The narrator, Gary Harkness, is a talented football player who might be said to think too much for his own good. His father, who had been a good football player, but not a hero, had brought him up to follow certain simple maxims: "Suck in that gut and go harder"; and "When the going gets tough, the tough get going." As Gary observes, men who fail to be heroes have expectations: "Their sons must prove that the seed was not impoverished." Gary spends much of his time in flight from these expectations; he enters and leaves several prestigious universities, always on football scholarships. In this novel, he is playing out his eligibility at Logos College in west Texas. On the first page, he remarks, "football players are simple folk. . . .