Friday Night Lights: A Town, a Team, and a Dream (47 page)

II

He remembered the turning point, as everyone who had ever
been there always did.

"Here's the pass."

On the video Jerry Hix faked to the fullback, dropped back,
and hit the tight end for a touchdown.

"At that point right there, I knew we had 'em."

The play had taken place eight years before, five days before
Christmas.

The breathless voices of the announcers came on over the
video. He sat on the couch and listened in silence.

All season long we've talked about Jerry Hix to an extent making
this Panther team go....

"Sitting there and watching this, still, it gives me a feeling.... Feel kind of odd all over, like you're down on the field
sweating."

And Hix scores! From a yard and a half out.

On the screen he dove into the end zone for the touchdown,
impossibly small to be playing football, five eight and 135
pounds. And yet not only was he playing football, he was excelling at it. He was the embodiment of the myth that had made Permian so enormously popular-small, overachieving, white,
fearless. Two teammates helped pull him up to his feet like a
beaten-up rag doll. On the screen he got up slowly and there
was the slight shaking of a fist.

"I guess I'm reliving."

He reached to the coffee table to check his stats. He remembered halftime when Coach Kennedy came in and kicked a
trash can across the room with the team down 19-7.

He knew the plays before they appeared on the screen.

"We got here and ran thirty trap up the middle.... then we
throw the little dunk pass.... Try a reverse right here....
Two-thirty-six pass.... I hit the flanker on this one.... I think
we ran twenty-nine here, sent the back in motion."

He watched the team score to take the lead.

He watched the defense hold, only to fumble on the very
next play.

"This is a play I hate, I felt like crap when I went to the
sidelines. That killed me, I thought I saw the hole inside and it
closed up. I went to the sideline and took off my helmet and
was damn near in tears."

On the screen, the team scored late in the fourth quarter to
ice the game for good.

Everyone knew Permian had done it, achieved one of the
great upsets in the modern history of Texas schoolboy sports.
They had won the state championship.

"I'd give anything to go back out there."

It was wrong to think that life had been unkind to him. It
was just different now from how it had been then. He had a
nice house he had gotten on a mortgage repo for $48,000. He
had a lovely wife and a lovely baby girl and two adorable stepdaughters. He had run the forty in 4.7 and he was All-State,
but because of his size he knew there wasn't a college in the
world that had use for him as a football player. He had gone to
the junior college in town, Odessa College, but then left after a
year to work full-time at Odessa Builder Supply. He rose to shop foreman and then had quit the previous summer to start
his own company, Brazos Door & Hardware. But something
was missing, and he wasn't ashamed to admit that the only way
to remember what it was like was to pull out that worn video
every month or so. It was a way of getting back there, just as his
parents still kept his room filled with memorabilia-a picture
of the championship team, a statue of a black panther that he
had carefully put back together after it had been broken, a
framed article and picture given to him by the booster club, a
collage made for him by his Pepette.

"We were hoarse from screaming and yelling. We didn't want
to leave the field."

When he finally did, he remembered dozens of kids calling
to him for his chin strap or his mouthpiece or his arm pad or
his earpiece, all these kids begging for a piece of Jerry Hix,
begging for a piece of the quarterback of the state champions
of Texas. It wasn't a matter of feeling like Roger Staubach, or
Terry Bradshaw, or a quarterback who had just won the Super
Bowl. It was a matter of their not knowing what Jerry Hix felt
at that incredible moment, unless they too had gone to State
and won it.

"I miss it. Like I say, if I could, I'd go back and relive that
moment. Nothing can compare. I miss it. I guess that's why I
have season tickets and go to the games. I don't want to be apart
from it."

At the public pep rally out at the stadium the Thursday before the quarterfinal showdown against the Arlington Lamar
Vikings, Hix stood on the glittering field. About five thousand
people were there, and when he calve to the microphone to
give a short speech they rose and honored him with a standing
ovation, because they would be thankful to him forever.

"There were a lot of people who didn't think we had much
of a chance to win District, let alone a state championship," Hix
told all those loyalists in the stands. "But we believed in ourselves and each other. We believed in our hearts."

There were several more introductions of former players
that night and there were dozens more who would have gotten
the same adulation, the same standing ovations for deeds done
five or ten or fifteen years ago, still remembered by everyone
as if they hadn't changed a single bit.

They were players like Joe Bob Bizzell, the Golden Boy of
golden boys, the one against whom all others were measured.
Said one former classmate of him with dreamy reverence as he
remembered Joe Bob's place and time in high school in the
early seventies, "You couldn't touch'im." He had been All-State
three years, making it as a sophomore, as a junior, and then
both ways at receiver and defensive back as a senior. No one
else at Permian had ever done that and no one had an instinct
for the ball like Joe Bob Bizzell, something that rose beyond a
rare gift, a natural talent, and had become a very part of him.
"Before they even snapped the ball, I knew what play they
were going to run," he said. "It was weird, but that's how it
was done."

He wasn't big, five seven and 132 pounds, but he had become
the Paul Bunyan of Odessa, no story about him too tall, no feat
too outlandish. On the edge of the practice field, boosters
gently argued with one another over how many people he had
knocked out on a single play. One booster pegged it at one.
Another said two. Another said three. They smiled as they recalled the glory of Joe Bob Bizzell, and it was impossible not to
think of the little picture of him on the Wall of Fame in which
he was adorable-looking, his easygoing smile seeming to imply
that he knew exactly where his life was headed.

Despite his size, he had been too good a prospect to pass up.
He got heavily recruited and ended up going to the University
of Texas in 1973 when the legendary Darrell Royal was still the
coach. Toward the end of his senior year at Permian he had
had an accident in the school parking lot when he drove his
motorcycle while drunk and skidded. He lost a lot of blood and
skin on the left side of his face and the left shoulder and left knee and Darrell Royal called him up, of course, to see if he
could still play and when he said he could, everything was okay
again.

He had played for Texas as a freshman on a team that went
to the Cotton Bowl and had on it two future big-time pros,
Doug English and Raymond Clayborn. In a Thanksgiving day
rout of Texas A & M, he intercepted two passes that helped set
up scores. In a 19-3 Cotton Bowl loss to Nebraska, he started
at safety and was in on nine tackles and intercepted a pass. Darrell Royal bragged about him on national television, and Joe
Bob Bizzell seemed to have it made until the following fall,
when Raymond Clayborn, who was faster and bigger than Joe
Bob Bizzell was or ever would be, became the starting safety.
Shortly afterward, campus police stopped Joe Bob in his car
and found a marijuana pipe. Darrell Royal responded by kicking him off the team two days before the season opener against
Boston College. Raymond Clayborn returned a touchdown
ninety-five yards for a score in that game, indicating that when
it came to football, Darrell Royal had shrewdly gauged the expendability of Joe Bob Bizzell.

He had come back to the team in 1975 and returned a kickoff
fifty yards in the Bluebonnet Bowl against Colorado. But it was
too late by then for Joe Bob ever to get on the right track again.
He was arrested by campus police for public intoxication and
expelled from school for a year in 1976. When he tried to come
back to play football in 1977, the coach then, Fred Akers, told
Bizzell he didn't want him back. He thought about transferring
to North Texas State, or to Hawaii, but it got complicated and
hopeless.

"My life's never been the same since," said Joe Bob Bizzell
one afternoon day fourteen years later of that moment when
Darrell Royal had told him he was through and cut off his lifeline because of a marijuana pipe. "It ruined my career. I
thought I was going to play football. I was good at football. It
just changed my life."

His face bore little resemblance to the one on the Wall of Fame, with little webbed feet around a pair of eyes that looked
like brittle coals. He had a drooping, saggy mustache and black
hair that fell below the neck. He looked weary and exhausted
and he gave off a deep laugh every now and then that came
out of nowhere. He was home watching his kids and a "Ghostbusters" cartoon wafted over the television.

Hold your fire, Peter. I think he wants to talk.

He worked as a production operator, which was a fancy
name for a pumper, for Amoco over in the North Cowden field
west of town. The work was hot and dry and as monotonous as
the maddening, slowpoke motion of the pumpjacks themselves.
He checked them to make sure they worked correctly. Although his name was a household word among Permian fans,
he didn't have season tickets anymore. Although he had been
on a state championship team, he never saw any of his old
teammates, nor did he ever hear from them. Although just
about everyone in town knew his name, he almost never went
out because it was hard to find a babysitter, which was all right
because he loved his wife and three boys. But there was also a
limited amount he could do with them.

The Texas Longhorns had washed their hands of him and
let him go after they found someone who played safety better
than he ever could, but he still carried the legacy of the Longhorns with him.

He felt it during the mornings when he couldn't bend over
to tie his shoes. He felt it when it became painfully difficult to
throw a ball. He felt it when he had to stop playing flag football
because his body couldn't take it.

Bizzell traced the problem to his freshman year at Texas. He
had been playing on the freshman team and was hit head-on in
a game against Baylor. He couldn't walk for three days because
of pain in his back. And then he was called up to the varsity.
He showed up in street clothes, and Bizzell said it was made
clear to him that if he didn't make good on this opportunity, he could go back down to the freshman team and rot there for the
rest of his life. He said he was fitted in a corset and played in it
all year on the presumption it was a sprain. But he said a doctor
had looked at his back recently and told him he needed fusion
surgery if he wanted it to get better.

"I've learned to live with it, I know that," said Joe Bob Bizzell.
"My wife don't like that, but shit, I'm not gonna get cut on." In
the meantime, he had finally come to grips with what had happened in his life and what hadn't. But it had taken a painfully
long time, and it wasn't until the year before that he had finally
explained it all to his wife after she repeatedly asked him what
was wrong, what was eating away at him.

He had cried when Darrell Royal told him he was kicking
him off the team. Football was his identity, his life, the one and
only thing people knew him for. "That's all I knew how to do
was football," said Joe Bob Bizzell, the Golden Boy of golden
boys. "It had been my life."

He felt he had been used as an example, and it was hard for
him to see the evils of having a marijuana pipe when you could
purchase them all over Austin. There had been other players
on the team who smoked dope and did drugs. But there were
those who got away with it because of who they were, and those
who did not.