Tigerland

July 30, 2018
High school teams bear the symbolic weight of the civil rights movement in this intense sports saga. Journalist Haygood (The Butler) follows the Tigers of East High, an all-black school in Columbus, Ohio, through state championship basketball and baseball seasons in the 1968–1969 school year. The Tigers were already a basketball powerhouse—they had won the previous year’s championship—and most games were predictable blowouts of weaker teams; the baseball players, meanwhile, had an undistinguished regular season, but got lucky in the postseason. Haygood emphasizes racial context as the teams weather the de facto segregation of Columbus schools, encounter racial antagonism at road games in white areas, and start wearing afros; he sets the narrative against national racial tensions, Tiger families’ experiences of poverty and the jim crow South, and accounts of historic civil rights episodes like the Emmett Till lynching and Jackie Robinson’s career. Haygood strains for socio-historical import (“nd so it would be—eleven months after the murder of Martin Luther King Jr.—the black kids from East High would be going to the state championship game”) and overhypes a season that doesn’t feel very significant. Nevertheless, Haygood is a passionate storyteller as he expertly captures this period of civil unrest in an American city. Photos.