Title: Big Time
Author: Rus Bradburd
Publisher: Etruscan Press
ISBN: 9798988198567

Could anything be more terrifying to lovers of the Humanities than having your beloved university taken over by a multi-national beer company just for the sake of pushing alcohol sales through the school’s football and basketball programs? (Wait, you ask, isn’t that already the norm?) In Rus Bradburd’s latest book, Big Time, a hilarious satire about the impact of mega-dollar athletic programs on American colleges, we get to imagine how this dystopian vision might look if the “sports and sponsorships trump everything” ideal were taken to its logical conclusion on higher education campuses.
As a noted sports writer who has coached and taught at the collegiate level, Bradburd brings intimate knowledge of the inner workings of the university, enhancing the realism and incisiveness of what is otherwise a facetious send-up about the uncomfortable relationship between education and sports at US colleges. But it is never heavy-handed. He offers a nuanced portrayal of the way the different characters respond to the sportification of the university, making it feel like this is just as much an exploration into unknown moral territory as it is a Swiftian rebuke of the excesses afforded to collegiate sports. Because this is complex ethical terrain, you never quite know where the characters will go as they confront the pressures of the Division I Sports Industrial Complex.
The story centers around five staff and students at the newly rebranded Coors State University, a former state school bought for a billion dollars by the beverage behemoth: a timid, middle-aged history professor, Eugene Mooney, who hawks copies of his book about the cultural appropriation of salsa alongside huge bags of artificially flavored popcorn at the football stadium concession stand; his best friend, Peter Braverman, a pony-tailed radical whose latest book laments the plight of American draft dodgers during the Vietnam War; a new Poetry professor, Layla Sillimon (branded a sellout by her “slam poetry sisters” in the Bay Area for taking the job), whose book of poems went viral because it was mentioned by Taylor Swift on TV; quarterback of the Coors State Silver Bullets, Trevor Knighton, who can’t quite get used to the perks (food, beer, cars, high grades, steroids) that are given to all the football players; and his Croatian teammate, Sasha Dimitrievic, who looks like Shrek and desperately wants to get an English degree to impress his family in the Balkans.
This quirky group of individuals, deftly elaborated in the book, is forced to navigate an upside-down world in which the university mission is to promote football and basketball above all else. Academic funding has been completely cut and staff are required to pay for their own salaries by selling beer, popcorn, programs, and merchandise at home games, or providing some other relevant service. Agriculture profs cut the grass of the football field, Environmental Science profs perform janitorial duties, Criminal Justice profs run security, Poetry profs sell game programs, and English profs…well…they were all axed after they refused to clean the stadium toilets. The football coach decided that. He is effectively in charge of the school.
Each of these characters has their own reasons for why they are uneasy with the new direction the university is taking. The academics face bleak prospects, clearly, but the football players are also worried because, even though they are treated like gods, they can see that this mission inversion is, ultimately, not very beneficial. Even they understand that it is not great that they would have more power than their professors, or even the university president.
As each of them tries to resist and/or make peace with their awkward relationships with the school (and their own interior selves), they explore the limits of what purposeful action might look like in a situation of growing absurdity. How should they respond when their college has been captured by a predatory commercialism that undermines the traditional educational enterprise of the university? And what possible difference could they make as a small group of individuals?
I’ll refrain from laying out the plot of the story, as it would spoil the genuine surprises and hilarity that develops along the way. But, in essence, the five main characters embark, almost inadvertently, on a Quixotic quest to change Coors State so that it better balances education and athletics. With grandiose visions of re-enacting the heroic deeds of Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, Gandhi, Pancho Villa, and so forth, they are soon forced to confront just how compromised they are as agents of change, and just how difficult it will be to even have their voices heard. After all, how do you take a stand against your employer when you still seek tenure? How do go against the team when you still need a football scholarship? How do you take big risks if you have nothing to fall back on? And who would care what they think anyway?! At a more basic and tactical level, what approach would be best: to enact change from within, through committees, or from the outside, through public agitation? And what about the use of violence?
These are questions that many activists face, but the book handles them in quite sensitive and insightful ways. As we readers laugh our way through this truly humorous novel, we are asked to think through the competing pressures that would-be change agents face when taking on large institutional forces. These characters are complicated, flawed, normal(ish) people just trying to make their little corner of the world better, but their situation is not black and white. It is blandly oppressive and dumb (conjuring elements of 1984 and Brave New World). And, as is so true in real life, the decisions they ultimately make have massive, life-altering unintended consequences.
When I first started reading the book, I thought it would be mainly about sports and the impact that sponsorship deals have on institutions of higher learning. But I was pleasantly surprised that it was about far more than just that. The sports dystopia scenario serves as a fascinating and fun setting for exploring more intimate and consequential questions concerning collegial relationships, mentor-mentee relationships, the mission of the university, the role of protest and resistance in shaping institutions, the tactics that should be employed to engender social change, and how to process both success and failure in a social activism campaign (and in one’s own life). While the story does not grapple with contemporary instances of similar protest actions (thankfully), through humor and compelling writing, the book invites a broad consideration of these topics.
Clocking in at just under 300 pages, Rus Bradburd’s Big Time is an engaging, laugh-inducing satire that develops its characters, charts a satisfying plot, and ignites deeper thinking about social issues in an open-handed manner. It’s good writing from a good storyteller who knows his subject-matter. Highly recommended.
Review by Henry Trotter
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