Life, Loss, And 8-Man Football On Indigenous Reservations With Journalist John Glionna

For decades, journalist John Glionna roamed the American West chasing stories that others overlooked: small towns, strange landmarks, and unforgettable characters. But it was in McDermitt, Nevada that Glionna found the heart of his first nonfiction book, No Friday Night Lights: Reservation Football on the Edge of America. What began as a tale about a struggling eight-man football team turned into something far richer: a chronicle of identity, belonging, and survival in a place most Americans will never visit. In this wide-ranging conversation, Glionna reflects on building trust in tight-knit communities, navigating controversy, and why these stories matter more than ever.

Transcript

Cowboys & Indians: You’ve been a journalist for decades, with experience at the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, and Outside. What drew you to narrative nonfiction, and how has it changed your approach as a writer?

John Glionna: Well, we had just talked, I guess before we started taping, about fiction and nonfiction. While I prefer reading nonfiction these days—and that’s what my stock-in-trade is—there are devices in nonfiction work that we owe to fiction: character development, scene description, conversation, and all of that.

I was a reporter at the Kansas City Star in 1986, and I was a comp reporter, so I was doing a lot of stories. I’ve always been sort of a storyteller. I’m not going to win any awards—I never have—for investigative reporting, although I did one that was nominated for a Pulitzer. But billions are nominated. The idea of a Pulitzer nomination is like a charge filed—just because it’s filed doesn’t mean you’re guilty. And if your story is nominated for a Pulitzer by your editors, it doesn’t mean it’s any good. It’s only for the finalists.

But I was more of a storyteller. I was doing a lot of police stuff, and there was a local grocery store near my apartment in Kansas City. It was kind of a transitional neighborhood. In the mid-1980s, Ronald Reagan had enacted a series of budget cuts—you’re too young to remember this—but what he was doing, this was pre-Trump, was battling with the air traffic controllers. They went on strike, and he just replaced them all with scabs. He also cut funding to mental health nationally. So, a lot of people who had been in institutions were let out and put into halfway houses, and there just happened to be a halfway house near this grocery store, which totally changed the clientele.

I’d go into the store and there would be all these crazy characters. I remember the Star had a magazine at the time, and this was the first time I’d ever written a magazine-length story. I pitched the story to the editor, and he even wrote a column that ran with my story about my pitch. He said I had the nervous eyes of a basketball point guard and these liverwurst-buff-colored, terrible shoes. I paced back and forth in front of him saying, “Bill, you’ve got to run this—this is a great story.” Night of the Living Dead had been a pretty popular movie, so this became known in the neighborhood as the Night of the Living Safeway.

There were characters like the Moon Lady, who had sparkles in her hair and a pet rabbit. The President’s foreign affairs advisor would stand outside and give Reagan advice. There was Safari Lady, who dressed in black safari gear. You name it—there were all these wonderful characters. I dove deep, and it was the first time I was really able to expand my writing—write about the scenes and develop the characters.

After that, people were saying, “Whoa, hey, this is pretty good.” I started to get comments like “Where did you find this story?” And that’s been a theme in my career. I like to dive deep, and I kind of pride myself on finding stories that maybe others wouldn’t.

One of the stories in my collection coming out in August, Rebels and Outliers, is a compilation of front-page stories I wrote for the Los Angeles Times. One of them is about a phone booth that was left standing in the Mojave Desert between Las Vegas and L.A. in the early 1990s. It was an old Ma Bell phone booth—not near any road, just out there. It had been used by truck drivers back in the 1960s when there was a mine nearby. The mine closed, the road went away, but for some reason, Ma Bell never took the phone out. It became an internet sensation—the Mojave Desert Phone Booth. I went out and spent a day answering the phone there.

That’s the kind of stuff I love. I’ll give you one more. I did two stories in San Francisco. One was about a night watchman at Alcatraz Island. After all the tourists leave, he’s the only guy there. He walks the old prison with a flashlight—it was a crazy night. I also did a story about the baseball team at San Quentin. Who would’ve guessed they have a team? It’s made up of guys serving life sentences, and they’re pretty good players. But they only play home games—San Quentin never travels. That really intrigued me.

So these are kind of walks on the wild side. I like going places others might not go. That’s what led me to McDermitt, the setting for my book No Friday Night Lights.

That book started as a freelance piece I wrote for a small paper in Las Vegas. I’d left the LA Times in 2015 and still lived in Vegas. I loved what I call the Outback of Nevada. I found this football team and was looking for ways to tell the story of the isolation of the American West.

Out here, you face these great distances. I used to live in Virginia and worked at the Norfolk Virginian-Pilot, but out West, it’s different. In Texas, you’ll be driving and see a town on the horizon—but it’s still 100 miles away. In North Carolina, when you see a town’s lights, you’re there. But in Nevada, there’s all this empty space.

I was in a little town called Gabbs, Nevada. The high school was one room in an elementary school. Grades 9 through 12 had one teacher—two kids in ninth grade, one in tenth. It reminded me of old Western schoolhouses. They had a basketball team—the Gabbs Tarantulas—named for the annual tarantula migration out there. I’d love to see that—hundreds of tarantulas crossing the road like people in Yellowstone watching bison.

But they didn’t have enough kids for a full team, so they had girls play too. It was co-ed. Even so, they had to shut down the team. That gave me the idea to find a football team so isolated that I could tell a bigger story. I called a superintendent I knew—Dave Jensen—and told him what I was looking for. He said, “John, you need to call Richard Egan up in McDermitt.”

McDermitt is a little town on the Nevada-Oregon border, along Highway 95. The border runs right through town. Richard Egan is the football coach of the McDermitt Bulldogs. They’ve struggled for years. When I called him—my number has a 415 area code—he almost didn’t pick up. Who would call McDermitt from San Francisco?

Eventually, we became friends. After the initial story, I kept calling him. “Hey Coach, what’s fall looking like?” He’d say, “Well, I’m out there doing what I can. I’m wandering the hallways, and the kids are trying to hide from me ‘cause they know I’m looking for players.” He’d say, “I’d say 75% chance we’ll have a team.” He didn’t actually talk like that—he’s Paiute-Shoshone—but I just loved the guy.

I never played high school football, but I loved being able to say, “Hey Coach.” So I said, “Richard, why don’t I come hang out in town?” My friends thought I was crazy. McDermitt has two gas stations, a casino, and a general store—attached to one of the gas stations. But I did it, and the story unfolded.

So that transition I made back in 1986—that realization that narrative nonfiction gave me more room to roam—stuck with me. A magazine story offers more freedom, and a book even more. One editor I worked with said, “Books are dangerous—you’re swimming in deep waters.” Going from magazine to book takes more development and attention.

No Friday Night Lights: Reservation Football on the Edge of America was my first traditional nonfiction book. I love the form. In fact, I don’t really pitch newspaper stories anymore. I go from book project to book project now. But my fascination is still the West.

C&I: In No Friday Night Lights, for those who haven’t read it yet, the story centers around an eight-man football team that—when they can field enough players—almost never wins. But what becomes clear early in the book is that football is really just the entry point to deeper social and cultural issues affecting the community. How did you balance writing about the football team on the surface level with exploring the larger issues at play?

Glionna: Well, I showed up in town in early August. The Bulldogs play, as we had discussed, in an eight-man football league. So this is another manifestation of being kind of out in the middle. I don't call it the middle of nowhere—I call it the middle of somewhere—because it is somewhere to those people.

And so you're out there, and you don't have enough kids. They struggle to get eight kids to come out and play every year. Some years, they don't get enough kids, so they don’t have seasons. The local league will say, “Well, you can't be trusted to get enough. If we put you on, say, a 14-game schedule and then you can't field a team, there are going to be holes in our schedule. So we're going to put you on probation, and you'll get a four-game season.” But for these kids, if they want to play, four games is like four Super Bowls.

They don't always have a team. When I showed up in August, I wasn't sure there was going to be a season. Richard had said that when I got there—about two weeks before Labor Day—we started having practices at night. School hadn’t started yet, and five kids showed up. I said, “Start practicing.”

There are scenes in the book where he really needs these kids more than they need him. They want to play football—kind of, sort of. And a lot of them… there's an interesting mix of young guys from the reservation and sons of ranchers. One of them was the son of a highway patrolman. But they all share that rural experience.

And at some point—I don’t think this is a spoiler—we find out pretty much right after Labor Day that they don’t have enough kids. It’s a pretty dramatic turn in the book, and it shows that the kids who did show up really, really wanted to play football. They really wanted that experience during their adolescence—that bonding. And suddenly, because of the decision of one freshman who wasn’t sure he was going to play, they didn’t have a season.

It was very poignant. I go into great depth in the book about the day they learned, and I can talk about that more if you’re interested. But what happened is, after I called my editor back at the University of Nebraska—who had already commissioned the book—I said, “We don’t have a season here. But I don’t think that’s going to stop me,” because in the couple of weeks I was out there, I had found that this is a fascinating place.

I had envisioned the book to be about high school football, with the town as a backdrop—a supporting character. What I ended up with was writing about the town itself, with the football team as a manifestation of one of the ways they’re struggling with depopulation. That’s happening across the American West, because people are moving—and it’s been that way for at least a generation. Towns are losing population. Some of them are really kind of closing up. They don’t have sidewalks, but if they did, they’d roll them up—because people move away.

So I ended up writing about some pretty fascinating characters. And I will say that each one told a story that you would never, ever expect—the sort of richness, the Shakespearean tragedy of people’s lives. From both coaches—Richard Egan—and if you'd like, I mean, is it okay if I tell a little bit about that? But we can move on.

C&I: You were an outsider coming into not only a remote place like McDermitt but also a community shaped by the Paiute and Shoshone tribes and nearby reservations. What was the process like in earning the trust of the people there—especially when you started delving into some of the deep and personal issues in their lives?

Glionna: Well, trust came slowly. I was immediately trusted by the two coaches. I was older than both of them, but they were almost my age, and I liked them quite a bit. One of them was a Paiute-Shoshone guy who lived in town, but he was from another nearby reservation, and he had played when the team was good in the ’80s and ’90s—they won the state championship for their league. So they knew they had a winning history, a winning tradition. He had this great connection to the land itself.

The other was a white guy from Reno who was raised by a kind of crazy-ass father named Mo, who was a professional wrestler and boxing promoter. He spent his growing-up years in the backseat of a car, driving to boxing matches. He became a boxer himself. And I loved both of those guys. When they told me their stories, I was like, "We’re off and running."

The kids I had a more difficult time with—and I’ll explain it in a moment, especially with some on the reservation. I blame myself for one of them, and not necessarily the other. I had images of myself coming into McDermitt as kind of this hipster, obviously liberal, big-city journalist. And I thought all the kids would be like, “Hey, wow—what’s it like living in the big city?” But we were totally on different sides of the cultural spectrum. There was less curiosity on their part than mine. I would talk to these guys, and it was difficult for me to get them to open up. They were very cliquish with each other—the res kids hung out together, and so did the rancher kids, in some ways.

I remember coming to Richard one day and saying, “How can I break this?” And he goes, “You’ve just got to be yourself. They’re kids.” I was sweating it—because if you really want someone to like you, chances are you won’t be yourself.

I remember one day, one of the young players—the best running back—I used pseudonyms for these boys, but I cornered him. It was very difficult after practice; they’d be in the locker room, together, very insulated. It was hard to get them alone and say, “Hey, can we talk? Can I buy you a cup of coffee?” So I asked him if I could come by his house, and he said, “Yeah, sure.”

So I drove onto the reservation. It was a Saturday or Friday afternoon—I can’t recall. He was outside, and it was very difficult to find—no addresses. He ended up having to come out to the road and wave me down. I was just totally lost. It’s a pretty big reservation.

We sat outside on his front stoop. He said his parents didn’t really allow strangers in the house. And I totally got that. That’s what I was—I was a guy, I was a foreigner, and I was white. I was not from town. And my politics were completely opposite from most of the people on the reservation.

But once we started talking, it was really fascinating—he really opened up. At one point, I just asked him straight out—imagine asking a 17-year-old this—I gave a pregnant pause before the question and said, “Are you a virgin?” I just wanted to know. That was important to me growing up, and I wanted to know what it meant to him.

He admitted he was. He talked about how difficult it was to let nature take its course in such an isolated area—especially on a reservation where a lot of people are related. He had gone to a Future Farmers of America meeting in Reno and met a girl from another reservation. They started texting. But he recognized the last name—there are only so many last names on the reservation. He asked his grandmother, and she said, “Oh yeah, she’s a cousin of yours.”

So he stopped. He didn’t want to go there at all. His father said, “Listen, your mom’s my cousin—it doesn’t matter.” But he said, “No, no, no. I’m waiting. I’m holding out for myself until I get out to the real world.” You’re going places where everyone is related. There’s that inner connectivity and a collective listening ear on the reservation. Everybody kind of knows what you’re doing.

To answer your question—until I left, I was, in some circles, someone people didn’t trust. At one point, while I was in McDermitt, I tried to build interest in the book. I have a website and write a blog, and I was writing—I think I called it Days in McDermitt or something like that.

I’d go to practice at night and come home, and rather than filing away my notes and saying, “I’ll get to this in January when I sit down to write,” I was writing in real time, like it was a column for a newspaper. I’d write it like it was ready for print and post it online.

At one point early on in practices, the coaches still had only five or six guys. One of them said, “Well, at least we don’t have the twins here.” I asked, “Who are the twins?” “Oh, a couple of res kids that came last year—Billy and Joe.” One of them said, “I thought they were developmentally disabled because they wouldn’t tackle. In games, they’d step aside when the running back came at them.”

I wrote about that. I mentioned the coaches saying, “At least Jimmy and Joe aren’t here—the two developmentally disabled kids from the reservation.” The day after I posted that—within hours—my email lit up. People on the reservation saw it. Silly me, thinking I was just writing for readers in San Francisco. But people knew I was in town.

I got a call from an activist who had been protesting a new lithium mine being opened nearby—part of the book too. He was an outsider like me but knew a lot of people on the reservation. He said, “Hey man, you’ve got a problem. The mother of those two kids wrote to me, and she’s livid.” I thought, uh-oh.

The principal got involved. She said I had broken the agreement I signed by exposing the identities of kids. I went to the superintendent of schools in Winnemucca—Dave Jensen—and visited him. He said, “Yeah, you kind of stepped in it. You’re writing for a very hypervigilant rural community not used to outsiders. I don’t think you broke anything—nobody outside knows who Billy and Joe are. But everyone here does.”

So, I wasn’t kicked off campus per se—but I was. The principal called me in and really gave me a dressing down. She was protective of those kids.

One Saturday, at a little league football game, I was standing next to one of the coaches, and suddenly someone was right in my ear. She startled me. She said, “Keep my kids out of your bullshit stories.” Whoa. I turned around and asked, “Are you Doreen?”—the twins’ mother. She said, “No,” but went on talking to people and pointing at me.

I don’t like people in my grill. Not that I grew up in rough neighborhoods, but I was thinking, “Hey, man, you’ve got to back off. You created this little fire.” Even after that, there were two other sisters who worked in the general store—they wouldn’t wait on me. They glared at me every time I passed.

During my last week in town, I saw one of them in the Sen—the local casino bar where people go to eat and have beers. She was playing a slot machine. I walked up to her and said, “Well, I’m leaving.” She turned and said, “Why are you even saying this to me?” I said, “I just wanted one more chance to apologize.” She said, “Apology not accepted—so get out of my face,” and turned around.

Now, I am never going to win her over. But I did win over others. I approached a father on the reservation—a struggling drug addict who had played football, and now his son and daughter were playing. He wanted to be a good example. He was actually a coach on the team. When I approached him, he said, “The elders told me not to talk to you. But people make mistakes. I’m going to give you a second chance.” We became good friends.

There were also three women—a grandmother, daughter, and granddaughter—who were really interesting. I wanted to explore the matriarchal nature of reservation culture, where women are strong figures, as in many cultures. At first, they were reticent. But now, we’re all pretty good friends.

So yeah, I lit a brush fire of my own making—and then I had to go around town putting it out. But in the end, the people who liked me, liked me even more. The people who were never going to give me a chance—probably never will.

I did a little research on my book title—it’s a derivative of the most famous book about high school football, Friday Night Lights, by Buzz Bissinger, I think. I read about him. He didn’t exactly get along with the football team either.

So the lesson is: when you enter any kind of subculture as an outsider, you try your best to fit in—but you’re not always going to be one of them. That’s really what I learned. But I’ve gone back to McDermitt since—and I love the place. I love the people.

C&I: You’ve spent a lot of time in McDermitt and dedicated a significant part of your professional career to getting this book out and everything since. Why is it important to tell these stories—especially from places that most Americans wouldn’t even have on a map or think to visit?

Glionna: Well, I think it’s—I'll answer that with two points I’d like to make. The way I liken my time in McDermitt is this: if you're driving down a country road—you’re from the city—you get an impulse, you get off the freeway and drive into town. You're on a country road with cornfields on either side, and you’re motoring down. If you stop, turn your car off, and let the engine stop—it's rattle and hum—and it’s totally quiet, just stop and listen. You're going to hear and see things out in that cornfield. You're going to see crows coming up. You're going to see predatory birds. You might see a fox—things you wouldn’t see going by at 40, 50 miles an hour, just labeling it as anonymous cornfield.

That’s what my stop at McDermitt was. If you stop long enough in these supposedly isolated places and wait for the population to either embrace you or reject you, you're going to realize there are a lot of interesting stories to be told in these places. They might only have two gas stations—but they have really kind of interesting stories to tell.

And I think it's really important, especially today. When Donald Trump was elected for a second term, I was living in probably one of the most liberal areas—San Francisco—and a lot of people in my silo were saying, “Oh God, I don’t trust whoever... I can’t even talk to somebody who would vote for Donald Trump.” It just happens—my wife is Chinese, and she’s a Trump voter. So I’m very used to dealing with that dynamic. I know what’s going on out there in America. We have discussions about different views.

But going to places like McDermitt—I know it’s a red part of the country. It’s a red part of the state. And you can’t dismiss people as two-dimensional, cardboard characters who vote one way, so therefore you have nothing in common or nothing to say. I would say that 95% of the people I met were Trump-supporting Republicans, but some of them are some of the most colorful characters—and they’re good friends of mine.

So I’ve kind of breached the divide. All it takes is a little time—to go out, turn your car off in the cornfield, and listen. And so I think I don’t make snap judgments about people. Whether I’m coming from Appalachia, or rural North Carolina, or Virginia—any of these places—some might say, “Oh, I wouldn’t have anything to say to them.” But we would have a conversation. I mean, it depends—if people put their guard down, there is dialogue to be had in America today.

And I think that’s an important reason why this matters. An urban guy goes to a rural area to write about football—but he comes back with stories about the whole human condition.

C&I: What I really appreciated about your book is that, in traditional Westerns, we often lionize the myth of the rugged individual—the man or woman who can stand alone against all odds, whether it’s nature or enemies. But in your book, the focus shifts to the interdependence of these remote communities. People rely on one another because they live so far from everything. Was that an intentional theme in your writing? And how has that shaped your understanding of places like McDermitt?

Glionna: You're right. We mythologize the West—like it’s filled with a bunch of Daniel Boone characters. And they’re there, believe me. I mean, they’re there. These are the people that, if there were an Armageddon, and when the dust cleared, there’d be smoke coming from several houses out near McDermitt. People would survive it and be doing just fine.

But for the most part, people there are part of a culture—they’re part of a society. They want it both ways. I remember asking my landlord—who’s a very interesting woman—why she chose to live where she does. Why live here? It’s difficult. And maybe in your neck of the woods, so to speak, you have to drive long distances, too. But in McDermitt, to go to a grocery store is 75 miles. To see a doctor—there are no services. You have to leave town for everything.

I became part of the weekly migration south to the Walmart in Winnemucca. I’d see some of my neighbors there. For me, it was a good thing—I got out of town during the weekend. It felt like, “Oh, I’m stretching my legs. I’m getting to see other places outside McDermitt.”

So, there is that umbilical cord—they realize it’s there, and they rely on it. Many are still receiving government paychecks. If they’re ranchers, they still have to sell their product on the market to survive. They want to be part of the American experience. But, as a friend of mine once said, “They just want a little more elbow room.”

They don’t want to live in a tract neighborhood. They want at least five acres—that’s just the starting point. I don’t think a lot of them are on the run from anything. There’s this cliché that these are people preparing for the next revolution. I’m heading up to Idaho for a road trip, and when I tell people, they say, “Oh yeah, you’ll run into that crowd.” But you don’t really find that.

At least I didn’t. In my travels, I didn’t find people who were out there because they distrusted outsiders. They just weren’t used to them. And it was more about what they wanted in life and how they were going to provide it for themselves—real life.

And I sort of buried the lede in my story. My landlord said, “I just like to see the moon come up at night.” She liked to be outside. One of the coaches had 13 cats—he was a cat guy. The cats prowled around on his few acres of land.

So, it’s more about what they’re pursuing than what they’re trying to avoid or push back against. These aren’t people building walls around McDermitt with guns facing outward. They’re just people going about their business—and they’re surprised you even stopped.

C&I: What has the response from the community been like since the book was published?

Glionna: Well, it's funny—it’s in the library. And I’ll be totally honest with you, it’s in the library, there are a couple of copies. I called up because I was going to go up and have a reading in McDermitt, but both of the coaches warned me against it. We didn’t know if I was going to get heckled, and it would’ve been really uncomfortable.

And I blame myself—that says more about me than it does about McDermitt. There’s a community center there, and a former coach from the 1990s—he was part of my book—had done some interviews with me. Afterward, he and some others got together and started an annual Hall of Fame for McDermitt’s athletes. They give out awards.

He said, “Why don’t you come out with your book at the next awards thing? We could talk about it.” And I thought about it… but I just chickened out. I haven’t been back.

I was also trying to schedule some book readings in Winnemucca, nearby. And here’s another thing—perhaps sadly—about the rural West, or rural America in general: there just aren’t many bookstores out there.

But to answer your question—I hightailed it away from some people. Still, I’ve embraced McDermitt in a very large way, and much of McDermitt has embraced me. But I would say… there are a couple of people who were probably glad I left.

C&I: I know you have a new book coming out as well. Could you talk for a moment about that and what the process was like?

Glionna: Well, I mentioned earlier that for years I was a rover. A rover is a sort of reporter who just goes out and finds interesting stories out in the ether. I covered any stories I could find west of the Mississippi, and I wrote about a lot of interesting characters.

This book is a collection of about 30 stories that I wrote—some magazine pieces, some newspaper stories—and they’re all about that whole Western idea. You might not be Daniel Boone, but a lot of you out there are rebels, and a lot of you are outliers by definition. So that’s the title of the book: Rebels and Outliers: Real Stories of the American West.

In the foreword, I write about my search for good narrative stories to tell—how to find stories that other reporters don’t necessarily see, and what attracts me to them. I’m hoping I’ll connect with readers through this. So far, pre-sales are pretty good. The release date is August 12th.