Friday Night Lights: A Town, a Team, and a Dream (2 page)

MAYBE IT WAS A SUDDENLY ACUTE AWARENESS OF BEING
"thirtysomething." Maybe it was where I lived, in a suburb of
Philadelphia, in a house that looked like all the other ones on
the block. Or maybe it was my own past as an addicted sports
fan who had spent a shamelessly large part of life watching
football and basketball and baseball. I just felt something pulling at me, nagging at me, a soft voice telling me to do it, to see
for myself what was out there and make the journey before
self-satisfaction crept in for good.

The idea had been rattling in my head since I was thirteen
years old, the idea of high school sports keeping a town together, keeping it alive. So I went in search of the Friday night
lights, to find a town where they brightly blazed that lay beyond
the East Coast and the grip of the big cities, a place that people
had to pull out an atlas to find and had seen better times, a real
America.

A variety of names came up, but all roads led to West Texas,
to a town called Odessa.

It was in the severely depressed belly of the Texas oil patch,
with a team in town called the Permian Panthers that played to
as many as twenty thousand fans on a Friday night.

Twenty thousand ...

I knew I had to go there.

You drive into Odessa the first time and become immersed in
a land so vast, so relentless, that something swells up inside,
something that makes you feel powerless and insignificant.
Pulling onto Highway 80, there is row after row of oil field machinery that no one has use for anymore. Farther on down
comes a series of grimy motels that don't have a single car
parked in front of them.

You come to the downtown, and even though it is the middle of the afternoon there isn't another soul around. So you just
walk in silence, past a couple of big buildings belonging to the
banks, past a closed-down movie theater with the words THE
END in crooked letters on the marquee, past a beige brick building where the old lettering saying JCPENNEY is still there, past
a few restaurants and a lot of pawnshops.

Farther east, past the gas stations and fast-food joints and the
old civic center that looks like a brooding frown, there is a different Odessa. It is almost suburban, with a shiny mall and
comfortable ranch houses, many of which have FOR SALE signs
planted in the front lawns. Driving back south there is still another Odessa, called the Southside. It is across the tracks, and
it is an area of town predominantly for minorities.

Turning around again, heading north on Grandview back
into those plains, there is a feeling of driving into the fathomless end of the earth. And then it rises out of nowhere, two
enormous flanks of concrete with a sunken field in between.
Gazing into that stadium, looking up into those rows that can
seat twenty thousand, you wonder what it must be like on a
Friday night, when the lights are on and the heart and soul of
the town pours out over that field, across those endless plains.

I visited Odessa in March of 1988. 1 met the coach of the
Permian Panthers and relayed to him the intent of my journey,
to live in Odessa for a year and spend a season with his football
team. I talked to others, but mostly I just drove and looked.

It became apparent that this was a town where high school
football went to the very core of life. From the glimpses of the
Southside and the FOR SALE signs and the unwanted machinery
filling up the yards of Highway 80, it also became apparent that
this was a town with many other currents running through it
as well.

There seemed to be an opportunity in Odessa to observe not
simply the enormous effect of sports on American life, but
other notions, for the values of Odessa were ones that firmly
belonged to a certain kind of America, an America that existed beyond the borders of the Steinberg cartoon, an America of
factory towns and farm towns and steel towns and singleeconomy towns all trying to survive.

What were the attitudes toward race? What were the politics,
and as the 1988 election approached, what did people want
from their president? In a country that was having more and
more difficulty teaching its young, what was the educational
system like? What did people hold on to as they watched their
economic lifeblood slip from them? What did they hold on to
as they watched their country slip from them? What had happened to their America?

My heart told me that I would find the answers to all these
questions in Odessa, not because it was a Texas town, but an
American one.

I left my job as a newspaper editor for the Philadelphia Inquirer in July 1988 and moved to Odessa two weeks later. The
following month I met the members of the 1988 Permian
Panther football team, and for the next four months I was
with them through every practice, every meeting, every game,
to chronicle the highs and lows of being a high school football player in a town such as this. I went to school with them,
and home with them, and rattlesnake hunting with them, and
to church with them, because I was interested in portraying
them as more than just football players, and also because I
liked them.

I talked with hundreds of people to try to capture the other
aspects of the town that I had come to explore, the values
about race and education and politics and the economy. Much
of what I learned about the town came from these interviews,
but some of it naturally came from the personal experience of
living there, with a wife and five-year-old twin boys. Odessa
very much became home for a year, a place where our kids
went to school and we worked and voted and forged lasting
friendships.

It was in Odessa that I found those Friday night lights, and
they burned with more intensity than I had ever imagined. Like thousands of others, I got caught up in them. So did my wife.
So did my children. As someone later described it, those lights
become an addiction if you live in a place like Odessa, the Friday night fix.

But I also found myself haunted by something else, the
words of a father with a son who had gone to Permian and had
later become a world-class sprinter in track.

He saw the irresistible allure of high school sports, but he also
saw an inevitable danger in adults' living vicariously through
their young. And he knew of no candle that burned out more
quickly than that of the high school athlete.

"Athletics lasts for such a short period of time. It ends for
people. But while it lasts, it creates this make-believe world
where normal rules don't apply. We build this false atmosphere.
When it's over and the harsh reality sets in, that's the real joke
we play on people.... Everybody wants to experience that superlative moment, and being an athlete can give you that. It's
Camelot for them. But there's even life after it."

With the kind of glory and adulation these kids received for
a season of their lives, I am not sure if they were ever encouraged to understand that. As I stood in that beautiful stadium
on the plains week after week, it became obvious that these kids
held the town on their shoulders.

Odessa is the setting for this book, but it could be anyplace
in this vast land where, on a Friday night, a set of spindly stadium lights rises to the heavens to so powerfully, and so briefly,
ignite the darkness.

IF THE SEASON COULD EVER HAVE ANY SALVATION, IF IT COULD
ever make sense again, it would have to come tonight under a
Hood of stars on the flatiron plains, before thousands of fans
who had once anointed him the chosen son but now mostly
thought of him as just another nigger.

He felt good when he woke up in the little room that was his,
with the poster of Michael Jordan taped to the wall. He felt
good as he ate breakfast and talked to his uncle, L.V., who had
rescued him from a foster home when he had been a little boy,
who had been the one to teach him the game and had shown
him how to cut for the corner and swivel his hips and use the
stiff arm.

L.V. still had inescapable visions of his nephew-Boobie
Miles as the best running back in the history of Permian High
School, Boobie as the best high school running back in the
whole damn state of Texas, Boobie as belle of the ball at Nebraska or Texas A & M or one of those other fantastic college
casinos, Boobie as winner of the Heisman. He couldn't get
those dreams out of his head, couldn't let go of them. And neither, of course, could Boobie.

There were still some questions about the knee, about how
ready Boobie was after the injury two months earlier that had
required arthroscopic surgery (they had a tape of it that L.V.,
who was out of work because of the slump in the oil field, sometimes watched in the afternoon darkness of the living room,
just as he sometimes watched other pivotal moments of his
nephew's football career).

The Cooper Cougars had thrashed Boobie pretty badly the
previous week down in Abilene, headhunting for him to the
point that he had to be restrained from getting into a fistfight. But he had held up under the physical punishment, two or
three or four tacklers driving into him on many of the plays,
the risk always there that they would take a sweet shot at his
knee, smash into that still-tender mass of cartilage and ligament
with all their might and see how tough the great Boobie Miles
really was, see how quickly he got up off the ground after a
jolting thwack that sounded like a head-on car collision, see how
much he liked the game of football now as fear laced through
him and the knee began to feel as tender to the touch as the
cheek of a baby, see how the future winner of the Heisman felt
as he lay there on the clumpy sod with those Cooper Cougars
taunting through the slits in their helmets:

Com'on, Boobie, you tough motherfucker, com'on, let's see how
tough you are!

Com'on, get up, get up!

You ain't nothin' but a pussy, a goddamn pussy!

He had made it through, he had survived, although it was
clear to everyone that he wasn't the same runner of the year
before, the instinct and the streak of meanness replaced by an
almost sad tentativeness, a groping for feeling and moments
and movements that before had always come as naturally as the
muscles that rippled through his upper torso.

But there was a fire in his belly this morning, an intensity and
sense of purpose. This game wasn't against a bunch of goodytwo-shoes hacks from Abilene, the buckle of the West Texas
Bible Belt. It was against Midland Lee-Permian's arch-rivalsthe Rebels, those no-good son-of-a-bitch bastard Rebels-under the Friday night lights for the district championship before
a crowd of fifteen thousand. If Permian won, it was guaranteed
a trip to the most exciting sporting event in the entire world,
the Texas high school football playoffs, and a chance to make it
all the way, to go to State. Anybody who had ever been there
knew what a magic feeling that was, how it forever ranked up
there with the handful of other magic feelings you might be lucky enough to have in your life, like getting married or having your first child.