Published: August 28, 2008 11:55 pm      

Eric Knopsnyder | Book details Whale of an effort

When high school football season kicks off tonight in western Pennsylvania, it’s safe to assume that none of the local teams will face the kinds of obstacles that the Barrow Whalers encounter on a regular basis.

Sure, there might be a bus ride of an hour or more, but there undoubtedly won’t be any 36-hour treks like the one the Whalers made last season.

And it might get downright cold for a few games toward the end of the season here, but it can’t compare with what Barrow fans routinely face.

Think fielding a football team is expensive here? It surely doesn’t come close to the budget required to fly the Whalers to their road games and fly visitors in for home contests.

Those are just some of the challenges facing the team, which is chronicled in Lew Freedman’s “Thunder on the Tundra – Football Above the Artic Circle” (Alaska Northwest Books, $14.95).

Freedman, a Chicago-based sportswriter who lived in Alaska for 17 years, offers an insider’s perspective on the team, as he spent the 2007 season – Barrow’s first full football schedule – with the Whalers.

So exactly why would the northernmost community in America, with just 4,800 people, try to field a football team knowing that its closest rival is 400 miles away and that many of its opponents are even further removed?

Superintendent Trent Blankenship was taking a big gamble by starting the program, but with dropout rates skyrocketing and drug and alcohol abuse on the rise among young people, he was hoping that a football team would galvanize the community and give students a reason to stay in school.

It wasn’t an easy sell in an area so far removed – geographically and socially – from the American mainstream. To many Barrow residents fishing, hunting and traditional native sports – such as the two-foot high kick and the blanket toss – carry more weight than football.

Throw in the logistical problems – grass won’t grow there and summer snowfalls aren’t unheard of – and a winning effort was as much about pulling everything together as it was beating the opposing team.

The story itself is a fascinating one that has been told in a number of TV and newspaper articles, but Freedman’s tale is the most in-depth look at the Whalers. At times, “Thunder on the Tundra” can be repetitive, with a handful of chapters touching on the same issue, but Freedman is thorough. His many hours with the team give him unique insight into the minds of the players, coaches and townspeople.

Because the book is written for a broader audience, it sometimes dumbs down the football situations and explains routine terminology that most fans probably already know.

“Thunder” also contains more than two dozen photos, but with black-and-white pictures crammed into a handful of pages, they offer little insight into the world of Barrow beyond the football field.

That’s where Freedman’s writing and interviews come into play. He talks with a number of the Inupiat Eskimos native to Barrow and writes about how they’re adapting to the intrusion from the “Lower 48.” The interplay between new and old, native and American becomes almost as interesting as the games themselves, with Freedman recapping how players on road trips gobble up the opportunity to bask in the mainstream monotony – think McDonald’s and Wal-Mart – that the rest of us take for granted.

As much as football helps Barrow become a bit more “American,” Freedman’s book allows the readers to connect to a world that most of us will never see.

For that, Freedman deserves to take a dip in the Arctic Ocean, which is located just off the Whalers’ field. After all, that’s what they do in Barrow after a winning effort.



Eric Knopsnyder is the sports editor of The Tribune-Democrat.