Free Nobody's Fool by Richard Russo

Park.
    The new banner (go sabertooths! trounce schuyler springs') was even more optimistic. The choice of the word "trounce" was more indicative of the town's mounting frustration with the basketball team's losing streak to Schuyler Springs than of a realistic goal. The more traditional "beat" had been rejected as mundane and unsatisfying. The real debate had been between "trounce" and "annihilate." The proponents of "annihilate" had surrendered the field when they were reminded that it was a ten-letter word, and Bath was a town that had recently established a precedent when it abbreviated the word "up."
    The banner also promised to revive another controversy, this one turning on a point of grammar. Nearly three decades earlier, when football had to be dropped due to the postwar decline in the region's population and the high school's other sports began to show signs that they could no longer compete successfully against archrival Schuyler Springs, the high school's principal had dedded it was time to change the school's nickname (the Antelopes) to something more ferocious in the hopes of spurring Bath's young athletes to greater ferocity. After all, there weren't any antelope within fifteen hundred miles of Bath, and all those animals were famous for was running anyway. So there had been a Name the Team contest and the Sabertooth Tigers were born, all the antelope logos repainted at town expense. Predictably, the whole thing had not turned out well. The fans had immediately shortened the name to the Tigers, which the high school principal thought common and uninspiring and a violation of the contest rules. The best thing about the saber tooth tiger was its saber teeth, which ordinary tigers didn't have, and the principal insisted that the name not be corrupted, even in casual conversation. He'd spent good money repainting all the logos, even if the saber teeth had turned out looking like walrus tusks. If all this weren't enough, a controversy had erupted on the editorial page of the North Bath Weekly Journal over whether the plural of Saber- tooth should be Sabertooths or Saberteeth. When the cheerleaders led the spell cheer, how should it go?
    The principal said Saberteeth sounded elitist and silly and dental.
    The chair of the high school's English department disagreed, claiming this latest outrage was yet another symptom of the erosion of the English language, and he threatened to resign if he and his staff were expected to sanction too ths as the plural of tooth. Why not? the public librarian had asked in the next letter to the editor. Wasn't this, after NOBODY'S FOOL41 all, the same English department that had sanctioned "antelopes" as the plural of "antelope" The letters continued to pour in for weeks. Beryl Peoples, who'd nursed a twenty-year grudge against the principal for caving in and allowing history courses in the junior and senior high school to be re designated '"social studies," had the last editorial word, reminding her fellow citizens that the saber tooth tiger was an extinct animal. Food, she suggested, for thought.
    Nevertheless, this new banner read go sabertooths. " trounce schuyler springs! and the men whose job it was to string the banner across the street were more concerned with it than with the old banner, which had become gray and tattered in the wind and would not be restrung after the weekend's big game. On the Monday following Thanksgiving the Christmas tights always got strung. And so, as the new banner was being attended to--the workers and onlookers shouting instructions to one another to make sure the new banner was centered and straight, as if a botched job might affect the outcome of the game--the old banner was allowed to lie stretched across the street in the slush. When the workers were satisfied that the new banner was secure and had climbed down from their ladders, one of them picked up one end of the old banner just as a car drove by and hooked the cord with one of its rear wheels,