You thought Humboldt and weed had already been covered from every conceivable angle. All the major media took their turns — they parachuted in for a few days or a few weeks and wrote their story, and now all the stories and all the angles have been exhausted, you thought.

You thought wrong!

Here comes Sports Illustrated with a 2,800-word reported essay on weed and … high school football? Sure! Why not? Humboldt’s marijuana economy affects everything in one way or another if you look hard enough, so why shouldn’t it make our brand of high school football slightly different than high school football as it is practiced elsewhere?

Writer Michael McKnight explores the question by basing his story at South Fork High, with side trips to St. Bernard’s, Hoopa and Humboldt State University’s Redwood Bowl, home of the Lumberjacks, which is apparently the glue that holds the county’s people together:

If there is a unifying force during these challenging times in Humboldt — challenging politically and in terms of the withering drought and the rise in violent crime — it’s been the ’Jacks, who were led last fall by Ja’Quan Gardner, an otherwise unrecruited, 5’ 7” running back who rushed for a D-II-best 2,266 yards behind an O-line that a lot of D-I coaches would trade theirs in for

Sure! We all know that stuff. 

What does McKnight find in the county’s high school locker rooms, and on its fields? Well, to begin with, everything smells like pot. Not pot smoke — fresh pot! Everything smells like that. You smell it from the stands. The football players smell like it because football season coincides with harvest season, and the kids are working the family farms before games and such. 

This leads to a lot of words about the hardscrabble life of a Humboldt County outlaw. We muse on all the psychedelic Tim Rigginses growing up in the Humboldt County hills against a backdrop of violent crime and murder, with football as the only stabilizing force in their delicate lives. Mike Downey is interviewed. Luke Bruner is interviewed. The phrase “Friday night lights” is used in both the first paragraph and the last. The South Fork marching band plays “I Shot The Sheriff.” 

Read the story! It’s pretty good.

READ: