Friday Night Lights: A Town, a Team, and a Dream (20 page)

Sometimes when he talked his eyes would close and the fingers of his hands would splay across the table, as if they were
trying to touch the very part of him that had caused his life to
go so wrong just when it seemed to be going right. But then his
eyes opened, eyes that were jaundiced and tired, and he spoke
with a melancholy weariness. He was tired of giving explanations, tired of being held up to the light and examined as if he
were some rare specimen being taken out of an airtight jar,
Laurence Hurd the social activist, Laurence Hurd the bank
robber, Laurence Hurd the eloquent spokesman for integration, Laurence Hurd the master of three-card rnonte, Laurence
Hurd the model of black success, Laurence Hurd the model of
black failure. There were others like him who had fallen off the
path and given in to the old demons. He wasn't the only one.

"I guess sometimes there's some force within me tha: takes
great control of me. Who knows? I can't say. You ask me why
there has been such drastic change. I wish I knew."

I

THERE WERE MOMENTS WHEN IVORY CHRISTIAN LOVED THE
game he tried so much to hate.

You could tell by the very way he lined up at the middle linebacker position, up on the balls of his feet in a cocked crouch,
fingers slicing slowly through the air as if trying to feel the very
flow of the play, elbows tucked and ready to fire off the snap of
the ball in a mercuric flash.

He even liked it sometimes during the early morning workouts that were held twice a week before classes started inside
the school gymnasium. The players ran at full strength under
the angry glaze of the lights, the first-string offense and defense
going against so-called scout teams simulating the offense and
defense of the coming week's opponent.

No one was supposed to tackle, but every now and then Ivory
pounced out of his crouch and drew a bead on some poor junior running back unfortunate enough to have become the
focal point of his frustration and the need to unleash it on
someone. As the unsuspecting prey went around the end, still
adjusting to the slightly surreal notion of practicing football indoors on a basketball court at seven-twenty in the morning,
Ivory just smacked him. There was the jarring pop of helmet
against helmet, and then the trajectory of the underclassman as
he went skittering across the gleaming gym floor like a billiard ball hopping over a pool table after a wild cue shot. Ivory then
sauntered back to the huddle as if he were walking down the
runway at the Miss America contest, basking in the glow of ultimate victory but careful not to show too wide a smile because
he had, after all, a reputation for self-restraint to keep up.

Much of the time Ivory fought to rid football from his life, to
call a merciful halt to the practices, the dreaded gassers, the
reading of page after page of plays and game plans, the endless
demands on his time. He liked the games, there was no denying
that, but it was hard not to find the rest of it pointless.

There were other coaches around the league who drooled
over Ivory's size and speed (195 pounds and growing with a 4.7
in the forty) and his strength (he could bench-press 275 pounds
as a sixteen-year-old). They thought he had major-college talent written all over him, but Ivory didn't. He was so sure of it
he wasn't even going to bother to take the SAT or ACT entrance exams, which made it virtually impossible for him to get
a major-college scholarship even if anyone was interested.

Maybe it would have been different if the coaches had let him
start at middle linebacker his junior year. He had had the talent
for it, there was little question about that, but the coaches
simply didn't trust Ivory at the show position of the Permian
defense. They switched him to offensive guard, and he played
it brilliantly.

But something snapped in Ivory after middle linebacker was
wrested from him. The common explanation, he wasn't rah-rah
enough, didn't make any sense to him, although the coaches
were hardly the only ones who found him to be stubborn and
headstrong. But the way Ivory saw it, they just wanted to deprive him of glory, of what was rightfully his.

And where was all this rah-rah stuff supposed to come from?
Was it simply expected that he would become indoctrinated
into the blinding passion of the Mojo mystique just like everyone else? He was aware of it-everybody in town was-but up
until the sixth grade Permian was off-limits to him because the
school system was segregated.

If you lived on the Southside, as Ivory's family did, there was
no way of going there. Instead, the big school in town was Ector, which wasn't too far from his home. Ector didn't have the
football tradition that Permian had. But it had won State twice
in basketball, residents of the Southside packing the tiny school
gym to the rafters with twelve hundred fans while others who
couldn't get in climbed the roof and stared in the windows.
That was the tradition Ivory had grown up with, not Mojo.

Relegated to the position of guard, he had played football
out of a dutiful sense of obligation, because it made his father
proud and also because it somehow seemed his destiny to do
so, regardless of what he thought about it. After all, if you were
a strong, fast black kid in Odessa, what else were you encouraged to do? What other outlet did you possibly have? When you
looked around, where else did you see a single black role
model, except in church?

He had talked with his father, Ivory senior, about it, and he
told him he wasn't sure he wanted to play college ball even if
he had the chance. The way the words came out of his mouth,
so flat and dispirited, Ivory senior thought his son might be
burned out on the whole thing altogether, the rigors of being
seriously involved in football since the age of nine finally getting to him. He had been playing the game for eight years, as
long as it took to go to medical school, serve an internship, and
complete a residency, but what loomed down the road because
of it?

Ivory couldn't see a thing.

His father had played football in Odessa in the sixties when
there was an all-black high school in town called Blackshear.
The team had played in its own stadium on the Southside, with
equipment that looked like something used in a junior high,
and it played in the high school version of the Negro League,
its opponents the all-black schools of Amarillo and Lubbock
and Midland. Those were the days of strict segregation, and the
idea of playing for Permian was of course almost inconceivable.

Ivory senior took great pride in his son's accomplishments. In the back of his mind it was probably hard not to think about
what football could do for his son and how it could make him
the first member of the Christian family ever to go to college.
But Ivory senior, who drove a. truck for a living, wasn't going
to push him. He would abide by his son's decision if Ivory chose
not to play football anymore after high school. He also knew
his son was a teenager going through changes who had, perhaps for the first time, found there might be something else in
life besides football to fill up the empty spaces of Odessa that
loomed as large as skyscrapers.

It had come to Ivory in a dream. When he related it to his
father he talked about being in a narrow tunnel with a tiny light
that he could barely see but he knew he had to find no matter
how difficult it was.

To Ivory, the message of the dream was crystal clear. He was
living his life wrong, emphasizing all the wrong things, football
and hanging out in the streets with his friends and alcohol and
marijuana. The day after he had the dream he went to church
with a hangover on his breath and Jesus in his heart, as he later
described it. He told the pastor at his church, Rose of Sharon
Missionary Baptist, about the dream and how he was convinced
that it had been a calling to preach and become part of God's
ministry.

Pastor Hanson welcomed Ivory's conversion. He knew that
Ivory was an influential kid whose actions made a tremendous
impression on his peers. But there was something worrisome
about it, and he didn't want Ivory moving from one world of
isolation into another where the only difference was the level of
standards.

Before, Ivory had displayed undisguised contempt for just
about everything, an attitude of what Hanson perceived as arrogance. Now he displayed a rigid righteousness that made him
almost a kept prisoner. At home he hardly communicated with
anyone but went immediately to his tiny room, where he listened to the gospel music of James Cleveland. He went on this way for hours on end, until his mother began to worry and
think there was something wrong with him. Why was he so
withdrawn, so quiet?

As the result of his conversion, he hated alcohol and had contempt for those who touched it. He also hated swearing, and
other players in the locker room figured it was better to abide
by his wishes rather than run the risk of messing with him. Before his calling to the ministry he had dated. Now he started
grilling girls about their habits to see if their moral standards
were high enough for him.

"Not everyone you meet is going to he a jam-up Christian,"
Hanson told him. "They may drink a beer, they may go to a
concert. You can still he Ivory, you can be eighteen years old.
You don't have to be forty years old. You don't have to isolate
yourself."

But Ivory's metamorphosis was total, a far cry from the days
when he had led the chorus of laughter in response to the
church teachings about fornication. And rarely had Hanson
seen anyone with as instinctive a gift for preaching. He was
amazed at Ivory's comprehension and interpretation of the
Scripture and his ease in the pulpit, the absolute fearlessness
he showed in getting up before the congregation and preaching the word of God with those square shoulders that did make
him look as though he was born to be a linebacker.

Wearing a blue suit with a little trim of white handkerchief
sticking out of the breast pocket, Ivory made a striking figure,
his poise like that of someone thirty years old instead of seventeen. He truly seemed at peace in these moments, able at last to
lose himself in something without anguish and ambivalence.
He rocked back and forth and nodded his head as Hanson gave
the altar prayer one Sunday. Moments later he was introduced
as "the Reverend Ivory Christian." The very ring of it sounded
stirring and wonderful, and it was amazing to see this teenager
who showed almost no enthusiasm about anything, who responded to almost everything with the shrug of an octogenarian ready to die, take the pulpit. He started softly but the exhortations of the congregation-"Talk! Talk!" and "Alright!
Alright!" and ""fake your time, son! Take your time!"-got him
going in a sweet and easy rhythm. He connected with the congregation and they connected with him as he stood beneath a
mural of the black Jesus and talked about his conversion:

When you let go of this world, Jesus puts a certain joy in your
heart. Do we really love him enough to say no to the world?