That Championship Season by Jason Miller

First published: 1972

First produced: 1972, at the New York Shakespeare Festival Public Theatre, New York City

Type of plot: Psychological

Time of work: 1972

Locale: Lackawanna Valley, Pennsylvania

Principal Characters:

• James Daley, a junior high school principal
• Tom Daley, his younger brother
• George Sikowski, the mayor of the town
• Phil Romano, a wealthy businessman in coal strip mining
• The Coach, the architect of the local high school’s basketball triumph twenty years earlier
• Norman Sharmen, the Jewish candidate for mayor

The Play

The Coach, about sixty years old, has lived in his nostalgia-filled home nearly all of his life. In a ritual that he has continued for several years, he and four of his “boys,” as he still calls them, celebrate the twentieth anniversary of their victory in the 1952 Pennsylvania state high school basketball championship. Prominently displayed in the parlor, which provides the sole setting for the play, is the large silver trophy award with the players’ names engraved in it.

George, the current mayor of the town and a none-too-bright former insurance salesman, is facing a reelection battle against a popular reform candidate, Norman Sharmen, who is Jewish. Since George won four years earlier with a mere thirty-two votes—thanks to the Coach’s spirited support—the mayor expects a difficult campaign. Thus, the get-together is also an occasion to map out campaign strategy and solidify the group’s backing. The latter includes the expected financial contribution of Phil, a shady but successful businessman engaged in the toxic practice of open-coal strip mining, a business facilitated by George, who, as mayor, has permitted Phil to have access to lucrative land tracts. Phil seeks release from personal stress by driving his sports car at breakneck speed on the highway and by philandering with various girls and matrons in town, including Marion, George’s wife.

The Coach continues to treat his thirty-eight-year-old “boys” as he has done since the championship season, trying to keep alive the old basketball-court spirit. In fact, even though forced into early retirement for hitting an offensive student, the Coach’s still uses maxims about striving for excellence, enduring pain, building teamwork, and accepting nothing less than success. Initially the group relives the final ten seconds of the championship game, when, one point behind, the absent fifth player, Martin Roads, scored the winning basket. Martin left town soon after, apparently feeling ashamed and guilty for following the single-minded Coach’s order to foul the star black player on the opposing team: Martin was unable to persuade the Coach to return the trophy.

However, soon the magic of the evening is broken as Phil starts to inventory George’s blunders as mayor: higher taxes, more unemployment, an unpleasant garbage strike, and worst of all, an incident involving an elephant that George acquired for the town zoo. The elephant turned out to have been ailing and died one month later. It took ten days to figure out how to bury it, at considerable expense.

With George and the Coach out of earshot, James Daley, who feels both frustrated with the sacrifices he has made for his family, including his ailing father, and insignificant, having attained only the position of school principal, now aspires to become George’s new school superintendent and eventually to achieve even greater political success. He is George’s current campaign manager and takes Phil to task for wavering in his loyalty to George. However, James suggests that with Phil’s financial backing he, himself, could run as an alternative candidate against Sharmen.

George, now back, reveals that he holds a trump card. He and the Coach have discovered that Sharmen’s uncle, now deceased, was a Hollywood writer blacklisted for invoking the Fifth Amendment during Republican Senator Joseph McCarthy’s hearings on communism in the 1950’s. Phil laughs this off as outdated and irrelevant. Annoyed with Phil’s continued hesitancy about George, James reveals to George the affair Phil is having with his George’s wife. George grabs the loaded hair-triggered gun from a rack on the wall and threatens Phil.

In act 2 a calmer George hands over the weapon to the Coach. Phil continues to insist that George cannot win reelection and then accepts James’s challenge to call up Sharmen and offer him financial support. Sharmen laughs off both Phil’s offer and his suggestion of the alleged communist relative. At this point, Tom rolls down the stairs from the upstairs bathroom, unable to handle all the liquor he has consumed. Even though he is a drifter and an alcoholic, financially supported by his brother James, Tom is the only member of the group outside Martin who clearly recognizes the fraudulent nature of their 1952 victory and the emptiness of their lives.

The Coach then tries to explain to James that for former team-mate George to have a chance at re-election, he has to hire a professional Philadelphia public relations firm rather than use James as campaign manager. James threatens to publicize Phil’s affair with the mayor’s wife all over town. George gets so upset that, unable to make it to the bathroom, he vomits into the nearest receptacle, the award trophy.

In act 3, after George is taken upstairs and the trophy is cleaned up, the Coach urges them all to keep the faith. He convinces the returning George that he must “pay the price” to keep Phil’s financial backing. George reports that he has called his wife, who told him that she had done it all to con campaign money out of Phil. George seems to believe this even though Marion was known to be “fast” in high school. The inebriated Tom repeats that the championship season had been a lie and that they are all whooping cranes en route to extinction.

The Coach now replays the recorded radio narration of the final moments of their championship game, which ends with the roar of the crowd. This exorcises the demons out of the shattered team. They sing the Fillmore High School song, make up, and plan their joint support of George’s campaign. The play ends with the team’s ritual of having their photographs taken around the silver cup trophy.

Dramatic Devices

The Coach’s parlor reeks of nostalgia. The bachelor’s faded, old-fashioned living room—the single set in the play—is richly evocative. There is a Tiffany lampshade, a Stromberg-Carlson radio console, and a gun rack on the wall. Framed pictures of distinguished Americans are in evidence, notably those of Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy, as well as that of Senator McCarthy, the anti-communist crusader. The large silver trophy is on the table.

The dialogue is fast-paced, sharp, bawdy, and often funny, with its locker-room humor reflecting Jason Miller’s gift for language and his sensitivity to the dynamics of character. The numerous racial, ethnic, and anti-Semitic slurs betray a conservative, even reactionary, bent. There is Jew-baiting, communist hunting, and money-shuffling in a town full of bigotry and shady dealings. Miller’s grasp of small-town mediocrity and attitudes may stem from his formative years in Scranton, Pennsylvania.

The actors move in and out of the downstairs living room where all the action takes place. Thus, only Tom and George are present at the play’s opening as the other characters are away buying fried chicken and more booze for the party. In subsequent scenes, the Coach, who recently endured surgery and suffers sudden pain, and George, upset by the play’s sordid revelations, are taken to the bedroom upstairs.

Critical Context

Jason Miller wrote little for the theater since he spent more time as an actor and a poet than as a playwright. Accordingly, he attained his reputation in drama nearly exclusively from the acclaim given to That Championship Season, his second full-length play, which won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award, several Tony Awards, and the 1973 Pulitzer Prize in drama.

Miller’s themes found in the play can be traced closely to his Roman Catholic background and education (the Jesuit-affiliated University of Scranton, Pennsylvania, and Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C.), his predilection for athletics and sports, and his life in the kind of small mining town featured in the drama. His first but unsuccessful full-length play, Nobody Hears a Broken Drum (pr. 1970, pb. 1971), also deals with a Pennsylvania coal town, this time set in the nineteenth century.

That Championship Season follows in the tradition of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman (pr., pb. 1949) since both works are about individuals who refuse to examine the moral bankruptcy of their lives and their perverted values of competition and success. Eugene O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh (pr., pb. 1946) is also similar in its theme about the false promises of a pipe dream that motivates individuals and prevents them from seeing themselves as they really are. In the same vein, Jason Miller’s play calls on the strip-all, tell-all realist approaches by playwrights Paddy Chayefsky, Edward Albee, Tennessee Williams, Henrik Ibsen, and Mart Crowley.

Sources for Further Study

Guernsey, Otis L., Jr., ed. “That Championship Season.” In The Best Plays of 1971-1972. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1972.

Kim, Yun-cheol. “Degradation of the American Success Ethic: Death of a Salesman, That Championship Season, and Glengarry Glen Ross.” Journal of English Language and Literature 37 (Spring, 1991): 233-248.

Miller, Jason. “On the Set: An Interview with Jason Miller.” The New Yorker 48 (May 20, 1972): 33.

Shelton, Frank W. “Sports and the Competitive Ethic: Death of a Salesman and That Championship Season.” Ball State University Forum 20, no. 2 (1979): 17-21.

Simon, John. “That Championship Season.” Hudson Review 25 (1972): 616-625.

Vanderwerken, David L. “‘We Owe It All to You, Coach’: Teaching That Championship Season.” Aethlon: The Journal of Sports Literature 14 (Fall, 1996): 241-245.