High school football is one of the identifying institutions of twentieth-century Texas. It is not unusual to see youthful football players placed on the same pedestal as the cowboy, oil man, or other icons of the Lone Star State, and many consider high school football to be cast in the state's rough-hewn image. In fact, it is shaped in the image of its coaches who are, by and large, an enigma to most of us. We think of them as caricatures, men who are alternately revered and vilified (usually depending on how many games they have won recently), but they have always been members of a traditional, closed society, and we do not really know them in their complexities.