be afraid to quit the team if he doesn’t like it.
Anyways, Pa nicely says he’ll cover Albert’s chores for him today – unloading feedsacks.
DAGNY [as ALBERT]: “I can see YOUR feedsack, Pa!”
Grateful Albert slouches toward the house.
DAGNY: You can tell he’s exhausted, because one suspender is down. He’s like a video-game character that’s running out of life.
One night at the Old Wilder Farm, then, Forty-Year-Old Laura bitches to Manly that all the football players are now getting terrible grades.
Then it’s back to football practice. No music whatsoever this time.
Albert gets crushed under a pile of kids. (Willie nicely asks him if he’s okay.)
Coach Ellerbee doesn’t take the least interest in Albert’s injury – which pisses Alb off.
He approaches Ellerbee and says he’s quitting the team.
As Dan watches, Albert says football is keeping him from other responsibilities, plus he gets hurt all the time, and furthermore, it isn’t any fun.
Ranting like a dictator, Ellerbee says if Albert doesn’t understand that football is more important than anything else, he should quit.
DAGNY: He’s like Benjamin’s dad in The Graduate.
WILL: That actor is married to Bonnie Bartlett, you know.
Ellerbee drenches Albert with insults to his character and masculinity, then names some kid named “Hallett” the new quarterback.
(Hallett is a new Ambiguously Ethnic Kid, taller than the others.)
Shamed, Albert says he’s changed his mind, but Ellerbee coldly rejects him.
Ellerbee makes Albert beg to rejoin the team, then we get the chugga-chugga music again. It gets louder and louder, then abruptly cuts off as we head to a commercial.
When we come back, we find ourselves at a strange social gathering.
First there’s an establishing shot of a modest farmhouse.
Next we get a shot of Ellerbee gazing at an old-timey football photo and boasting of his accomplishments in a game against Cornell.
We see he’s hosting some sort of party for Charles, Caroline, Nels and Harriet. They’re all dressed formally.
Mrs. Oleson clucks about how amazing Mr. Ellerbee’s stories are, whilst Charles and Caroline listen with what you might call polite disinterest. (They have their class-reunion smiles on.)
Nels mentions that the Groveland team will play their first game against Redwood Falls. (About forty miles away, you’ll recall – a full day’s drive, one way.)
Ellerbee says the Grovester boys are responding well to his coach, again presaging Pete Hegseth by noting that football is great for male morale . . . just like war!
Caroline finds this comparison distasteful, and pretty much says so.
Ellerbee mansplains to her that no, actually it’s a perfect comparison, as Mrs. Ellerbee watches him disapprovingly from the dining room.
As for Pa, he’s in agreement with Ma, but says nothing.
WILL: Yeah, don’t look so sanctimonious, Chuck, you ol’ draft dodger.
At the end of the evening, the guests depart, Mrs. Oleson saying, “Oh, Pete, I wish I could have seen you run over Nels!” as they go.
Caroline nicely compliments Mrs. Ellerbee on the food, and Nels addresses her as “Sandra.”
DAGNY: This must have been a weird dinner party. Is this the first time we’ve ever seen Ma and Pa socializing with another couple?
WILL: They dressed up and had dinner with the Garveys once, but we didn’t see that.
DAGNY: Wouldn’t they have invited the boys, too? Where are they?
Once they’ve gone, Pete says he enjoyed the party, but Sandra Ellerbee says his war analogy was ill-received.
“It happens to be true,” Pete sniffs, so Sandra changes the subject to something even more critical, saying his old football stories are becoming ridiculously exaggerated.
“It’s just the way it happened,” Pete says curtly. (Or perhaps Kurtwoodly.)
Even if Sandra’s teasing had a nasty edge to it (and it did), I don’t think she deserves her husband’s assessment that she was “calling him a liar.”
(The gigantic phonograph horn in the foreground seems to belie Pete’s claims of emasculation.)
DAGNY: The back of his head is SO SUNBURNED.
WILL: Yeah. You can tell this guy liked the sun. Well, mad dogs and Englishmen!
Sandra stands her ground, suggesting nobody cares about football games that happened 35 years ago.
“I remember it like it was yesterday,” Pete snaps.
DAGNY: This is like The Stepford Wives. He’s gonna go order one.
Sandra says she doesn’t want to talk about it anymore, then immediately blows up and says his obsession with football is toxic.
DAGNY: She sounds like Pee-Wee Herman pretending to be a woman. [as PEE-WEE:] “Yes, of course, Officer.”
(Is that not one of the funniest movies yet made?)
WILL: They have a lot of art. Is that a storm at sea?
DAGNY: Yes. It represents the tumultuous emotions in this scene.
Sandra says she doesn’t care what absurd shit Pete’s into, but he’s ruining Dan’s life by trying to force him into it too.
DAGNY: Is that the dad from Dead Poets Society?
WILL: No, but I thought it looked like him too.
DAGNY: It looks like him, and it’s the exact same character.
Then Sandra implies Pete’s too stupid to realize his son hates football.
DAGNY: Oh, wow!
WILL: She’s got his number.
DAGNY: Yeah, she’s good.
Pete says the only reason they moved to Minnesota was so Dan could excel. But Sandra counters that the real reason was to mold him into Pete Junior, something that was impossible in a more competitive environment than Walnut Grove.
Pete stands up and says, “Sandra, I’m warning you.”
Sandra says the warning is for him – not to fuck up their son’s life.
DAGNY: Whew! This one’s intense.
Pete storms out, and Sandra stares with loathing at one of his trophies.
WILL: She should smash it to the floor, like JD Vance did with the football trophy that one time.
Next we see Ellerbee overworking Dan and the rest of his players again.
DAGNY: I can’t remember if this kid winds up in a wheelchair or with leukemia, but it’s something bad.
Willie asks for a break, and the coach says, “I don’t understand you people.”
WILL: “You people,” ouch.
Willie says if only Laura didn’t assign so much stupid homework, they’d be better rested and wouldn’t feel so tired.
Pete says he’ll deal with Laura – immediately.
Dismissed for the moment, all the players collapse into the dirt.
DAGNY: What? What the hell just happened?
We watched it again.
WILL: Do you buy that?
DAGNY: No, but I like it. It’s very “high-school play.”
Ellerbee arrives at the schoolhouse mid-vomit and starts swimmin’ upstream.
DAGNY: Oh, Laura is NOT going to take shit from him, oh no she isn’t.
After exchanging cordialities, Mr. Ellerbee starts out by making a snarky reference to how much homework she assigns – but she of course has no context for the joke.
Then he pa-tronizes her.
Very sexistly, Ellerbee frames his request that she downsize the homework assignments as a way she could “help him out” with the important task of establishing a champion football team.
WILL: Do you think this is also a commentary on schools prioritizing sports over other areas?
DAGNY: Oh, for sure.
Laura says maybe he could help her out by blowing it out his ass. (Paraphrase.)
Ellerbee asks if Laura would really fail the students for succeeding at football, and she says, “No, they’d do the failing.”
DAGNY: That’s an Ingalls for you.
Ellerbee seems to think Laura just misunderstands what he’s asking, so he rephrases the request three or four different ways.
WILL: He’s such an asshole.
In response, Laura rants at him for a while.
DAGNY: Oh, Laura. Have a Klonopin.
Ellerbee frowns and marches out.
WILL: He’s really skinny for a football star.
Returning to football practice, Ellerbee snatches a book out of Albert’s hands (it’s simply titled History of the World) and snarls that football is more important than studying.
The team reassembles.
DAGNY: I bet those hats smell terrible.
As if dealing with the bullshit of two Ingallses in one day wasn’t bad enough, Ellerbee now looks up to find Chuck stepping into the shot.
DAGNY: Yep, here we go. Snoopy McNoserson.
“How are the practices comin’ along!” Pa says with hearty good cheer. (Ellerbee manages to smile back.)
Only then, the kids call that Albert’s been hurt.
Pa whisks him to Doc’s office.
Doc says no ribs are broken, but adds that he doesn’t really have a clue. (Paraphrase.)
DAGNY: I like that the Coach came along. That speaks better of him.
Pa says broken ribs are no daisy parade, and since he’s broken his about twice a season to this point, he would know.
Alb says he’s not so badly hurt that he needs to take a break from football, and everybody’s counting on him.
DAGNY: He’s just like Olive.
WILL: Totally. Both the girls.
DAGNY: Not Roman, though. Roman would be, like, [cheerfully:] “Well, I guess I better take the week off! I’ll just cheer from the sidelines, friends!”
Ellerbee assures Pa he’ll take Albert out of the game immediately if he’s in pain, so Pa gives in.
Back at home, Alb is on feedsack duty again. He says he feels fine, and indeed, both suspenders are up in their proper position, but when Pa isn’t looking, he grimaces in pain.
WILL: You can tell David Rose is on strike. Otherwise they would have used Albert’s Theme here.
DAGNY: Is the makeup guy also on strike? I don’t think the “dirty” makeup is very good this week.
Well, the day of the big game arrives. You can tell the season opener is a big deal, because the mysterious Hero Township Marching Band has materialized in full uniform.
(We previously theorized they live in a nearby forest or cave.)
The Redwood Falls team, in green, takes the field first. (Today the Redwood Falls high school mascot is the cardinal.)
(And the Walnut Grove team mascot is the “Charger.”)
Sandra Ellerbee says the Redwood Fallster boys much bigger than the Grovester kids, but Pete tells her to stifle herself.
On the sidelines, Pa tells Albert to listen to his body during the game.
DAGNY: Oh my God . . . it’s his kidneys, isn’t it?
But Albert reassures him he’ll be fine.
DAGNY: Or a RUPTURED APPENDIX! Because it’s just like when Amelia got appendicitis at the softball game and we were like, “Come on, just push through it!”
WILL: Yeah. We maybe should pay more attention to the message of this one.
The referee, who looks more like a bookie if you ask me, does the coin toss thing that they do at the start of football games.
(He’s Ron Doyle, who was on Highway to Heaven a couple times, and in a movie called Dr. Terror’s Gallery of Horrors.)
The Fallsters’ quarterback, a kid in the classic Little House bully mode, taunts Albert at the line (or whatever).
(Credited as “Clyde,” he’s Joshua Davis, who was on Baskets a couple times, and in a movie called The Car.)
DAGNY: The football sequences are well filmed. You can tell the cinematographer was throwing himself into it. He and Landon must have enjoyed working the shots out.
Despite not being into football, I agree, the episode looks great. (It was Haskell B. this time.)
Ma, Pa, Carrie, Laura, Manly and Doc sit amongst a bunch of strangers in the stands.
WILL: Where is Baby Grace?
DAGNY: Mary and Adam must be babysitting.
WILL: Nah, they’re in Sleepy Eye now. Plus I doubt if anyone ever let them watch a baby again after the fire.
The game goes on for a while. Willie gets tackled, causing his parents to scream at each other in the stands.
WILL: They seemed like they were making that up as they went along. They should have done another take.
DAGNY: I bet people were too drunk by that time.
There’s no music during most of the game, which seems a strange omission. (Rosey, we hardly knew ye!)
The Fallsters are the first to score. (Mustache Man is the scorekeeper.)
The game goes on and on. The Groveland team isn’t doing very well.
DAGNY: I think there’s too much whistleblowing in this game. There doesn’t need to be that much.
Ellerbee calls a time-out and yells at Albert for half-assing it.
Albert says his side is hurting and gets a lecture about the masculine nobility of football.
WILL [as ELLERBEE]: “Let me tell you a story, Albert. I once knew this witty gay guy who taught me an important lesson about life . . .”
DAGNY [as ELLERBEE]: “He was SO FUNNY, I mean, when I say ‘witty’ . . .”
So Alb reluctantly soldiers on.
Pa, who can’t go a full minute without thinking about Albert even under ideal conditions, of course has been monitoring his condition through the game. But he trusts the coach’s judgment.
Quarterback Clyde of the opposing team crudely taunts Albert.
WILL: Now, this kid seems like he’s from Wisconsin. I like how he laughs at his own joke, just like I do.
Well, when they start up again, Albert makes a touchdown, I think.
Apparently this makes Groveland eligible for a sort of bonus point, if Dan Ellerbee can kick a field goal – and he does.
“Now we got a football team!” Coach Ellerbee screams.
Mustache Man updates the score, even though we just saw him (in a different outfit) on the sidelines a moment ago.
Of course, in “Wilder and Wilder” we learned that Mustache Man has a similar-looking younger brother named Harvey, so I suppose this could be him.
Through some mechanism beyond my understanding, Groveland gains control of the ball.
DAGNY: Oh, thank goodness!
WILL: You’re really involved in this game.
DAGNY: Yeah, this one’s fun.
Quarterback Clyde leans forward and growls to Albert, “That bit of luck’s gonna cost you.”
DAGNY: Whoa, did that kid just smoke a pack of cigarettes?
Actually, I may be wrong, but if you listen closely, I believe the growling, menacing voice belongs to one Michael Landon.
DAGNY: Ha! I think you’re right. You can hear it on the word “cost.” He must have thought the kid’s real voice didn’t sound threatening enough.
Then we have a big pileup on the field again, with Albert at the bottom.
DAGNY: Does Albert stand up and start vomiting blood?
WILL: Yeah, this is what actually GIVES him leukemia. Like, the stress on his immune system.
He doesn’t, but he does struggle to stand.
“Chaaarles,” Ma whispers in alarm.
“Don’t worry, Pete will take him out now,” Pa reassures her.
But Pete just shouts at him in disbelief. “On your feet, Albert! Come on, get mean!”
Albert makes it up, and the crowd applauds politely.
But Ma and Pa are not clapping politely. “I’ll get him out,” Pa says.
But when he tells Ellerbee to take Albert out, the coach just looks at him in disbelief and says, “What?”
Pa says fine, he’ll take him out himself.
WILL/DAGNY: Oh, CASHEW!!!
At this point our seventeen-year-old cat Cashew stepped on the remote and backed out from the episode, greatly disrupting the story’s flow. (While I rarely mention it, he does this at least once per viewing.)
Anyways, Pa interrupts the game and shouts “Time out!”
WILL/DAGNY: Oh, no!/Chuck, don’t!/etc.
WILL: It’s just like that grandma who ran onto the field during Alexander’s soccer game when he was ten.
Understandably, Albert mewls that he doesn’t want to stop.
DAGNY: Oh my God, this is so embarrassing.
Doc Baker, who is in attendance in case of such emergencies, does a cursory examination and declares Albert now has at least two broken ribs.
The Doc/Chuck Coalition of Guilt stares daggers at Ellerbee, with Pa saying, “What kind of man are you?”
WILL: Well, that’s maybe a bit dramatic, Charles.
Ellerbee simply looks unhappy, and Doc and the Ingallses take Albert away.
WILL: Good grief, eleven minutes left? What else could possibly happen?
Ellerbee puts Dan in for Albert.
DAGNY: I told you, the son winds up in a wheelchair.
Appalled, Dan says, “Me?”
WILL: That was my reaction when my dad made me join Little League.
Mrs. Ellerbee, who’s also appalled, rises and tells her husband Dan’s too small to be put on the front lines.
“You promised!” she says. Ellerbee gives her a look of disgust and says, “I didn’t promise you anything. Stop interfering.”
Stunned, Sandra watches as her husband jumps back into the game.
Meanwhile at Doc’s office, Doc is bandaging Albert up. You can still hear the noise of the game.
DAGNY: Where is the football field?
WILL: Behind the Mercantile, I think.
Albert is fretting about the game, but Doc says he nearly “shoved one of those broken ribs right through a lung.”
“What would have happened then?” Albert asks.
WILL [as DOC]: “Oh, you’d have been fine.”
Albert says Coach Ellerbee is a Svengali who made it seem like he had no other option but to play.
Doc says the pain was a message from God that his body couldn’t take it anymore, which is a sensible way to put it, and a variation on the desperate arguments he made trying to save the kid from the faith healer. (Hagen is good in this one.)
DAGNY: Look! There’s a vaccine scar on Albert’s arm.
Indeed, there is. Probably a smallpox vaccine, which in a nice coincidence was around by the 1800s. (Standard issue at the Pierre orphanage? Or did Doc give it to Albert when he arrived in Walnut Grove?)
Of course, this specific vaccine scar is real, Matthew Labyorteaux being among the last generation of American children to receive one. By 1980, vaccination had eradicated smallpox from the world; it’s the only human disease ever to be completely eliminated. (Anti-vaxxers in America today are like foie gras ducks, kept in the dark and forcefed lies until they’re bursting with ignorance.)
Albert says he wants to watch the rest of the game. Ma doesn’t like it, but back they go.
Dan Ellerbee’s face is now covered in blood.
DAGNY: Does Albert go and make a dramatic speech encouraging everybody to quit? It’s totally Dead Poets Society.
WILL: Yeah, and Coach Ellerbee is like, “Leave, Mr. Ingalls!” and the rest of them stand up and say “O Captain my Captain.” . . .
Well, Groveland come close to winning, but not close enough.
Albert limps back over to rejoin the players, just in time for Ellerbee to make a brutal speech about how “no game you lose is a good game.”
Albert and Dan shake their heads, aghast, and Ellerbee literally shoves them out of the way to stomp away and pout.
(This is the sort of thing that made me step back from music – doing our best, achieving our best, and being made to feel like shit for coming in second. I was sad to do it, but it wasn’t fun anymore. And just look at the fulfilling life I managed to live anyhow!)
Sandra Ellerbee watches this from the sidelines, her face electric with loathing for her husband.
DAGNY: Does she take over as Head Coach?
That night, Dan Ellerbee skips dinner and lies in bed depressed.
Dan tells his mom he hates football and always has. “I know,” she says.
Dan’s got a small part in the story, but James Jarnigan is pretty good in it, I think.
Meanwhile, in his study, Pete Ellerbee is biting his nails, twitching, and reading his stupid scrapbook again.
DAGNY: It’s you rereading your recaps over and over.
WILL: Oh, haw haw.
Sandra comes in and tells him Dan basically hates him now, but Ellerbee waves this away, saying the kid’s fine.
When she presses the point, Ellerbee says cruelly, “I think his coach would know more about that than his mother.”
WILL/DAGNY: [gasp]
But Sandra ignores the jab, because she’s got a better one of her own:
Ellerbee gives her a hard look and hisses, “Well, you make a sissy out of him if you want to, I’m gonna make him a man.”
DAGNY [as SANDRA]: “Hey, I’m not the one who slept with Noël Coward.”
Finally, Sandra does go full JD Vance, screaming and hurling football trophies to the floor.
Ellerbee seizes her and screams “Stop it!” – but she won’t stop it, snarling back, “Hurting people doesn’t make you a man! Knowing how to love them does!”
Ellerbee stares at her.
DAGNY: She’s gonna get ejected from the game.
Eventually he lets her go and says, “If the boy doesn’t want to play football he doesn’t have to.” (I guess it isn’t a phonograph horn after all, just a . . . sculpture of a horn?)
But lest we think he’s learned something, he immediately starts talking about how Albert is a better player than Dan ever will be, and, he implies, a better son.
Saying nothing, Sandra exits, possibly to get a gun.
Next we see the team at football practice again. Albert approaches and says his ribs are getting better, but when Ellerbee starts talking about him coming back to the team, Albert says he’s not coming back.
He mentions he wants to be a doctor, and therefore his studies take precedence.
DAGNY [as ALBERT]: “Meep meep meep meep meep.” He’s totally the Mary of this one.
Then he nicely says the competitive approach just isn’t any fun.
He shrugs, says good luck, and leaves.
WILL: Matthew Labyorteaux is kind of phoning it in in this one.
Another march plays softly on the soundtrack, and Ellerbee rather brusquely cancels practice.
“I’m going home to talk to my son,” he says.
Suddenly Voiceover Laura tells us Coach Ellerbee was a changed man after that, and everybody had a lot more fun.
DAGNY: WHAT? That’s the end?
Yep.
DAGNY: You’re kidding. There’s no final scene with him and the son?
Nope. Not kidding. Bum-Bum-Ba-Dum.
STYLE WATCH: Pete Ellerbee seems to be wearing the same blue pinstripe suit that Pete Rawlins did last week.
Dagny thought some of Sandra’s style choices questionable, but liked her blue game-day ensemble.
She also questioned whether the Coach would have gone with a classic football sweater given the hot weather.
And as for Charles, well . . .
THE VERDICT: I’m not a fan of this one. The guest performers are all good, especially William Traylor . . . but his character is so unlikable and his Middle-Aged Man Redemption so abrupt, it leaves a bad taste.
Then again, Dags liked it, and I have to admit, watching it with her made it much more enjoyable. (Well, as always.)
DAGNY: Yeah, I liked it. The ending was horrible, but I think it’s better than the other football one. It’s more Friday Night Lights, about the football culture. It’s about how sport has lost its original purpose by the late Twentieth Century.
WILL: Yeah, similar to the take on wrestling in the Milo Stavroupolis one. I agree with that, but I still like the Winoka football one better.
DAGNY: Well, neither of them are as good as the baseball one.
See y’all next time. And happy Pride!
UP NEXT: The Silent Cry
Walnut Groovy 