http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/04/s...a-texas-high-school-then-the-unthinkable.html
IRAAN, Tex. — This is not the story we intended to report, about a fatal bus crash and injured cheerleaders and ecstatic celebration whipsawed into gut-punching tragedy.
I traveled to West Texas last week with the photographer Ilana Panich-Linsman for more salutary reasons. We wanted to chronicle a high school football team so dominant that it had not lost a regular-season game in four seasons, and yet in a place so tiny and remote that homecoming was held only every other year.
There was to be a quirky angle, too, a somewhat irritated but mostly amused reaction here to viral fake-news videos posted in January on a website called Stranger Than Fiction News. The videos claimed that Iraan (pronounced Ira Ann) was a ghost town, not the oil town it is. That no one lived there. That the football team was a fake bused in from elsewhere. That the 1,200 residents actually lived underground in a secret city.
“That’s why we don’t have a dome on our stadium,” Jim Baum, 49, the principal at Iraan High School, joked on Friday morning. “You don’t need one when you’re underground.”
As the undefeated Iraan Braves prepared for a three-hour trip to play in the state quarterfinals, I spoke with Christina Garlock, 48. She ran the high school’s computer lab and sponsored the varsity cheerleaders. She has a daughter who is a cheerleader and two sons who play on the team. She spoke of the 11 seniors who had played together since elementary school and had lost only three or four games their entire lives.
Condolences to those lost, injured, and in mourning today.
IRAAN, Tex. — This is not the story we intended to report, about a fatal bus crash and injured cheerleaders and ecstatic celebration whipsawed into gut-punching tragedy.
I traveled to West Texas last week with the photographer Ilana Panich-Linsman for more salutary reasons. We wanted to chronicle a high school football team so dominant that it had not lost a regular-season game in four seasons, and yet in a place so tiny and remote that homecoming was held only every other year.
There was to be a quirky angle, too, a somewhat irritated but mostly amused reaction here to viral fake-news videos posted in January on a website called Stranger Than Fiction News. The videos claimed that Iraan (pronounced Ira Ann) was a ghost town, not the oil town it is. That no one lived there. That the football team was a fake bused in from elsewhere. That the 1,200 residents actually lived underground in a secret city.
“That’s why we don’t have a dome on our stadium,” Jim Baum, 49, the principal at Iraan High School, joked on Friday morning. “You don’t need one when you’re underground.”
As the undefeated Iraan Braves prepared for a three-hour trip to play in the state quarterfinals, I spoke with Christina Garlock, 48. She ran the high school’s computer lab and sponsored the varsity cheerleaders. She has a daughter who is a cheerleader and two sons who play on the team. She spoke of the 11 seniors who had played together since elementary school and had lost only three or four games their entire lives.
Condolences to those lost, injured, and in mourning today.
