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![]() ![]() Others, like this one, make us laugh while wincing, confronted with the absurdity of ourselves. Some funny books draw their humor from the ways in which they expose us to the absurdity of other people. We know only that the group has been converging on the same hotel for 16 years, dedicating a single weekend annually to the re-creation of that fateful play - forgoing the actual bone breaking. It isn’t performed to reimagine the outcome or to analyze what went wrong. No explanation is given about the reenactment tradition, how it started or why. To wit: “NovemWashington Redskins quarterback Joe Theismann, 36, suffers a career-ending compound fracture of the right leg on a sack by New York Giants linebacker Lawrence Taylor during a telecast of ABC’s ‘Monday Night Football.’” ![]() Kennedy’s assassination, the Challenger explosion or 9/11. They remember it the same way some of us remember John F. So I was simultaneously repelled and attracted by the setup for the novel “The Throwback Special”: middle-aged men meet to reenact one single play from one single football game. In the small town where I grew up in Texas, high school football - Go, Hillsboro Eagles! - was so essential to our culture that, to this day, when old friends get together I inevitably suffer through painfully detailed recollections of games that should, by all rights, have been long forgotten by now. ![]()
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