Friday Night Lights: A Town, a Team, and a Dream (15 page)

If all he had been was a hell-raiser, Charlie Billingsley might
have been in some trouble. But he also had the numbers, the
kinds of numbers that everyone in Odessa understood and admired: 890 yards rushing to lead the team as a junior, when it
went all the way to the state finals before losing to Austin Reagan; 913 yards to lead the team as a senior.

Those were great days back then, great days, and it was safe
to say that life was never quite the same afterward. In the succeeding years he had traveled a lot of miles, too many to tell the
truth, loaded down with the baggage of too much booze ("I've
spilt more whiskey than most people have drunk") and too
many wives ("I wouldn't have married a couple of girls I married"), still casting around for the proper fit twenty years out of
high school, still trying to find the way home.

He had been recruited by Texas A & M, and as he recalled
all the false promises that were cooed into his ear he couldn't
help but give a little chuckle. He played for a few years, but
one thing led to another, and Charlie Billingsley found out
that life in college was a whole lot different from what it was
in high school when it came to football: you were a whole lot
more expendable in college, a hero one day and a broken-down
nobody the next, and if you didn't like it no one really gave a
crap because there was always a bunch of guys ready to replace
you in a second. He transferred to a small school in Durant,
Oklahoma.

"It was the worst mistake I made in my life," said Charlie
Billingsley, looking back on it. "Those inbred Okies, they didn't
take kindly to the pros from Dover." A friend got shot in a bar
one night, and he and some others beat up the assailant.

Charlie Billingsley left school after that. He floated from one
job to another, some of them good, some of them not so good.
He was in the floor-covering business in Houston, but high interest rates kind of put a damper on that. And then he sold
casing pipe during the boom, and that worked out pretty great
for a while. He made $40,000 the first year out when Houston
back in those days "was blowin' gold." But then the bust set in
after a couple of years and Charlie moved back to Odessa. He
helped start up a new bar in town that featured bull riding on
Sunday afternoons-there was a ring in back-and kick-ass
rock 'n' roll acts, but a falling-out with one of the partners put
an end to Charlie's involvement in that. He started running another bar-restaurant in town where, as he gently put it, "it was
hard to deal with drunks sober." He had also been through two marriages at that point, one to a girl from Odessa, the other to
a girl from Houston, and then an unexpected element entered
his life: his son Don.

Don had been living up in Blanchard in Oklahoma with his
mother. It was a quiet, sedate kind of place and he was a star
there, a starter on the varsity football team as a freshman. But
Don, who spent part of every summer with Charlie, knew of
Permian and of his dad's exploits there. He knew that every
year the team had a chance of going to State and had won the
whole shooting match four times since 1964. The more he
heard, the more he realized how badly he wanted a piece of it.

Right before his sophomore year, he informed his mother
that he wasn't coming back to Blanchard; he was going to stay
with his father in Odessa so he could play for Permian, even
though he had little chance of starting there until his senior
year. He didn't want her to take his decision personally because it had nothing to do with his loving one parent more
than the other, it just had to do with playing football for
Permian High School. I)on remembered his mother's being
"kind of pissed off" about his decision. But since she herself
had been a Permian Pepette during Charlie's senior year, she
also understood.

Don had been three when his parents had split up, and his
coming back into Charlie's life on a permanent basis wasn't the
simplest of moves. Living with Charlie was sometimes more like
living with an older brother or a roommate than with a father.
There were times when Don stayed up almost all night, regaled
by his father's stories of how to live the world and how not to
live it. Don treasured those sessions and learned from them.
But when Don came home one night with a black eye, Charlie's
idea of advice was to tell him to "stop leading with his face."

Charlie's drinking didn't go away. He would go on binges,
three- or four-day hauls that were tough for everybody to
handle. "I'd get pretty hairy at the end of one of 'em. Those
three or four days, they were eventful" was how Charlie Billingsley said it, giving a hoarse laugh that made you realize that at the age of thirty-seven he had been through one hell of a lot in
his life since his playing days for Permian.

During the spring of his junior year, Don moved in with one
of his grandparents while Charlie Billingsley went to a clinic for
alcohol rehabilitation. Don went to visit him a couple of times.
It was difficult to watch his dad try to pull himself through, and
Don was glad he had football. The locker room became his
home, the one place where he always felt he belonged.

Whether he knew it or not, I)on had become the spitting image of his dad, Charlie Billingsley reborn seventeen years later.
The physical resemblance they bore to one another was striking-the same thin, power-packed frames coiled and ready to
strike if' the wrong button got grazed, the insouciant swagger,
the same shark's-tooth smile that could be both charming and
threatening, the same friendly way of speaking, the words falling casually out of the side of the mouth like cards being slowly
flipped over during it poker game.

Like his father, Don was a fighter who didn't think there was
anything irrational about mixing it up with kids who were a
whole lot bigger than he was. His reputation was established
sophomore year when he told Boobie one day after practice to
take the stocking cap off his head. Boobie told Don to go ahead
and make him, but I)on wasn't intimidated. "Those niggers,
they talk a lot," he later said, describing how he had eagerly
taken up Bookie's challenge. Although he gave up about five
inches and forty pounds to Boobie, he took him down easily
and earned the admiration of many who had always thought
Boobie was too damn cocky for his own good. When Don had
a few pops in him, which was frequently, he felt the urge to
fight even more.

He had taken his first drink in fifth grade, and by the time
he was a senior had built up quite a reputation for drinking.
There was nothing exceptional about that in Odessa, where
kids drank freely, often with the tacit blessing of their parents,
who saw it as part of the macho mentality of the place. When
Don went home from school for lunch, he sometimes raided the liquor cabinet. As a sophomore at Permian he was found
wandering around the field house parking lot one day drunk.
Customers at the various bars his father worked in were quick
to buy him beer.

Like his father, Don was also the starting tailback for Permian. Charlie Billingsley had been the most valuable offensive
player in the district when he had played that position his senior year. He had left his mark on the program, even though
it sometimes seemed he used his fists as much as his legs. But
he had been one hell of -a runner, tough as leather, hard-nosed,
and people around town still remembered him for that as if it
had happened yesterday. They always would.

Until he went into the rehabilitation clinic, he admitted, he
had been right on the edge, making things tough not only for
himself but for I)on. Their relationship, he knew, had been
at the point of fracturing. But he was more in control now.
He had settled down, and he had his son's football season to
look forward to. As Charlie Billingsley said, "I got him to live
through, and that's something pretty special."

After all, football was what had brought the two of them together in the first place, and it seemed destined to keep them
together. At least for as long as the season lasted.

III

With all those eyes focused on him, the ball popped loose
from Don's hands without anyone's touching him. He went after it on his hands and knees, desperately trying to recover it
and redeem himself, but he couldn't get to it. A groan went up
from the crowd as El Paso Austin came up with the ball.

He came off the field, his eyes downcast and brooding, his
eagerness to do well in this first game and live up to the legend of' Charlie putting his whole body out of- sync. "God Almighty," he said to no one in particular on the sideline. "I can't
believe that."

El Paso Austin was held to six yards in three plays, the hapless
Austin running backs suffocating under a pile of five or six raging dogs in black shirts. Swarm the ball! That's what the coaches
had told the Permian players time after time after time. Never
let up! Swarm the ball every play!

Permian took over after a punt. With a first down inside El
Paso territory at the 47, Winchell dropped back to pass. He saw
flanker Robert Brown open, but the touch was too soft and the
ball fluttered, a high fly up for grabs, the kind of pass that had
become a Winchell trademark the year before, etched with
hesitation. It was destined for an interception, but the El Paso
defensive back mistimed. The ball plopped into Brown's hands,
a gift, an absolute gift, and he had a clear path down the left
sideline. He scored, and the ice was broken.

Winchell, coming back to the sideline, almost, but not quite,
looked pleased with himself, a tiny look of relief, perhaps even
the glimmer of a smile. "What do you think?" he said, motioning to the crowd, to the stadium, to the starry beauty of it all.
"You ain't seen nothin' yet. Wait till Midland Lee."

Permian scored twice more in the first half to go ahead 21-0.
Winchell threw a five-yard touchdown pass to Hill and then
made it three when he hooked up with Brown for a sixty-oneyard bomb with twenty-four seconds left. In the locker room at
halftime he seemed as if he was walking on air. Three touchdown passes in the first half. Three! Last season it had taken
him his first four games to get three touchdown passes, and he
only had eleven the entire season in fifteen games.

As for Billingsley, his debut as a starter had become further
mired after that first nervous fumble. Regaining his composure, he had peeled off a nice thirty-four-yard run on a sweep.
But then, with time running out in the half, he had fumbled
again, as if the ghost of Charlie caused the football to go bouncing along the turf like a basketball. The mixture of excitement
and anticipation had him in knots, his legs working so hard he
looked like a cartoon character going at fast-forward speed.

The coaches, who had always harbored concerns about Bil lingsley because of his life-style, were not terribly surprised.
They knew of his drinking and partying and the fact that he
and his father moved around a lot. "I think we got a big-assed
choke dog on our hands," said one at halftime.

Gaines called Billingsley into the little coaches' room and
threw him a football. "Hold on to it," he said.

Then Belew took him aside. "Just put that behind you. If you
worry about it, it's gonna screw you up. It's history."

The locker room was hot and steamy, and Gaines and his
four assistants were hardly euphoric. The Panthers were dominating every facet of the game, but fumbles and penalties had
kept Permian from leading 35-0 at the half.

"We should have had two more [touchdowns]," said defensive coordinator Hollingshead. "Don laid it on the ground."

Billingsley continued to drown deeper and deeper the second half. After Permian took over on downs on its 41, he took
the hand-off and had clear sailing on the right flank. But his
feet were still moving too fast for him and he slipped, adding
to the rumbles that Charlie Billingsley's boy sure as hell wasn't
going to follow in his father's footsteps, at least not on the football field.

"God damn!" said Hollingshead derisively.