Friday Night Lights: A Town, a Team, and a Dream (14 page)

There had always been something inward and painfully shy
about Mike, but the death of his father forced him to grow up
even faster than he already had. He knew Billy was in pain and
he also knew that only death could stop it. "It was hurtin' 'itn
and there was nothin' they could do," he said. "You don't want
nobody to die, but you don't want him hurtin' all the time
either."

After Billy died, Mike's life didn't get any easier. He had a brother who was sent to prison for stealing. At home he lived
with his mother, who worked at a service station convenience
store as it clerk. They didn't have much money. His mother was
enormously quiet and reserved, almost like it phantom. Coach
Gaines, who spent almost as much time dealing with parents as
he did with the players, had never met her.

Mike himself almost never talked of his mother, and he was
reluctant to let people into his home, apparently because of' its
condition. "He never wants me to come in," said his girlfriend,
DeAnn. "He never wants me to be inside, ever." When they got
together it was over at his grandmother's, and that's where his
yard sign was, announcing to the world that he was a Permian
football player.

"Me and him talked about not havin' a nice home or a nice
car and how those things were not important," said Joe Bill. "I
told him, you make your grades and stay in sports, you'll one
day have those things."

Mike persevered, a coach's dream who worked hard and became a gifted student of the game of football, just as he had in
baseball with his father. The one ceaseless complaint was that
he thought too much, and he knew that was true, that whenever he threw the ball he didn't just wing it, go with his instincts,
but sometimes seemed to agonize over it, a checklist racing
through his mind even as he backpedaled-be careful ... get the
right touch now ... watch the wrist, watch the wrist! ... don't overthrow it now, don't throw are interception... on....

He started at quarterback his junior year at Permian, but his
own obvious lack of confidence caused some of his teammates
to lose faith in him in a tight game. When the pressure was off
and the score wasn't close, it was hard to find it better quarterback. When the pressure was on, though, something seemed to
unravel inside him. But now he was a senior and had had a
whole year to process the incredible feeling of walking into a
stadium and seeing twenty thousand fans expecting the world
from him. He seemed ready, ready for something truly wonderful to happen to him.

He didn't dwell much on his father's death anymore. It had
been four years since it happened and Mike had moved on
since then. But he still thought about him from time to time,
and he said he had never met anyone more honest, or more
clever, or more dependable. He smiled as he talked about what
a good "horse trader" Billy was, and how he loved animals, and
how he had bought him every piece of sports equipment that
had ever been invented. When he had had trouble with his
baseball swing, he knew that Billy would have been able to fix it
in a second, standing with him, showing him where to place his
hands, jiggering his stance just a tad here and a tad there, doing
all the things only a dad could do to make a swing level again
and keep a baseball flying forever.

And Mike also knew how much Billy Winchell would have
cherished seeing him on this September night, dressed in the
immaculate black and white of the Permian Panthers, moments
away from playing out the dream that had kept him in Odessa.
The two-a-days in the August heat were over now. The Watermelon Feed had come and gone, and so had the pre-season
scrimmage. Now came the Friday night lights. Now it was showtime and the first game of the season.

Most everyone thought that Billy Winchell had given up on
himself by the time he died. But they also knew that if there
was anything making him hold on, it was Mike.

Billy and Mike.

"He would have liked to have lived for Mike's sake," said Julia
Winchell. "He sure would have been proud of him."

"Some of you haven't played before, been in the spotlight," said
assistant coach Tam Hollingshead in those waning hours before
Permian would take the field against El Paso Austin. He knew
what the jitters of the season opener could do, how the most
talented kid could come unglued in the sea of all those lights
and those thousands of fans. He offered some succinct advice.

"Have some fun, hustle your ass, and stick the hell out of 'ern."

"It's not a party we're goin' to, it's a business trip," Mike Belew told the running backs. "If you get hurt, that's fine, you're hurt.
But if you get a lick, and you're gonna lay there and whine
about it, you don't belong on the field anyway."

The team left the field house and made its wav to the stadium
in a caravan of yellow school buses. They went through their
pre-game warmups with methodical, meticulous determination. Then they went to the dressing room and sat in silence
before Gaines called the team to huddle around him. He didn't
say much. He didn't have to.

Everyone knew what was at stake, that if all went without a
hitch, this game would be the beginning of it glorious stretch
that would not end until the afternoon of llecember 17 with a
state championship trophy. It would he a sixteen-game season,
longer than that of any college team in America and as long as
most of the pro teams' seasons. 't'hree and it half months of
pure devotion to football where nothing else mattered, nothing
else made a difference.

"'That 1988 season is four and a half minutes awav," Gaines
said quietly with it little smile still on his lips. "Let's have a
great one.

At the very sight of the team at the edge of the stadium, hundreds of elementary school kids started squealing in delight.
They wore imitation checrleading cosiLtimes and sweatshirts
that said PERMIAN PANTHERS #1. 'I hey began yelling the war cry
of ".11o /O! ,11o JO! .110./0r' in frantic unison, rocking their
arms hack and forth. A little girl in glasses put her hand to her
month. as if she had seen something incredible, and it made
her ntomentarilyspeechless between screams. As the black
wave of the 1 ermian players moved out into the middle of the
field, eight thousand other souls who had filled the home side
rose to give a standing ovation. 'Ibis moment, and not January
first, was New t'ear's day.

Brian Johnson opened the season with it fifteen-yard run off
the right side through it gaping hole to the Permian 47, lurching low ward for every possible extra inch. Iwo quick passes
front Winchcll to split end Lloyd Hill gave Permian it first down
at the El Paso Austin ten. y1'inchcll looked good, setting up with poise in the pocket, throwing nicely, no rushed throws skittering off the hand.

Then 1)on Billingsley, the starting tailback for the Permian
Panthers, got the ball on a pitch. He was a senior, and it was his
debut as it starter.

The roars of the crowd got louder and louder as Don took
the ball and headed for the goal line. A touchdown on the first
drive of the season seemed destined, to the delight of the thousands who were there. And no one wanted it more, no one felt
it more, than Charlie Billingsley.

It was his son Don down there on that field with the ball.
But it was more than the natural swell of parental pride that
stirred inside him.

Twenty years earlier, Charlie Billingsley himself had worn
the black and white of' Permian, not as sonic two-bit supporter
but as a star, a legend. He still had powerful memories of those
days, and as he sat in the stands on this balmy and beautiful
night where the last wisps of clouds ran across the sky like a
residue of ash from it once-brilliant fire, it seemed impossible
not to look clown on the field and see his own reflection.

II

There were some kids who came out of Odessa ornery in the
saute way that a rodeo bull with it rope wrapped tight around
his balls is ornery, kids who went through life as if they were
perpetually trying to buck someone off' their backs to get that
damn rope off their nuts, kids whose idea of 'a good time was
to look for fights with townies from Andrews or Crane, or do a
little bashing at the local gay bar, or bite into the steaming flesh
of it fresh-killed rabbit, or down it cockroach or two in the
locker roost, or go rattlesnake hunting by shining a little mirror
into the crevice of some limestone pit where the only sign of
human life was the shards of broken beer bottles that had been
used for target practice.

They were kids for whom the story of David and Goliath wasn't some religious parable but the true story of their own
lives, kids who were lean and mean and weighed maybe 170
pounds dripping wet but were built like steel beams and had a
kind of fearlessness that was admirable and irrational and liked
nothing better than to knock some slow, fat-assed lineman up
in the air and watch him come falling down like a tire bouncing
along the highway.

Charlie Billingsley may not have been the meanest kid ever
at Permian, but he was somewhere near the top, and it was hard
to forget how that tough son-of-a-bitch had played the game in
the late sixties.

His sense of right and wrong had been mounted on a hair
trigger. If he thought you were jacking with him, he didn't go
grumbling back to the huddle making empty threats about revenge. He just put up his fists right there and if that didn't
work, then what the hell, he'd just rear back and kick you smack
in the face.

And it wasn't like he left all that anger on the field or anything. He wasn't one of these chameleons, one of these splitpersonality types. He was as memorable off the field as he was
on it, hanging out at Cue Balls or Nicky's or the old A & W over
on Eighth Street or wherever lie happened to be night after
night. He won a lot and lost a few and the coach of Permian
then, Gene Mayfield, finally told him that he'd be off the team
if there was one more fight. But Charlie Billingsley wasn't about
to change his ways. The minute the season was over, he got into
a fight and someone broke his jaw. They had to wire it shut and
he dropped to 130 pounds but that was okay because Charlie
Billingsley got an opportunity for a rematch, which is all he
really wanted, and taught the kid who had messed up his jaw a
very serious lesson.