Game Changer

Jim is Teddy’s father, a Walthorne High alumnus and former football player. He is characterized by his frequent nostalgia and idealization of football and Teddy’s future in the sport. Jim believes Teddy’s injuries were due to an accident and positively views Teddy’s prognosis and his chance for playing football again. Jim upholds the toxic views that football makes a boy into a man, and that the small town in which the Youngbloods live need the football team to survive.

Jim deals in cliches that indicate his preference not to deal with the real-time, real-world realities that begin to unfold. His very first line in the novel reveals this tendency: He walks into the hospital bed and looks down at his son, his body strung with wires and tubes, an intubating tube running into his mouth, the only noise the steady press of the ventilator, and he asks, “How’s my guy? / How’s my man? / You look great, Teddy” (10).

As evidence begins to mount of the reality of the Hit Parade and the culpability of the entire football program, Jim still cannot entirely disavow the sport he loves. He resists acknowledging the disturbing reality that Teddy was hurt not by accident, but by a deliberate late hit. After Ethan’s confession, Jim confronts Coach Bizetti in a moment of growth, admitting that he was fooled and that the coach’s responsibility was to know what was going on with the team. As Teddy returns to consciousness, Jim realizes that his family is his most important priority, not a football game or title.

Sarah Youngblood is Teddy’s mother. She is emotional, fraught with anxiety, and angry that Teddy was hurt playing football. She left the Youngblood family due to unhappiness and the need to find her own identity. She fixates on Teddy’s physical comfort in the hospital, continuously changing his pillow the way he likes it. In Teddy’s comatose state, Sarah explains her reasons for separating from Jim and shares her guilt over leaving. She feels responsible for Teddy’s injury in that if she hadn’t left, he might not have been hurt.

Sarah foils Jim’s optimism about Teddy’s future football glory days with anger and pessimism about the sport. She dismisses football as barbaric and “crazy” (110) and reveals that neither she nor Teddy’s grandmother were supportive of Teddy’s football activities. In her distress, Sarah expresses an overprotective defense of her son. As cool and deliberate as Jim appears, Sarah, after two days in the hospital, is emotionally wrung-out, desperate to feel Teddy’s hand squeeze hers. Sarah is the first of Teddy’s parents to believe something more than an accident happened to Teddy and demonstrates her priorities to be with Teddy when he wakes from his coma. Sarah, unphased by her conflict with Jim, asks, “What is it you want to tell us?” (284).