Friday Night Lights: A Town, a Team, and a Dream (28 page)

There had been a time ...

When Odessa High Broncho fans got to talking their fondest
recollections centered on another era, an era when Odessa
High was the only high school in town if' you didn't count the
one the blacks went to, which no one (lid.

Those had been the days back then in the postwar boom of
the forties and fifties. The Permian fans thought they had it
lock on football and were the only ones in town who knew anything about it, but that wasn't true. If' you wanted to see real
football mania, if you wanted to see a group of' people who
cared about a team and loved them as if they were their own children, go back to the 1946 season, when almost half the town
was crammed together on the wooden benches of old Fly Field
like pencil points. Go back to the days of Byron "Santone"
Townsend, the mere memory of number 27's angular moves in
the open field, the way he could tilt and turn his body so that
he was nearly parallel to the ground, making grown men almost misty-eyed. "God dog could he run!" was the only way
Ken Hankins, an independent oil producer who had been born
in Odessa in 1933 and was a die-hard Odessa High booster,
could possibly describe it.

Go back to the days when people camped out overnight for
tickets with huge smiles on their faces, as if they were performing an important service for their country.

"Odessa is a place you have to see to believe," wrote Irving
Farman in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram during the 1946 season.
"At first I thought I was back in St. Louis before the seventh
game of the World Series, instead of on the eve of the OdessaSweetwater football classic.

"Chairs in the Elliott Hotel lobby were selling for the price of
the diplomatic suite at the Waldorf-and for half price you
could sit on someone's lap."

Go back to the 1946 state championship game after the Red
Hosses had already smitten down everyone else in their paththe Lubbock Westerners, the El Paso Tigers, the Big Spring
Steers, the Abilene Eagles, the Amarillo Golden Sandies, the
San Angelo Bobcats, the Sweetwater Mustangs, the Lamesa
Tornadoes, the Midland Bulldogs, the Ysleta Indians, the
Wichita Falls Coyotes, the Highland Park Scotties.

Some thirty-eight thousand people filled Austin's Memorial
Stadium three days after Christmas for that state championship game. Thousands came from Odessa, and from all over,
to watch one of the greatest schoolboy duels in the history of
the game-Santone Townsend versus San Antonio Jefferson's
Kyle Rote.

Rote, who later went on to star at SMU and the New York
Giants, scored on a six-yard run. He threw a fifty-six-yard touchdown pass. He punted for a forty-seven-yard average and
kicked both extra points. He did everything he was supposed
to do, fulfilled every promise. But Townsend rushed for 124
yards, scored a touchdown, and threw for one as well. He led
the Bronchos to their first, and only, state championship will
over the Mustangs, 21-14.

"Out in the middle of West Texas is an oil town named
Odessa-a fast growing city that jumped from some 9,000 souls
in 1941 to more than 31,000 in 1946. And all of them are football mnad," said the foreword to a special seventy-page booklet
commemorating that championship season. "A great football
team will live in the minds of sports fans for years to come. If
moving pictures were made of the Jeff-Odessa game, those pictures will be used to show future gridders just how great a high
school football team can be."

One could just imagine the grainy images flickering on a
postage stamp-sized screen of boys with sawed-off names
wearing helmets that looked like bathing caps: Jug Taylor at
center, Steve Dowden and Wayne Jones at the tackles, Her-
nman Foster and Gorden Headlee at the guards, the Moorman
brothers, Billy and Bobby, at the ends, Pug Gabrel and H. L.
Holderman the halfbacks, Santone'Iownsend the fullback, and
Hayden Fry the quarterback.

"Whether or not Odessa again will win a state title, we can't
say," said the commemorative booklet. "But, whether or not
they repeat, the city of Odessa has had its moment of triumph."

That moment of glory was never repeated. Little by little the
football teams at Odessa High started changing, and so did the
makeup of the student body it served. Odessa was growing,
the promise of good work in the oil field an irresistible lure.
With that growth came the inevitable pattern of social stratification. In 1959 Permian opened, and it hastened the migration
of affluent whites away from the downtown to the northeast
part of Odessa. The east side increasingly became the repository for the town's white-collar class. The west side increasingly
became the repository for blue-collar workers doing grit labor in the oil field, and for Hispanics drawn to Odessa because of
the availability of work and the relative proximity of the town
to the Mexican border. "The attitude of success was moving in
that direction and the don't-give-a-shit was over here," said
Hankins of the transition that took place between east and west.

In 1964, the Bronchos heat Permian 13-0. It was their last
victory over their east-side rival, the beginning of a winless
drought that showed no signs of stopping.

As Permian began to build a dynasty, Odessa High football
faltered. Little by little, support for the town's original high
school ebbed away, the fanaticism of the forties and fifties being replaced by bitterness. Some of those who had once been
the Bronchos' biggest supporters, who had gone to school at
Odessa High and played in Fly Field, fled to the suburbanlike
security of Permian. They often said they did so because they
were disgusted with what had happened to the football program. But behind that veil, many believed, was often a thinly
disguised contempt for the fundamental social changes taking
place at the school, and on the west side of town in general.

When a suburban-style shopping mall was built in 1980 at the
height of the oil boom, it opened on the east side of town, just
a few blocks away from Permian. The mall was the final coup
de grace for the downtown area, taking with it the Sears and
the Penney's and leaving behind the dirty bookstores. When
the new art museum opened, it was on the east side of town.
When the new Hilton Hotel opened, it was on the east side of
town. When the new stadium opened, it was on the east side
of town.

As one school official put it, Permian and the east side of
Odessa offered disenchanted rooters a reminder of what
Odessa High used to be like in the old clays, that is, the days
when it had had almost no Hispanic student population to
speak of, the days when its football team had been the only
game in town.

In 1960, the Hispanic population of the county had been
about 6 percent. By 1985, census data showed that 25 percent of the approximately one hundred thirty thousand people living in the county were Hispanic, and that estimate may have
been low since the proportion of Hispanics in the school system
was around 40 percent.

At Odessa High the effects of the demographic shift were
even more pronounced. In 1969 the school had been 94 percent white and 6 percent Hispanic. In 1983, a year after the
implementation of court-ordered desegregation, the propor
tion of white students was 59 percent and that of Hispanics 36
percent. In 1988, for the first time ever, the proportion of
white students dropped below half, to 48 percent. Hispanics
made up 47 percent of the student population and blacks and
other minorities the remaining 5 percent.

There had been changes in the ethnic makeup of Permian,
but they were not nearly as radical. In 1983, as a result of desegregation the proportion of white students at Permian was 76
percent and that of Hispanics 14 percent. In 1988 whites made
up 69 percent and Hispanics 23 percent of the student body.

To those who continued to remain loyal to Odessa High, the
changed ethnic makeup had made the school almost unrecognizable. The place clearly had a stigma attached to it now, and
nowhere was that better embodied than on the football field.

There was Permian, where champion after champion was
churned out on the gridiron, often with the help of blacks who
went there because of the odd way the boundary lines between
the two schools had been drawn. There was Odessa High,
which many old-line supporters felt had become a dumping
ground for Hispanics who, among other things, couldn't play
football worth a lick.

"Some kids don't like to play football and the Spanish-Mexicans are one of them," said Vern Foreman, an electrical contractor and former city councilman who had graduated from
Odessa High in 1951. "Look at the enrollment of the school,
and damn sure that's what you got. So they need to take up
another sport, like beer drinking."

"My house sits on OHS property and I can't sell it because OHS is the Mexican school, unless it's [to] a rich Mexican," said
Hankins, who had been president of the Odessa High booster
club for two years during the seventies.

It became apparent that the quickest way to achieve better
racial balance at the two schools would be to change the
boundaries. The school board was clearly reluctant to take up
the issue. Changing school boundaries was thorny under any
conditions, but any effort to achieve a more balanced composition would inevitably be heightened by the politics of football.
Would students living in areas of town that had been the nucleus of Permian talent suddenly find themselves in the Odessa
High attendance district? If that happened, everybody agreed
that all hell would break loose.

"It would be very nice if we could make a decision irrespective of football," said school board member Lee Buice, "but that
may be where the gauntlet is thrown." Raymond Starnes, the
principal of Odessa High, agreed, stating that "football is in the
eye of the storm in the controversy over boundaries."

Or as Ken Hankins put it, "When they start movin' some
boundaries around, you're gonna see some people slingin' snot
and start crying."

Aware of Odessa High's frustration on the gridiron and the
image problems it caused, the administration had tried to shift
the focus of Odessa High away from football into other areas.
In the regional academic decathlon, a contest pitting teams of
students from various local schools against each other, Odessa
High had won four straight times. It was a wonderful accomplishment for a school where the background of many students
was far more economically disadvantaged than that of students
attending Permian.

During the 1988-89 school year, Odessa High also had a
greater percentage of students than Permian pass the statemandated test in math and English that was required for a diploma. That too was a wonderful accomplishment. But it did
not mitigate the feelings of failure on the football field.

Permian's streak over Odessa High had created deep-rooted
convictions of inferiority, to the extent that Principal Starnes
spent time after each loss telling students and teachers that losing to Permian wasn't a reflection on anything. "I spend a good
part of the year after the football season drumming that message into the students and the faculty that we are not secondrate," he admitted. And Buice knew that many Odessa High
supporters would give academic achievement up in a second
for one victory against Permian, just one.

Aware of the rivalry between the two schools, employers
searched for some middle ground of impartiality, fearful that
any inadvertent slip might cause a mutiny from one half of the
work force or the other. One year, an employer simply split the
office into two militarized zones on game day, thereby allowing
Permian supporters to decorate their half black and Odessa
High supporters their half red. Even bank presidents found
themselves acutely aware of the tricky diplomacy of east-west
relations in Odessa. When Ron Faucher, president of Texas
Commerce Bank, dressed up for work on the annual costume
day for employees, he arrived in a shirt that tactfully proclaimed Moto on the front and BRONCHOS on the back.

But such evenhandedness still didn't work. At every level,
Odessa High fans saw a conspiracy against them. They pointed
to the settlement of the desegregation suit and the strange zigs
and zags of the boundary line that resulted in Permian's getting
more blacks than Odessa High.

Painfully detailed letters were sent to members of the school
board outlining how Permian boosters had recruited athletes
who lived in the Odessa High district to move and play for
Mojo with promises of cars and bargain prices on houses. The
school hoard checked into the allegations and found no merit
in them, but the investigation did little to lessen the air of suspicion, and animosity, between the two schools.

Most of the time the Odessa High supporters did their
grumbling in private, but once a year it all came out in the open. The Permian fans got tired of the incessant whining of
the Odessa High fans, of hearing that the Bronchos' ineptitude
on the football field was always somebody else's fault. The
Odessa High fans got tired of the condescending smirks of the
Permian fans. They saw an area of town changing in ways they
had never dreamed of, the names Taylor and Townsend and
Fry and Gabrel and Moorman on the beloved football field replaced by new names in a new era-Villalobos and Paz and
Martinez and Limon.

They wanted to feel the past once again, to bridge the gap to
that time forty years earlier when the slithery moves of Santone
Townsend had swelled their hearts like nothing else. They
wanted revenge. They wanted to feel the superiority and invincibility that had once been theirs, to stake a claim once again to
Friday night. "It's kind of scary that it can have that sort of an
impact," Superintendent Hayes acknowledged of the rivalry.

But it did, and Coach Belew, who had played in one of
those games fifteen years earlier, put it best in the waning
moments before game time when he told his defensive ends:
"It's a big game. It's gonna be a sellout and Odessa High is
gonna be higher than a kite. This is their season. This is their
Super Bowl."