The Boys of Riverside: A Deaf Football Team and a Quest for Glory
The Boys of Riverside: A Deaf Football Team and a Quest for Glory
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Thomas Fuller on The Boys of Riverside: A Deaf Football Team and a Quest for Glory
In his own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why he wrote it
A happy story after years of smoke and griefFuller had spent years as a New York Times correspondent covering wildfires, mass shootings, and the pandemic from the paper’s San Francisco bureau. Then, in November 2021, a routine email from the California Department of Education arrived: the California School for the Deaf in Riverside, a state-run school with 168 high school students, was having an undefeated football season. He packed his bags and drove seven hours south.
One of the highlights of my career was standing on the sidelines in the Riverside sunshine watching this story unfold.
The campus visit did something the email had not: it flipped who had the language problem. Fuller had assumed he was arriving as the fluent one, the journalist who could communicate with anyone. What he found was the opposite, and it reframed every question he intended to ask.
When I entered the campus of the California School for the Deaf and Riverside, I couldn’t communicate. Everyone around me who was deaf had no problem communicating. [paraphrased from audio]
Fuller was open about the limits he brought to the subject. His prior reporting had nothing to do with deafness or disability, and he did not want the book to carry the authority of someone who had spent a career in that world. What he wanted instead was a specific, bounded argument rooted in what he had actually witnessed on a football field.
I’m not an expert in disabilities at all. I wanted to write very specifically about deafness on the football field. Here’s this sport that everyone loves, now look at this twist. And let’s ask ourselves if the hearing world has things to learn from the deaf world. My answer would be yes.
That self-imposed narrowness turned out to be the book’s engine: not a survey of deaf life, but a single season’s worth of evidence for a single claim.
Fuller had spent the years before the book deep in political reporting, the kind where every source is sorted into a partisan category. The Cubs offered something he had not had in a long time.
The time spent on the sidelines watching football and not asking anyone if they’re Democrat or Republican.
How he wrote it
Two seasons embedded, one language learnedTo get inside the team’s world, Fuller took a leave of absence from the Times and embedded with the Cubs across two full seasons. His interpreter was Malika Angoorani, a college-aged ASL interpreter and daughter of the team’s defensive coordinator. Through that sustained access, he began learning not just individual signs but the underlying logic of the language, and that learning changed what the book was arguing.
It was my research into ASL that helped me understand the grammar, the structure of it, the sophistication of it, that it’s a language just like English, Spanish, Chinese or Japanese. That was part of my discovery that made me say, ‘hey, let’s look at ‘disability’ with more nuance because in this case the conclusion I came to is that I’m not sure deafness is a disability on the football field.
Fuller grounded his argument in direct comparison rather than abstract claim. His own son played on a hearing high school team, which gave him a ready baseline. The contrast he observed in how each team received its play calls produced the book’s most concrete illustration of ASL as a competitive asset.
I would say playcalling. My son is on a high school football team that is very storied and athletic. But between each player the quarterback runs to the sideline, confers with the coach or offensive coordinator, and runs back to a huddle. It takes like a full minute. The Cubs just walk up to their positions on the line or in the backfield. They look over to their coach. The coach signs them the play. They all nod and two seconds later comes the snap. The fluidity, the efficiency, and speed of ASL gives them an edge.
Research into deaf football history turned up a discovery that Fuller found almost too good to be true: the standard formation that every hearing team uses to call its plays has its roots in the deaf world. The fact that Riverside’s edge came partly from abandoning that formation added a layer of irony the book did not have to manufacture.
It was probably that the football huddle was invented by deaf players in the 1890’s at Gallaudet University. When two deaf teams faced off, the Gallaudet quarterback decided something needed to be done because the opponent could read their plays. So he told the players to form a circle with their backs turned to the defense. I just love the irony that the deaf world gave football the huddle, and the edge for the Riverside Cubs was not needing to have one.
What he wants us to sit with
Redefining the edge as a question, not an answerThe shift Fuller experienced on campus the first day became the lens through which he wanted readers to see the whole season. It was not a point he arrived at after months of reporting; it hit him almost immediately, and the book’s structure is built around making readers feel it the same way.
I realized, right then, that deafness was not a language barrier, but could be turned into something that the team could use, that the students could use as their superpower. [paraphrased from audio]
Fuller did not want the championship season to be the only takeaway. He spent two years alongside the Cubs, and the question that stayed with him after the final whistle was one the scoreboard could not answer: whether the hearing world’s standard definition of disability has been doing real damage to people it claims to describe.
I hope that people just come away with an appreciation for this story, which I think is just a great American Underdog story. Story about boys and, you know, getting together, having great winning seasons, but also just those questions about what is disability, what’s the meaning of disability? If you can turn it into something that gives you a winning edge, maybe we should add those nuances to our understanding of disability. [paraphrased from audio]