Friday Night Lights: A Town, a Team, and a Dream (22 page)

Even the little group sitting in the wedge of bleachers behind
the west end zone seems to be getting into the intoxicating pace
of the game. It is a delegation of Russians who spent the previous day at the nearby air force base in Karnack to witness the
destruction of Pershing missiles as provided by the recent INF
treaty between the United States and the Soviet Union.

Courtesy of the chamber of commerce, the Russians are
dressed in gray shirts embossed with the word MAVERICKS in red
letters. They have on red-and-white MAVERICK hats. They have
red MAVERICK carry-on bags with red MAVERICK footballs inside
them. They sit on red MAVERICK seat pads and they are holding
special co! MAVS flyers printed up by the Marshall Messenger
that have the signatures of every Maverick football player and
feature good-luck ads from Jerry's Auto Parts and the East
Texas Sports Center and Pump `N Pantry. They look a little
wild in their outfits and they don't understand a lick of football,
but by halftime they are fairly adept at making a hook 'em
horns sign and in any case their understanding of America by
the end of the game will be absolute whether they realize it
or not.

Winchell drops back to pass and throws deep. Hill tiptoes
against the sideline while stretching his head back to pick up
the ball. He makes a remarkable catch, as if he has eyes in his
chin. The thirty-six-yard gain sets Permian up for another field
goal to cut the Marshall lead to one point.

Marshall fumbles the kickoff and Permian recovers deep inside Maverick territory at the 37. With a second and eight, Winchell throws a little pass in the left flat to Hill, who eludes his
defender with ease and is gone for a touchdown.

Permian goes for two points. Winchell fakes the hand-off and goes around the right end on a bootleg, angling for the end
zone. A Maverick defender heads for the corner as well, the
moment of impact unfolding like a game of chicken on a lonely
highway; the whole point is not for the players to avoid each
other at the last second but to collide. The crowd waits in
breathless anticipation for the inevitable head-on. And then the
sound comes of two high school boys smashing into each other,
as jarring as a bottle flung full force against a wall or a stick
being snapped or a club being taken to a set of bones.

It's no good. Winchell is a foot short.

Permian leads 12-7.

Odell takes the hand-off on a draw at the Permian 30 and cuts
to the left side. Cornerback Stan Wilkins has a perfect angle on
him to make the tackle, a chance to "hit the snot out of 'im" as
the coaches like to call it. Wilkins weighs 136 pounds, and of all
the kamikazes who dominate Permian and are eagerly willing
to sacrifice their bodies for the great cause of football, he is the
most fearless, or foolhardy.

But Odell doesn't have time for such mythic self-sacrifice. He
outweighs Wilkins by sixty pounds, and with one hand he casually throws him to the ground. He speeds down the sideline
and isn't brought down until the eight. The Mavericks score on
the next play. The try for two points fails but they are back in
the lead, 13-12.

Permian moves to a fourth and five at the Marshall 28. Winchell drops back to pass, throwing a perfect strike on a timing
pattern to reserve split end Johnny Celey on the left sideline.
Celey turns around too late to catch it. As he comes to the sidelines Gaines is livid. In an uncharacteristic moment, he loses
control. Celey hopes to avoid him but Gaines grabs him by the
shirt.

"What you thinkin' about, boy!" he screams at Celey at the top
of his lungs. He stares at him with a look that seems almost
desperate. Celey, like an embarrassed little boy, refuses to make eye contact. Then Gaines lets go, moving back into his anguished solitude, on the headset once again to Belew in the
press box trying to crack the Marshall defense for the go-ahead
score. He doesn't want to lose this game. A loss will only fuel
the fire of those who think he doesn't have what it takes to win
the ones that really count. Sure, he can get his boys to pummel the
El Pasos. Anyone and his mother can do that. But against the big boys
he big-time bellies up....

He doesn't need the pressure of it, because he has been
through the misery of it before.

Marshall linebacker Kevin Whitworth tries to get up off the
field in the middle of the fourth quarter. There is a sudden
interlude in the frenzy of the game as he takes off his helmet
and rises only to his knees. The sun is beating down and the
humidity makes every piece of clothing stick to his skin like
heated molasses and Permian is knocking on the goddamn
door again and it's not the Mavericks he is playing for but the
entire town of Marshall and there are eight thousand people
screaming like they are all giving birth and it is up to him not
to let Permian score even though he is sick to his stomach from
exhaustion.

Whitworth begins to vomit on the grass, which stinks in the
heat and has been torn to bits by cleats and the crash of helmets
and the endless screams of the fans. No one pays attention except for Trapper, the Permian trainer, who starts shouting at
him from the sidelines, "Gut check, baby! Gut check!" Yes, it is
a gut check, a test of how much Kevin Whitworth wants to play
this game.

He's done vomiting. He gets to his feet and stays in for the
next play.

Permian's fourth down at the Marshall 20 fails.

With a little over a minute on the clock and no time-outs left,
Winchell works the sideline brilliantly, the team as precisioned
and disciplined as anything in college. Thirteen yards to Robert Brown for a first down to the 40. Eighteen yards to Hill for a
first down to the Marshall 42. Thirteen yards to Hill for another first down to the 29. Ten more yards and they win the
game with a field goal.

First and ten. Thirty-six seconds left. Winchell throws a perfect strike, but the ball is dropped. Second and ten. Thirtythree seconds left. The pass is incomplete. Third and ten.
Twenty-nine seconds left. The pass is incomplete. Fourth and
ten. Twenty-six seconds left. The pass is incomplete. Marshall
is penalized for having too many men on the field. Permian has
another down.

Fourth and five. Twenty seconds left.

Winchell drops back to pass, the eleventh play of this drive.
He has time. He isn't rushed....

He looks for Hill, who has already caught eight passes for
198 yards and cannot be stopped if he gets anywhere near the
ball. All the ingredients are there for another Permian miracle.
It has to happen. Each and every f'an, those who have willingly
traveled the 530 miles, those listening at home over the radio,
can feel it in his soul. The ball rises and almost seems to freeze
in the exhausted air, spent by so much cheering and hitting and
incomprehensible effort....

The Marshall players danced and hugged and flashed the hook
'em horns sign as if it were V-day. They ran to the stands with
their bright red shirts sticking out of their grass-stained pants
in glorious dishevelment. 'They bowed to the fans and the fans
bowed to them and the Mavettes were everywhere with their
twinkling sequins and white cowboy hats slightly askew and
their mascara and rouge falling joyfully down their tearstained
cheeks. Coach Parker gave massive bear hugs to everyone in
sight while the Permian team gathered quietly in the center of
the field to pray.

Inside the locker room, Parker accepted congratulation after
congratulation. One man lingered to the side, waiting his turn.
He finally went up to Parker and quietly told him, his voice sounding as if he was about to cry, "Every Maverick, and every
person in Marshall, is proud of you."

Parker walked back outside, and about two hundred supporters were there to cheer him. A fan came up to him, gave
him a long hug, and thanked him for a "wonderful, wonderful win." Nobody had any intention of leaving, because they
wanted to linger in this moment forever.

In the visitor's locker room, Gaines, his face slacked with
sweat and his hair matted, closed the door to parents and fans
and drew the players around him. "I lay as much blame on
myself as anyone," he told them, looking ghostly. "I did a lousy
job of getting you ready to play and I promise, I'll do a better
job next week." The loss was Permian's first non-conference loss
in nine years. With a record of one and one, it was also the first
time in nine years the team had been at .500.

The sporadic grumbles that can suddenly overrun a town
like a summer forest fire had been given another excuse to ignite again. Those starting the grousing would tell you that
problem wasn't the players. But the coach ...

After all, who in town could possibly forget the debacle of
the 1986 season, Gaines's first, when the team had gone only
seven and two and didn't even make the playoffs? Many were
ready to give up on Gary Gaines right then, ship him and his
family back to Monahans where they came from. As booster
Bob Rutherford put it, "We'll just have to get another coach, a
coach that can win." The 1987 season, when P^rmian had gone
to the semifinals of the state playoffs, helped to redeem him,
but the Marshall loss would inevitably stir up the sparks of dissent that he wasn't tough enough and didn't know how to strike
the fear of God into his players as his predecessor so effectively
had. He was just too damn nice.

Back in the Permian field house after the flight home, Gaines
and the other coaches gathered to watch the film of the game
and sort out the paradox of it, the alternation of great plays
with sloppiness and mental breakdown-fifteen missed tackles,
two fumbles, the inability to punch the ball in inside the twenty yard line. Over its history, Permian had won an awful lot of
games it should have lost. It had almost never lost a game it
should have won, but this was one of them.

Was there a fatal flaw? Was there something Gaines couldn't
detect? Or was it somehow his own fault, his own inability to
motivate the team? In the lights of the coaches' office the agony
showed, the handsomeness replaced by a weary sallowness, his
eyes drawn tight and puffy from lack of sleep. But the exhaustion didn't matter. The Marshall game was an impetus to work
harder than ever before. It was a painful loss, but the season
was still only beginning and there were eight games left to determine the team's fate.

"Five hundred yards of offense and can't score but thirteen
points," he said wistfully near the stroke of midnight as he and
the assistants watched the film in the windowless room, where
the gray light filtered from the projector lens like a lonely wisp
of moonlight.

The party at the home of one of the players started out as a
small affair, but then word about it, like the game of telephone,
got out to the drag along Andrews and suddenly the vacant lot
next to the house was filled with cars. With the player's parents
away and unaware of what was going on, there was no problem
of parental interference.

There was a keg and a couple of cases of beer. A fight
erupted for entertainment. A girl who everybody agreed was
about the toughest shit-kicker in Odessa knocked another girl
to the ground with a few punches and then started slamming
her head against a stone floor, leaving blood all over the place.
No one seemed quite sure about the reason for the fight, but
there wasn't much attempt to break it up since the girl who got
pummeled was generally thought to be a jerk.

The players were upset over the loss to Marshall. But since it
wasn't a league game, they could live with it. They didn't need
to dwell on it over and over the way the coaches did and flagellate themselves with it. They knew in their hearts they were still going to State, and they also knew that when they got to
school on Monday no one would think of them as losers.

They would still be gladiators, the ones who were envied by
everyone else, the ones who knew about the best parties and
got the best girls and laughed the loudest and strutted so
proudly through the halls of school as if it was their own wonderful, private kingdom.

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