The Boys of Riverside: A Deaf Football Team and a Quest for Glory

Keith Adams is the head coach of the California School for the Deaf, Riverside football team, and the protagonist of The Boys of Riverside. Fuller provides details about Adams’s personal family history alongside the primary narrative to demonstrate the dangers of anti-Deaf biases and the Importance of Sign Language Education. Adams was born profoundly deaf into a hearing family, and Fuller suggests that his parents’ unconscious biases against Deaf people made his early childhood difficult. Fuller argues that Adams’s deafness “shocked [his parents] and brought tension into their marriage” (43.) His mother “collapsed and cried” when she realized he was deaf, and his father “reacted angrily to the audiologist’s findings, seeing deafness as a defect” (44). The emotional intensity of these passages highlights the impact of the unconscious anti-Deaf biases that Keith’s parents held at the time of his birth.

Adams continued to face anti-Deaf bias as a young athlete looking for success in college football. Despite the fact that he was playing “high school football of the highest level” and was considered “a Division I football player,” Adams was largely ignored by college recruiters, who repeatedly admitted that they couldn’t “accommodate a deaf student in our football program” (222, 224). Fuller argues that Adams was rejected by colleges “not because of his football abilities, but because he was a deaf kid in a hearing world” (224). These passages suggest that, like Michael Paulone, Adams was the victim of anti-Deaf biases that prevented him from achieving success despite his natural skills as a football player.

It was only when Adams transferred to Gallaudet University, a Deaf university, that he was able to “find the camaraderie and friendship that had eluded him” at hearing schools (225). Although the Gallaudet team was not successful, Adams found a “brotherhood” among his fellow Deaf athletes that brought him the confidence necessary to progress as an athlete and an educator. At CSDR, Adams was able to build “the star-studded, all-deaf high school squad that he dreamed of, but never had” (225). The fact that Adams grew as an athlete despite his team’s relative lack of wins on the field suggests that a strong Deaf community is essential to the emotional and personal success of Deaf people.

Kaveh Angoorani is the defensive coordinator for the CSDR Cubs, and a supporting character in The Boys of Riverside. He is central to Fuller’s characterization of the Cubs as “a flesh-and-blood realization of the American dream” (2). Angoorani “was born in Iran a decade and a half before Islamic fundamentalists took control of the country” (94). The reference to the 1979 Iranian Revolution highlights the contrast Angoorani experienced between his home country and his adopted home of America. As a student at the American School for the Deaf, Kaveh joined the football team because “it’s American,” and he “wanted to be like one of them […] wanted to be an American,” highlighting the Value of Team Sports for Identity Formation (100). As an adult, Angoorani “made his way in America working at a fast food restaurant, painting county jails, and ultimately doing one of the most American things an immigrant could do: coaching football” (94). As a coach at CSDR, “football would become a central part of Kaveh’s new American identity, one that he embraced so enthusiastically that his idea of retirement was to buy a Harley-Davidson and ride into the California desert” (2-3). The repeated references to American identity and culture in this passage reinforce Fuller’s depiction of Angoorani as exemplifying the concept of the American dream.

Charles Michel L’Epée (1712-1789) was a French educator and philanthropist who founded the National Institute for the Deaf Youth of Paris, commonly considered the first public school for the Deaf in the world. In The Boys of Riverside, Fuller presents Epée as the originator of the Deaf education movement that led to the success of the California School for the Deaf, Riverside and its students.

Fuller introduces Epée as a “scion of a wealthy family who had served in the court of Louis XIV in the early eighteenth century” (53). The emphasis on Epée’s wealth and class in this passage reflects Fuller’s belief that Epée’s success was due in part to his resource and privilege, which allowed him to influence other wealthy, upper-class Parisians. Fuller argues that Epée had a unique ability to “spark fascination about sign language among elites of the day, archbishops and emperors” (55). Epée’s wealth and prestige allowed him to “demonstrate to the European elites that deaf communities on their own had no inherent disability: they could communicate fluidly with one another in sign” (54). Fuller’s repeated use of the word “elites” in these passages reflects the role of Epée’s class privilege in the success of his mission to improve Deaf education.

Fuller argues that Epée “brought about a fundamental change in attitudes toward deafness” among hearing Europeans by demonstrating “that deafness, with the right resources, was not an obstacle to knowledge and intelligence” (54). The importance of Deaf-centric education is an important theme throughout The Boys of Riverside; these passages suggest that Epée was one of the first hearing people to understand and act on this idea. His influence radiates through the centuries to the heart of Fuller’s story about the CSDR Cubs: “Epee’s disciples would ultimately launch two hundred schools for the deaf, including what is today called the American School for the Deaf in Hartford, Connecticut, a school that the Cubs’ defensive coordinator, Kaveh Angoorani, would attend a century and a half after its founding in 1817” (54). Fuller positions the CSDR Cubs within a broad history of Deaf advocacy and education marked by Epée’s influence. Although Epée died over 150 years before the California School for the Deaf, Riverside was established, The Boys of Riverside demonstrates his essential impact on the school’s success.