1951 is a journal of the private thoughts and daily adventures of a 17-year-old college student-athlete as filtered through a series of 26 letters to an older, more worldly friend and mentor from the letter writer¿s home town. Couched in the terms of inexperience, braggadocio, and often exaggeration of newly-found freedoms from many prior restraints, these letters describe the lures of overdue discoveries and previously unobtainable opportunities in the common dialect of that time and place. His dual mottos were ¿Anything worth doing is worth doing well,¿ and ¿I can resist almost anything except temptation.¿
In summary, 1951 is a story focused on:
A poor but basically honest student-athlete who was recruited and then romanced by a perennial cellar dweller team that was destined to become a national junior college football dynasty.
A little old whistle-stop of a junior college town where a guy could easily get an enviable reputation for doing very little, and a young lady could be ruined for life for doing a heck of a lot less.
A minor league junior college football coach who everyone believed was so dense that he could not pour urine out of a boot even if the instructions were printed plainly on the heel. However, after assembling his first Alpha Team, he just kept winning anyway. His aces in the hole were: (1) an uncanny ability to lure troubled but blue-chip athletes into the institutionally wide, even community wide deceptions necessary to produce a winning team in a very tough league, and (2) maintaining plausible, implacable deniability.
The care and feeding of a high-strung herd of somewhat misunderstood student-athletes, all of whom were just trying to get by, or whatever seemed right at any given moment in time.
The 26 letters that comprise 1951 are written in the shibboleth rich, esoteric dialect commonly spoken by most young athletes of the southern Great Plains at that time. That language pattern was faithfully reproduced so that it tracks that segment of the semantic calf path, and reflects the vivid if somewhat naïve imagery, culture and life styles that characterize that far less complex time and place.