Friday Night Lights: A Town, a Team, and a Dream (13 page)

The scrimmage ended. Under the glow of the stadium lights,
Ivory Christian helped Boobie adjust to a pair of crutches that
was too small for him. It was a beautiful night in Lubbock,
windless, in the seventies. Jones Stadium, home of Texas Tech
University, was virtually empty, and there was a mood of serenity and peace. The light, falling on the field accentuated the
colors-the green of the artificial turf, the red of the seats like
a luscious flowerbed. Everything looked wonderfully vivid and
clean as Boobie struggled with the crutches to get off the field.

"Take care of yourself, man, so me and you go to the same
college," said Clifton Monroe, a running back from the opposing team.

Boobie smiled that wonderful, glowing smile. He liked hearing that, but an instant later came the fear of not being able to
go to college at all.

"That's what I'm afraid of," he said.

Gaines huddled the team around him. He tried to be stoic,
giving the familiar speech that no team was ever built around
one player. But the thought of a serious in to Boobie
gnawed at him. He had been preparing for this season the moment the last one had ended eight months earlier. He was methodical and meticulous about everything, the kind of coach,
the kind of man, who prepared for every possible situation
through tireless work. And now came something he had no
control over.

Boobie's loss was just the kind of news he did not want to
hear, an omen that the season was tailspinning out of control,
somehow jinxed. If the knee was wrecked, there went the
team's star before a single down had even been played. And
who could possibly take his place? Who could match the physical skill of Boobie? On the bus ride home he hardly said a word
to anyone, the gray shadows of Brownfield and Seagraves and
Seminole and Andrews falling across his face like a fine mist.
Instead he leaned against a railing right behind the bus driver,
gazing at the highway through the bug-splattered windshield,
lost in thought, the tension of a season that hadn't even started
yet reducing him to silence.

The next day, Boobie came to the field house with a huge
smile creasing his face. A doctor's exam had showed it was more
a sprained ligament than anything else. The doctor told him he
could play again in ten to fourteen days. Boobie might only
miss two or three games of the season.

But then, almost as abruptly, the dream changed again. A
second examination by another doctor did reveal damage to
the knee. Boobie needed arthroscopic surgery. He would be
out at least a month before he could come back, and there were
some, like Trapper, who believed the road back might take
much longer than that.

"It's not an impossibility that Boobie can come back. Can he
mentally overcome the injury to come back? Can he be full
speed? You have surgery on your knee, they cut it open, and
then they say, `Fuck, you're okay, go back out there.' It's kind of a gut check. Do you really want to play football? Can you really
come back from it?"

It meant adjusting to a knee brace. It meant not flinching an
inch when the knee was hit full-speed by a helmet, not succumbing to the perpetual fear of pain, not running with the
slightest tentativeness, which was the edge between a great
player and a mediocre one. And it meant doing all these things
at the age of eighteen.

In the aftermath of that meaningless scrimmage in the summer twilight in Lubbock, Trapper envisioned a definite fate for
the Boobie Miles who had been the dazzling jewel of the Watermelon Feed.

"I think he's just gonna drift away."

With the season opener a week away, the pressure now intensified on everyone else, on Brian Chavez with his metamorphic
ruthlessness and Ivory Christian with his love-hate ambivalence
and Jerrod McDougal with his religious zeal. If Permian was to
go to State, they would have to perform in ways that no one
had ever imagined, rise to heights beyond even the expectations of the fans. But no one would have to have a greater year,
be more superb, than Mike Winchell at quarterback.

Now, more than ever, it was up to him.

I

WHEN HIS FATHER GAZED AT HIM FROM THE HOSPITAL BED
with those sad eyes that had drawn so narrow from the drinking and the smoking and the endless heartache, Mike Winchell
had been thirteen years old. He knew something was wrong
because of the way his father acted with him, peaceful in the
knowledge he didn't have to put up a fight anymore. Mike tried
to joke with him as he always had, but Billy Winchell didn't have
time for playful banter. He was serious now, and he wanted
Mike to listen.

He brought up Little League and warned Mike that the
pitchers were going to get better now and the hone runs
wouldn't come as easily as they once had. He told him he had
to go to college, there could be no two ways about it. He let him
know it was okay to have it little beer every now and then because the Winchells were, after all, German, and Germans
loved their beer, but he admonished him to never, ever try
drugs. And he told his son he loved him.

He didn't say much more after that, the arthritis eating into
his hips and the agony of the oil field accident that had cost him
his leg too much for him now. In the early morning silence of
that hospital room in Odessa, he let go.

Mike ran out of the room when it happened, wanting to be
by himself, to get as far away as he possibly could, and his older
brother, Joe Bill, made no attempt to stop him. He knew Mike would be back because he had always been that kind of kid,
quiet, loyal, unfailingly steady. Mike didn't go very far. He
stopped in front of the fountain at the hospital entrance and
sat by himself. It was one in the morning and hardly anything
stirred in those wide downtown streets. He cried a little but he
knew he would be all right because, ever since the split-up of
his parents when he was five, he had pretty much raised himself. Typically, he didn't worry about himself. He worried about
his grandmother.

But he didn't want to stay in Odessa anymore. It was too ugly
for him and the land itself bore no secrets nor ever inspired the
imagination, so damn flat, as he later put it, that a car ran down
the highway and never disappeared. He longed for lakes and
trees and hills, for serene places where he could take walks by
himself.

Mike came back to the hospital after about half an hour. "You
were the most special thing in his life," his brother told him.
"It's a hard pill to swallow, but you're gonna have to make him
proud of you." As for leaving Odessa to come live with him, Joe
Bill gently talked Mike out of' it. He used the most powerful
pull there was for a thirteen-year-old boy living in Odessa,
really the only one that gave a kid something to dream aboutthe power of Permian football.

He talked about how Mike had always wanted to wear the
black and white and how much he would regret it if he didn't
because there were so few places that could offer the same
sense of allegiance and tradition. Mike knew that Joe Bill was
right. He had already carried that dream for a long time, and
despite what he thought of Odessa, it was impossible to let it go.

He stayed in Odessa and sometimes, when he went over to
his grandmother's house and talked about his father, it helped
him through the pain of knowing that Billy was gone forever.
"His daddy worshiped him," said Julia Winchell. "He sure
loved that little boy." And Mike returned that love.

"When he died, I just thought that the best person in the
world had just died."

Billy and Mike.

There was Mike, smiling, curly-haired, looking into his (lad's
face at Christmastime. And there was Billy, thin and wizened
and slightly hunched, like a walking stick that had warped in
the rain. There was Mike at the flea markets they went to together on Saturdays and Sundays over on University, helping his father lift the boxes from the car and set them in the
little booth. There was Billy following him to a chair so he could
sit and rest. There they were together on those hot afternoons
that Mike hated so much but never complained about, selling
the cheap tools and knives and toys and Spanish Bibles that had
been found in catalogues or on trips to Mexico.

There was Mike playing Little League baseball with that goto-hell stance of his-feet close together, up on the toes, taking
as big a stride as he could possibly muster into the ball-jacking
one homer after another. And there was Billy, the proud master, watching his gifted disciple from the car, unable to get out
because of the pain in his leg and the arthritis.

Under the demanding tutelage of his father, Mike could do
no wrong in Little League. He became the stuff of legend, with
twenty-seven pitches in a row thrown for strikes, a single season
in which he hit thirty home runs. And then somewhere around
the time his father started slipping, Mike lost that innate confidence in himself. The gift was always there, but he began to
question it, doubt it, brood over it. When he hit three homers
in a game once, he didn't go back to the bench feeling exalted.
"Why in the hell can I hit these home runs?" he asked himself.
"Why could I do it when other kids couldn't?'