Friday Night Lights: A Town, a Team, and a Dream (40 page)

Once they were gone, Sharon Gaines entered through the
double doors of the field house with some medication for her
husband. The place was empty. All those little pictures on the
Wall of Fame with those square jaws and steely-eyed gazes, all
those heart-shaped plaques with the inscribed, once-glittering
names of this player or that one who had been the very best at
running back or linebacker or lineman, all those typewritten
phrases of inspiration on the bulletin board painfully culled
from such sources as H. L. Mencken and AC/DC now looked
like decorations for an elaborate wedding that had suddenly
been canceled without warning.

In the aftermath of 'a win there was no place more giddy than
the locker room, the players whooping and hollering, readying
themselves for the spoils of victory with strokes of the comb as
meticulous as brushstrokes by Michelangelo and gobs of Lag-
erfeld aftershave as pungent as the smell of ripened Juicy Fruit.
They would leave the field house and waiting outside for them
would be a haze of' boosters and parents and Pepettes and
cheerleaders. The faces of the parents and boosters would be etched with the same stunning kind of pride you might see in a
hospital delivery room, eyes shining and brimming and filled
with love at the joy of their creation. The cheerleaders and the
Pepettes would be coy and coquettish and adoring, their blond
hair falling down in wonderful piles as high and soft as clown
pillows, dressed in letter jackets from their boyfriends that fell
to the knees and had white patches on the back as bountiful as
uncontrolled clusters of daisies. For the players it was impossible, whether you were it starter or it fourth-string substitute,
not to feel as though you owned the world at that very moment,
that everything you had ever dreamed of, imagined, prayed for
had somehow come true before you were even twenty. But in
the aftermath of a loss the field house emptied quietly and
quickly, as if the place was cursed and it was somehow shameful
to be there at all.

And no loss had been worse than this one, by a single point
to the Lee Rebels.

Winchell asked someone to walk out of the field house with
him and act as if the two of them were deeply engrossed in
conversation so he wouldn't have to face anyone and hear all
those people tell him how sorry they were. He knew they meant
well, but lie couldn't stand scenes like this. McDougal's eyes
were red when he left the field house: he had sobbed in the
stadium dressing room immediately after the game; he had
sobbed on the way to the bus when he and his mother, who was
sobbing also, had clutched fingers through the tiny holes of the
fence separating them; he had sobbed in the locker room of the
field house when he sank his head into the arms of a male
cheerleader. Billingsley's eyes were red also, but as girl after girl
came up to him to give him a long hug, he realized there were
possibilities in the situation he had not yet considered. "'Fills is
better than winning," he whispered to someone with that wonderful shark's grin.

Chavez, his hands in the pockets of his gray-and-black letter
jacket, had a little smirk on his face, as if he knew who exactly
who was going to shoulder the blame for the whole disaster. Boobie Miles left the scene almost immediately, convinced that
the coaches had deceived him into letting him think he was going to get into the game, consumed with the rage of having to
melt away on the bench in front of thousands. "I'm not going
to play anymore," was all he said when L.V. picked him up.
Ivory Christian, filled with so many tortured feelings about the
whole thing, didn't show any emotion one way or another. They
had lost to the Rebels and instead of winning the district championship and guaranteeing themselves a trip to the playoffs,
there might be only one game left in the season. But Ivory
didn't know whether that was had. Or maybe good.

Sharon Gaines met her husband in his office, which was filled
with the usual stock-in-trade of a football coach: a helmet
mounted on a pedestal, pictures of his two children, several
footballs etched with fading script to commemorate wonderful
wins, a map with a huge arrow pointing to M010LAND, smiling
portraits of him and his assistants in better days before the season had ever started, a little plaque commemorating Permian
as the team with the best winning percentage in all of Texas in
the decade of the seventies. He had spent so much time in the
lousy light of a film projector in that office, watching play after
play in the creep of slow motion for a secret, a clue-a raised
shoulder, an extra sliver of space between the guard and the
tackle-focusing on the seemingly imperceptible details of those
grainy images as intently as a scholar pores over a rare manuscript. The time he spent coaching seemed unimaginable. Like
a soldier of fortune, he kissed his wife and children goodbye in
August and almost literally did not see them again for the next
four months, until the conquest of a state championship ended
in victory or defeat. And now it all seemed worthless.

His ear had been throbbing for about two months, and it was
just one of several ailments that had come up during the course
of the season. He was glassy-eyed and barely able to say a word,
his thoughts still fixed on what had happened on the field, on
what had gone wrong and whether it was somehow his fault. Sharon handed him the medication for his ear. She hugged
him briefly, her eyes closing tight. He didn't respond and she
quickly withdrew, for she knew that he was lost to her, in his
own world of shame and defeat. He hated to lose, absolutely
hated it, and of all the losses, this may well have been the most
devastating one.

She quietly left the field house and sat outside for a few minutes in the parking lot in her car. Her face peered out from the
driver's window in the darkness and she too looked tired and
exhausted, as if she had been out there with him on the field in
those waning, helpless moments after the final pass from Winchell had fallen so pathetically incomplete and the ten thousand
strong on the Permian side had collapsed into a shocked hush.

A wealth of feelings bubbled up inside her. She knew firsthand how high the stakes were in Odessa, how "goin' to State"
was not something merely desired but demanded. It made her
husband's job exciting and wonderful and it gave her some
glamour as well.

If you took a poll, few people in town could tell you who the
mayor was, or the police chief, or the city manager. Hardly anybody could tell you the name of a city councilman, or a county
commissioner, or the head of the public works department, or
the planning department, or the fire department. Those were
jobs nobody cared about in Odessa unless a house burned down
or a sewer line backed up. But just about everybody could
tell you who the coach of Permian High School was, and that
rubbed off on her.

Her (laughter Nicole had often joked with her, "If Daddy
dies, you would be nothing." But during the past three years,
sitting in the stands week after week had become a nightmare
for her as she listened to the fans tear apart her husband and
the teenagers who played for him with unrelenting venom, not
caring one whit that she, the wife of the coach, was sitting
within easy earshot. Sometimes she couldn't stand it and had to
move to one of the portals to get away from it all.

"I don't think they realize these are sixteen, seventeen, eighteen-year-old kids," she once said. "I don't think they realize
these are coaches. They are men, they are not gods. They don't
realize it's a game and they look at them like they're professional football players. They are kids, high school kids, the sons
of somebody, and they expect them to be perfect."

Yes, they did, and they had too much invested in it emotionally to ever change. Permian football had become too much a
part of the town and too much a part of their own lives, as
intrinsic and sacred a value as religion, as politics, as making
money, as raising children. That was the nature of sports in a
town like this. Football stood at the very core of what the town
was about, not on the outskirts, not on the periphery. It had
nothing to do with entertainment and everything to do with
how people felt about themselves.

"They don't have any idea about the coaches and the time
they put in and the dedication," she said. "They don't have any
idea, and they don't care. They don't have any idea of what the
families give up."

She remembered the cruelty of the 1986 season, her husband's first, when Odessa was going through the worst economic crisis in its history. Everywhere you looked someone was
filing for bankruptcy, or throwing his belongings into a U-Haul
to find another job up in the rustbelt or snowbelt or crimebelt
from which he thought he had escaped. If there had ever been
a time that the city needed a lift it was then, and Permian did
not even make the playoffs for the first time in the entire decade. People had savagely ripped into Gaines then, as if the
seven and two record the team compiled was the same as not
winning a single game.

She remembered how, after that season, Nicole announced
one day that she was too sick to go to school. Later that
afternoon she bounded into the garage bubbly and obviously
healthy. It then dawned on Sharon that there was nothing
physically wrong with her daughter at all, that she simply did not want to go to school because of what other kids might say
about her father. She had hated that year. She never wanted to
relive it. And now it all seemed to be happening again.

With the 22-21 loss to Midland Lee there was a three-way tie
for first place in the district with one game left. Since only two
teams went to the playoffs, there was now the distinct possibility
of Permian's not making it. The repercussions of that made her
shudder. Her voice turned reedy and high-pitched as she imagined what might happen if Permian didn't make the playoffs.
"If we don't, we may be saying goodbye to our sweet little of
house," she said outside the field house, and the intent of her
words was obvious: she was afraid that her husband was going
to get fired, or simply be forced to leave because of the avalanche of criticism against him.

It wasn't an irrational thought, for there was no profession in
the state of Texas with worse job security than that of high
school football coach. Coaches were fired all the time for poor
records. Sometimes it happened with the efficiency of a bloodless coup-one day the coach was there at the office decorated
in the school colors and the next day he was gone, as if he had
never existed. But sometimes he was paraded before school
board meetings to be torn apart by the public in a scene like
something out of the Salem witch trials, or had several thousands of dollars' worth of damage done to his car by rocks
thrown by irate fans, or responded to a knock on the door to
find someone with a shotgun who wasn't there to fire him but
to complain about his son's lack of playing time.

When Gaines himself went home that Friday night at about
two in the morning he found seven FOR SALE signs planted
in his lawn. The next night, someone had also smashed a
pumpkin into his car, causing a dent. It didn't bother him. He
was the coach. He got paid for what he did and he was tough
enough to take it. But he did get upset when he heard that
several FOR SALE signs had also been punched into Chavez's
lawn. Brian was just a player, a senior in high school, but that didn't seem to matter. "That's sick to me," said Gaines. "I just
can't understand it."

The following Tuesday, as he drove downtown to the bus
station to pick up some game films of the team's final opponent,
the San Angelo Central Bobcats, he was still grappling with the
loss. "It shakes your confidence, it shakes the heck out of it," he
said. "It's been miserable, just miserable.

"I'm going to work as hard as I can and do the best job that I
possibly can," he said. "If it doesn't work and I'm not needed,
I'll move on. I have put everything I've got into it and if that's
not enough, the good Lord can guide me in another direction."
He was silent for a few seconds, and then he said something
else about what it was like to have the job he had in a place like
Odessa.

"You can't really describe how high you can be or how low
you can be. I think that's a truism in coaching, but that's especially true here."

If he was looking for any reprieve from the fans in the succeeding days, he wasn't going to get it. A few, like Bobby Boyles,
rose to his defense. Boyles was a die-hard booster, one of those
who set his life each fall to the clock of the season. He and his
wife sat there at the booster club meeting every Tuesday night
and at the junior varsity game every Thursday night and at the
varsity game every Friday night, wearing their black as proudly
as a priest wears his collar. He needed Permian football as
much as anyone, but he couldn't stand the attacks on Gaines.
He was sitting at the Kettle restaurant over on Andrews when
someone came round to the table the Monday after the game
to ask him to sign a petition to get Gaines fired, and he bluntly
told the person, "Go to hell."

"Lose two games by two points and they're ready to hang
'im," he said quietly at the booster club meeting that Tuesday
night following the loss to the Rebels. "What it is, they're
spoiled. They've won too damn many. They need about five
years of losing and then they'd think Gary was great."

Boyles called Gaines at home to say he was still with him.
"Gary," he told him, "They're ready to kill you, but I'm still
your friend." But Boyles was clearly in the minority.

Phones rang off the hook. Ken Scates, who had religiously
followed the team since its inception in 1959, couldn't remember a time when everyone had been so upset. Name the last
time a Permian team had been favored by three touchdowns
and had lost! You couldn't do it. It had never happened.