Friday Night Lights: A Town, a Team, and a Dream (44 page)

A little after one-fifteen the third coach to participate, Midland High's Doug McCutchen, arrived from Abilene. He was
a roly-poly man, his stomach hanging amply over the bright
purple shirt lie wore.

The three coaches moved to the front of the restaurant and
sat in little yellow chairs. The glare of the television lights immediately bore clown on them, making the bags and circles
around their eves even more noticeable. Surrounding them in
a hushed, solemn circle were reporters from television stations
and radio stations and the two local papers. The men in the
white cowboy hats looked up momentarily from their halfeaten steak fingers, trying to figure out what was going on in a
place where excitement usually meant not getting charged for
an extra cup of coffee, why all these hot lights were on at one
in the morning when the world was supposed to be asleep unless you drove a truck for a living and why three grown men
were now standing in the middle of the room solemnly listening
to meticulous instructions on how to throw a coin and how it
had to hit the dropped ceiling or it wouldn't be considered a
valid throw. They stared back down again and returned to inspecting their food.

No one would have believed it anyway.

Miller was on the left. Gaines, feeling nothing but a numbness inside, was in the center. McCutchen, wearing a white cap
that said BULLDOGS on it, was on the right. He had a look of sad
bemusement on his face, as if to acknowledge that no job in the
world was stranger than that of 'a high school football coach.

"Good evening, ladies and gentlemen," Big Two News sports
anchor Skip Baldwin said in a hushed voice at 1:19 A.M. to begin the station's live coverage. "Welcome to an undisclosed
location."

McCutchen held in his hand a 1922 silver dollar that he had gotten from a friend. He claimed it had been successful in
eleven straight prior coin tosses. Miller used a quarter that he
had gotten from a player. He claimed that the player had told
him, "Use this and we win." Gaines reached into the back
pocket of his pants and fumbled for a 1969 nickel. He claimed
nothing about it at all.

"Who's gonna caaalll it, caaaaallll it, Gareeee," barked Miller.

"One, two, three, go," said Gaines. They lifted their arms
stiffly in the air with the same awkward motion of a bride reluctantly throwing her bouquet.

The coins Hew to the ceiling, then ricocheted and spun
around the room before landing on various parts of the red tile
floor with tiny pings. Miller did a little skip to get out of the way
of his quarter, which landed under a red leather booth against
a wall.

Gaines's nickel took off from the ceiling at a forty-five-degree
angle and ended up toward the hack of the room under a camera tripod.

McCutchen's silver dollar landed smack in the middle of
the room.

For several seconds there was silence as a dozen pairs of eyes
frantically darted back and forth trying to pick up the outlines
of the three metal objects.

"Heads," said Miller, pointing to McCutchen's coin.

Another voice said that Miller's own coin had turned up
heads as well.

Now it was up to Gaines.

He went slowly to look for his nickel, as if he really wasn't
sure that he wanted to see what it was. His hair was matted with
sweat and he walked on the tips of his toes.

If the nickel came up tails, Permian was out of the playoffs,
and the chorus of complaints and criticism against him would
only intensify to the point that it might become unbearable for
his family to remain in town. If it came up heads, it simply
meant that the three men would have to line up in a row and
make jackasses of themselves once again in front of the live
television cameras.

Gaines bent down to find his nickel.

Perhaps for the first time in history, not the single clatter of
a fork nor the clink of a coffee cup against a saucer nor the
weary command of "Check please" to a bleary-eyed waitress
could be heard inside the Convoy restaurant. Gaines finally saw
it, wedged up against the tripod.

"Heads," he said in a loud voice.

It was a dead heat. They would have to do it again.

Skip Baldwin neatly summarized the action so far for viewers. "We got three ..." But then he hesitated and didn't quite
finish the sentence.

"Is that a heads on this one?" he said, gesturing toward the
silver dollar in the middle belonging to McCutchen of Midland High.

"What is thaaat, tails? Thaaaat's tails, ain't it?" chimed in Miller, who looked ready to snap someone's neck.

McCutchen walked to the center of the room and slowly bent
down to pick up his silver dollar. He looked at it momentarily,
as if the deep sorrow of his gaze would somehow change what
he saw. And out of his mouth came two words, spoken with the
tone of 'a child sadly confessing to something that he had hoped
and prayed would go unnoticed.

"'that's tails," he whispered.

He was the odd man out.

"So it's Permian and Midland Lee in the playoffs," said Baldwin in a reverential whisper. "Midland High will not be going."

Gaines, still quiet and subdued, shook Miller's hand and then
gave McCutchen a hug. He flashed a small smile and that
was all.

"Congratulations," said McCutchen.

"Man, a cruel way to do it," replied Gaines.

For the next ten minutes he patiently answered questions
from television, radio, and newspaper reporters, as if he had
just become the second man in history to throw a perfect game
in the World Series. He left the Convoy carefully and circumspectly, as if he was exiting a wake.

The second he got outside, he started scampering to the car with the speed of a little boy going to open his birthday presents. He took off like a madman, doing eighty-five down Highway 80 without being aware of it, giggling and grinning, and
had you been next to the car at that very moment you would
have heard a grown man yell something that you didn't think
grown men ever yelled, unless they had grown up in Crane:

"Hot cfiggety dog!"

At about two-twenty in the morning, the members of the
Permian team arrived by bus from San Angelo at the field
house. 'they had listened to the coin toss on the radio (KCRS
had broadcast it live as well), so they already knew the outcome.

There were hugs and bear-sized claps on the backs of letter
jackets that reverberated like yells in a tunnel. The season was
still alive, the hope renewed of donning jackets with wonderful
white patches saying STATE CHAMPIONS, jackets that would have
everything on them except flashing markers.

Twenty minutes later, members of the Midland High team
arrived home by bus from Abilene. They too knew the outcome
of the coin toss before they arrived.

"I told you that we had no control over a coin flip," McCutchen said to his players. "I wish I could change the way
things are, but I can't. It was out of our hands.

"I'm proud of each and every one of you," he said. As he
tried to console them, there came a sound of high school football as familiar as the cheering, as familiar as the unabashed
blare of the band, as familiar as the savage crash of pad
against pad.

It was the sound of teenage boys weeping uncontrollably
over a segment of their lives that they knew had just ended
forever.

II

As all the commotion unfolded, Boobie Miles lay at home.
He had officially quit the team earlier in the week, figuring it was better to undergo the knee surgery he needed at some
point anyway and try to be ready to play in college rather than
spend another hideous Friday night of his life languishing on
the bench. When the doctor opened the knee up he discovered
that Boobie had torn the anterior cruciate ligament. It seemed
remarkable that he had been able to come back to play any
games at all, since it was this ligament that prevented the lower
leg from shifting forward and made it possible for a football
player to plant his foot and cut.

Trapper thought it might take Boobie as long as two years to
rehabilitate, and he still didn't know anyone who had ever come
back 100 percent from it. The doctor had put in a replacement
ligament, but it was hard to construct one that could handle the
natural stress caused by the constant starting and stopping of
running with the football. And the magic speed that had made
Boobie so spectacular would be gone for sure.

By the time he got out of the hospital the town had come
alive again, like the miraculous reblooming of a withered desert
flower that all but a handful had given up for dead. There was
no more talk of Gaines's getting fired, no more FOR SALE signs
on his lawn, no more pumpkins smashed into his car, no more
petitions passed around. The crowd that hung around the
practice field was up and smiling again. People were making
plans to go to Amarillo to face the Tascosa Rebels in the first
round of the playoffs, and they knew in their hearts that by the
middle of December they would be making plans to go to the
great mecca to the east, Texas Stadium, to watch their boys in
the state championship. Goin' to State was in the hearts and
minds of everyone again, still at the center of the universe.

Except for Boobie. Football didn't entice or thrill him anymore. It just taunted him.

Football ...

He couldn't stand the word now. Everything in his life reduced to a series of qualifying statements-could have done
this, would have done that, might have been this, should have
been that ...

Are you gonna play college football?

It seemed as though everywhere he went there it came again,
that awful question sounding like a nasty cackle as the wondrous universes of Nebraska and Oklahoma and Arkansas and
Houston spun away from his touch. They were gone now, on
to other specimens, and no amount of hoping and praying and
wishing would ever get them back.

"Everywhere I went, everybody was askin' me, 'Are you
gonna play college football?' Every time someone said football,
I couldn't take it."

He came from a religious home and he believed in the lessons of the Lord. "Everything was goin' so good and he took it
away from me just like that," said Boobie. There must have
been a reason for it, an explanation.

But what was it? What on earth was it? And who was he anymore, besides a teenage kid who three months before had been
beatified with it halo of invincibility and now was being laughed
at and scorned because it was somehow his fault that his football
skills were as fragile as the flesh of his knee?

"It's hard for me to feel sorry for someone who already shit
in his bed," said Trapper, convinced that Boobie had been
nothing but it quitter even before the surgery.

"The sad part is, there are thousands of Boobies all over this
world," said Gaines. "A lot of them don't have a chance, welfare
cases. He had several. He had a chance to fight back and he
threw up his skirt."

On the practice field, it trio of men gathered one afternoon
to joke about his plight. One of them suggested that maybe it
was best for Boobie just to kill himself since he didn't have football anymore.