Rus Bradburd’s Big Time
by William Meiners
Rus Bradburd is taking a swing at big-time college athletics. Big Time, his aptly named satirical novel, is all at once purposely absurd, laugh-your-ass-off funny, and probably not that far off base from the present-day reality. I can tell you what I like about the book in around 750 words. He seems to be having a go at football, the gargantuan monster on campus, while also taking the stuffing out of higher education itself.
When I spoke to Bradburd in August 2024, he joked about being recently retired from New Mexico State University. Just in time to take the preverbal bite from both hands who fed him through a 30-year career. Ironically, Bradburd spent nearly equal time as a Division I assistant basketball coach (14 years) and a tenure-track professor (16 years). So from bench to classroom, recruiting road to faculty meeting, he paints these landscapes well.
This won’t give it away on a book you should buy and read, but Big Time begins at Coors State University, where the beer sponsor seized naming rights of a Colorado university, and football, undoubtedly, is king. In fact, the football coach fires the president. The History Department faculty is reduced to selling popcorn at games. Professors from Foods and Nutrition deliver training tables to all the players. The Criminal Justice folks are campus cops. And the English Department, aside from a crusty old poet and a hip new one, has been completely sidelined. Though a handful of them are keeping up with the committee work in a largely ignored “tent city” protest in the middle of campus.
There’s nothing new about the friction between faculty and football programs. See Knute Rockne vs. the Notre Dame priests from 100 years ago. Nevertheless, it’s worth a Google to find that the highest paid state employee, in all but a handful of states, is a college coach today. Players can also get paid now — above board. And though there’s maybe nothing fair or right about any of it, there’s also nothing I like more than college football Saturdays. Should I ever develop a conscience, what the hell would I do with all that face paint?
Bradburd said he sees himself in both history professors that open the novel. Eugene Mooney, the chairperson who perhaps goes along to get along, and Peter Braverman, a 1960s-obsessed rabble rouser who may be more bark than bite, decide to take on the football program.
With his book about a dozen years in the making, Bradburd had plenty of time to see sports through the academic lens. And maybe that’s where those conflicting professors emerged as characters.
“I found this sort of the acquiescence of the faculty if they’re not willing to say, ‘Hold on just a second here. This can’t be right,’” he said. “You’re a lonely voice if you start protesting.”
Maybe it’s the pious PhD attitude that resonated with me. I spent most of my professional career in the basement of higher
education, aggrandizing the professorial types who get good at saying the same things over and over. And over.
Bradburd said it took him about three or four faculty meetings to learn that most folks were practicing doublespeak. “Everyone is talking in circles, and nothing is really happening,” he said.
In Big Time, Bradburd breathes life into a quarterback and a lineman, a multitasking university president, and a host of characters under the glare of a “silver bullet” campus. Turns out there’s no silver bullet, or magic one, for all the ills of college football. Maybe that’s what happens when you throw loads of television money on a problem.
Satire isn’t about solving problems. It’s about pointing out the insanity of all of it. And if you don’t think these are insane times, have a look out your window. Or turn on the television. One football great, a mere 18 years ago, could have been forecasting Big Time when he said, “Get your popcorn ready.” The history professors must have been listening.
William Meiners is the founding editor of Sport Literate.
Rus Bradburd is the author of four books: All the Dreams We’ve Dreamed, (Chicago Review Press, 2018) an examination of gun violence in Chicago; the novel-in-stories Make It, Take It (Cinco Puntos Press, 2014); the controversial Forty Minutes of Hell (HarperCollins/Amistad Books, 2010); and the memoir Paddy on the Hardwood: A Journey in Irish Hoops (University of New Mexico Press, 2006). His short stories have appeared in Southern Review, Colorado Review, Puerto del Sol, and Aethlon. His essays have appeared in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Chicago’s Daily Southtown, The El Paso Times, Las Cruces Sun-News, and The Houston Chronicle. He is a regular contributor to SLAM Magazine and New Mexico Magazine.