Jasper Lovelace, "Execute Again"

Jasper Lovelace is the football coach in the story "Execute Again." He came to the narrator's high school in a small Oklahoma town and led the football team to victory with his insistence that they run only a single play over and over again. The characterization of Lovelace is humorously absurd and meant to indicate his football coaching is based on a profound, complex understanding of philosophy. The narrator recalls his early coaching: "He spends the first two hours explaining how clocks work, from a mechanical standpoint. He talks about how the ocean is 95 percent unexplored. He talks about math without using numbers. The Civil War. The Crucifixion. Chopping wood. Kierkegaard's 'philosophy of repetition'" (14). Somehow, all of this contributed to his design of the play, which proves to be completely impossible to defend against, ensuring success for the narrator's football team, not only on the...