Friday Night Lights: A Town, a Team, and a Dream (43 page)

THE PERMIAN PANTHERS FINISHED THE REGULAR SEASON ON THE
first Friday night of November by pummeling the San Angelo
Bobcats. That same night, the Midland Lee Rebels finished the
season by routing the Cooper Cougars, and the Midland High
Bulldogs did likewise by beating the Abilene High Eagles. All
three teams had identical five and one records in the district,
and a numbing scenario was set up.

Since only two teams could go to the playoffs, the district's
tiebreaker rule went into effect: a coin toss.

After all that work and all those endless hours, it seemed silly.
But that's what the outcome of the season had finally been reduced to-three grown men still dressed in their coach's outfits
driving in the middle of the night to a truck stop so they could
stand together like embarrassed schoolboys and throw coins
into the air to determine whether their seasons ended at that
very moment or continued.

It was a simple process of odd man out. If there were two
tails and a heads, the one who flipped heads did not make the
playoffs. If' there were two heads and a tails, the one who
flipped tails did not make the playoffs. If they all Hipped the
same, they just did it again until someone lost.

It was hard for Gaines to find solace in any of this. But at the
very least, the place wouldn't be a complete circus. By universal
agreement among school officials, it had been decided not to disclose the location of the coin toss to the public. Doing so,
they felt, would result in a crowd of several thousand waiting
outside and a possible riot depending on who won the flip and
who lost it.

"We are not releasing the place of the meeting," Midland
school district athletic director Gil Bartosh had told the Midland
Reporter-Telegram several days before the toss. "We are fearful
that four or five thousand people might show up and we don't
need a carnival atmosphere for this. After all, some people are
going to be unhappy. There is no way around that."

As Gary Gaines drove along the dark ribbon of highway past
Bobs Creek and Fools Creek after the San Angelo game, he
knew he had no control over anything now. All he could do was
pray that God felt mercy for all souls, even those who somehow
found themselves needing it at the Convoy truck stop, where
grim-faced men in white cowboy hats picked at plates of gargantuan steak fingers as if they were picking up rocks to see
what might be buried beneath them.

To no one's surprise, Permian had just trounced the Bobcats
41-7. Winchell had thrown for 211 yards and two touchdowns, giving him a total of twenty for the season. Comer had
rushed for 135 yards to up his total to 1,221 yards. If anything,
the game simply proved how talented the team was. It gave
Permian a regular season record of eight and two, and both
losses had been by a single point each.

But it wasn't good enough without a trip to the playoffs and
everybody knew it, most of all Gaines. This hadn't been one of
those underachieving teams whose only hope was a fantastic
combination of luck and miracle. This had been a can't-miss
team, and if it didn't make the playoffs, it was scary to imagine
the enmity that thousands in town would feel for him.

Unseen, on the edges of the undulating buttes, deer and wild
turkeys stirred and every now and then the night burst alive
with a shooting star that left a delicate and misty trail. It was a
beautiful night and his car was just one of a steady stream of vehicles belonging to Permian supporters making their way
back from San Angelo like worshipers returning from a pilgrimage. They had prayed in San Angelo for a win. And now
they would go to their homes to pray that Gaines would have
the presence of mind to throw heads if it should be heads, or
tails if it should be tails.

He was in the front seat and next to him was Belew, nervously sucking one Marlboro Light after another as if they gave
him strength. They talked softly, their voices barely rising over
songs by Barbara Streisand and Neil Diamond.

A little later one of those songs from the sixties came on,
refreshingly tinny, made in a day when not all studio sound was
automatically reduced to perfect resonance.

Was it an omen? Or was it pure silliness?

"It's a song of my era, Mike," said Gaines with a laugh, and
one could imagine him back in Crane looking pretty much the
same as he did now, with those liquid eyes and melt-any-heart
smile, captaining the football and basketball teams, throwing in
the half-court shot against Fort Stockton that forever made him
a legend, winning the Babe Ruth award for being best allaround everything, distinguishing himself as one of those kids
you just knew would make their way in the world not because
they did anything with any particular flair but by the sheer will
of their own determination.

All week long Gaines had been nervous, almost snappish, but now he was surprisingly relaxed, glad to be insulated from it all
as the car spun its way toward the Midland loop.

A coin toss ...

If there wasn't so much riding on it, if hundreds of people
didn't already feel like running to the city council to get an
emergency resolution passed legalizing lynching, it would have
been laughable. But it wasn't.

Belew asked Gaines what kind of coin he was going to use, if
he had some special one imbued with magical powers. He said
he wasn't much of a gambler and talked about the time he had
stopped in Vegas on the way back from a coaches' convention
and couldn't bring himself to play blackjack.

"I was just an of country boy with my britches hangin' out,"
Gaines said to Belew with a little deprecating laugh. "I was kind
of intimidated." Instead he had played the slots and also went
to see the Siegfried and Roy magic act. He told Belew it was one
of the most incredible spectacles he had ever seen, stumbling
over his words as he described how some of the girls in the
revue hadn't worn much in the way of lingerie.

He told the story the same ingenuous way he told the one
about his trip out east when he was still at Monahans and had
gone with another coach to look at artificial-surface tracks; they
took a commuter plane from Philadelphia to Kennedy that was
so tiny it looked for a moment as though the only way to get
the other coach on board was to lasso him and throw him in the
baggage compartment..

The car went past the twinkling lights of an oil rig lit up like
it lonely Christmas tree, past the white clapboard houses of
Garden City where the town sign heralded the seven and one
record of the Garden City football team. The talk fell to snow
skiing, to money, to what it had been like when they had gone
to college, to anything but the coin toss.

They talked a little about the game, about who had played
well and who hadn't. Belew related an anecdote about a player
who had tried to quit the team earlier in the year and how his father had coaxed him hack into playing by sharing a case of
beer with him.

"I can't even begin to imagine that," said Gaines, who in his
own life could only remember disappointing his father once, in
seventh grade, when he had played a football game over in
Kermit.

His father, who worked at a natural gas plant for Gulf as a
shift supervisor, had not gone to the game that day. But he got
back reports from friends saying that his son had broken free
with the ball and then hesitated near the goal line, as if he was
scared of getting hit. In the world of a small Texas town, where
the four seasons of the year were football, basketball, track,
and baseball, there was no greater condemnation. In stony
silence later that evening, the elder Gaines sat down and ate
his supper. Few words were exchanged, few words had to
be exchanged, until he called his son into the backyard of
their home.

He told Gary that if he couldn't be any tougher, he might as
well not play. Suddenly he ordered his son into a stance and
told him to fire off and start blocking. Over and over, Gary
fired off into his father, who was much stronger than he was.
Over and over. Then he tackled his father, and then his father
tackled him. Over and over, with tears streaming down his face,
scared that his father was going to hurt him, which he never
would have, his mother listening to the painful commotion but
not daring to interfere, because this clearly was a rite of passage
between father and son.

Almost thirty years later, Gary Gaines recalled the backyard
incident in his office one day with a sheepish half-smile on his
face, describing the "bawlin' and a-squallin"' that had gone on
as he tried, without success, to tackle his father. Looking back
on it, it was the one memory of his youth he remembered above
all others, although he wasn't even sure if his father had any
recollection of it at all. But he did.

"I did it because I wanted the kid to be the best he could
possibly be and I didn't want anyone to make the remark that he was shirking his responsibilities," he said. "If he didn't put
out, he might as well not play."

If there had been a motto for Gary Gaines's life, that would
have been it. It had always gotten him through, always enabled
him to succeed, always given him a certain special edge.

Except now, as he left the serenity of the Concho Valley and
headed for the Convoy.

Gaines pulled slowly into the driveway and seemed a bit taken
aback. "Too many cars," he said. "I don't like this."

Two sheriff's cars from Midland were parked in front with
their lights off, there just in case the location of the coin toss
had leaked out and crowd control was needed. Gaines could
stomach the police cars, but he wasn't necessarily prepared for
the towering antenna rising up from the KMID-TV van.

The television station, recognizing the importance of the
event for the community, had decided to broadcast it live even
though it would not take place until after one in the morning.
The last time it had broadcast a local event live at such an hour
had been when a little girl named Jessica McClure was rescued
from an abandoned well.

Inside the Convoy, cigarette smoke mingled with fumes of
grease from the back-room grill to create a filmy substance that
hung near the ceiling like a patch of stubborn fog. Gaines
walked inside the restaurant and immediately went to the back,
past the red and yellow leather stools that ran down along the
white countertop like pieces in a checker game. He talked quietly with Wilkins, who was so miserably nervous he had become
virtually mute, and Wilkins's wife, who wore a little pin that had
a picture of their son Stan in his football jersey. At the other
end of the room, Gaines's eternal nemesis, Earl Miller, and several assistant coaches from Midland Lee sat on chairs with the
inscrutable look of Buddhas. They glanced up at their adversaries but didn't say anything.

Gaines was pale and sallow-looking. Away from the cocoon
of the car with those velvety songs and that meandering chat ter, little heads of sweat began to form on his forehead. He
fumbled with the handle of a pinball machine in the darkness
of the game room, his liquid eyes as yearning and sincere as
those of a puppy.