Friday Night Lights: A Town, a Team, and a Dream (5 page)

With 2: 27 left in the half, Winchell threw the finest pass of his
life, a sixty-yard bomb to Lloyd Hill, to make the score 21-10.
But then, with less than ten seconds left, Lee scored after connecting on a forty-nine-yard Hail Mary pass that unfolded like
a Rube Goldberg drawing, the ball fluttering off the hands and
helmets and shoulder pads of several Permian defenders before somehow settling into the hands of a receiver who had
never caught a varsity pass in his life. Lee's try for a two-point
conversion failed.

The score was 21-16 at halftime.

The Permian players came off the field exhausted, in for a
fight they had never quite expected. The gray shirts they wore
underneath their jersies were soaked. Winchell, who had taken
a massive hit in the first half, felt dizzy and disoriented. They
grabbed red cups of Coke and sat in front of their locker stalls
trying to get their breath, the strange Lee touchdown at the end
of the half a weird and scary omen. There was hardly a sound,
hardly a movement. The players seemed more shell-shocked than frantic, and few even noticed when Boobie flung his
shoulder pads against the wall.

In a furious rage he threw his equipment into a travel bag
and started to walk out the door. He had had it. He was quitting
at halftime of the biggest game of the year. He couldn't bear to
watch it anymore, to be humiliated in those lights where everyone in the world could stare at him and know that he wasn't a
star anymore, just some two-bit substitute who might get a
chance to play if someone got hurt.

None of' the varsity coaches made a move to stop him; it
was clear that Boobie had become an expendable property. If
he wanted to quit, let him go and good riddance. But Nate
Hearne, a black junior varsity football coach whose primary
responsibility was to handle the black players on the team,
herded him into the trainer's room to try to calm him down, to
somehow salvage what little of his psyche hadn't already been
destroyed.

Boobie stood in the corner of the darkened room with his
arms folded and his head turned down toward the floor, as if
protecting himself from any more pain. "I quit, coach, they got
a good season goin'," he said, his tone filled with the quiet hurt
of a child who can't process the shame of what has happened
except to run from it.

"Come on, man, don't do this."

"Why'd [Gaines] play me the last weekend and the weekend
before that?"

"I know how hard it is. Don't quit now. Come on."

"That's why I'm gonna quit. They can do it without me."

"Everything's gonna be all right. Everybody knows how it
feels to be on the sidelines when he should he out there."

"Could have hurt [my knee] last week, could have hurt it the
week before. He didn't think about it then."

"You'll be all right. Just hang tough for now. The team needs
you. You know we need you. Use your head. Don't let one night
destroy everything."

"Why not just quit?"

"This is one game. We got six games down the line."

"Six games to sit on the sidelines."

"We're almost there and now you want to do this, don't do
this."

"Next week it ain't gonna be a new story because I ain't gonna
play. ,Just leave me alone, and I'll get out of here."

"You can't walk off now, in the middle of a game. You just
can't walk off in the middle of a game."

"I'm just gonna leave because I ain't gonna sit on the sidelines
for no one. I see what it's all about.

"What's it all about?"

"I'm a guinea pig."

It went on a little longer, Hearne's heartfelt understanding
in contrast to the attitude of most of the other members of the
Permian football staff who derided Boobie, who had grown
weary of his emotional outbursts and privately called him lazy,
and stupid, and shiftless, and selfish, and casually described
him as just another "dumb nigger" if he couldn't carry a football under his arm.

Reluctantly, Boobie left the trainer's room and walked back
out to the dressing room. Without emotion, he put on his hip
pads and shoulder pads. Carefully, meticulously, he tucked his
TERMINATOR x towel into the belt of his pants and put that ridiculous costume back on again because that's what it was now,
a costume, a Halloween outfit. He went back out on the field,
but it no longer had any promise. When players tried to talk to
him, he said nothing. The Rebels scored early in the fourth
quarter on a one-yard run to take a one-point lead, 22-21.
The Lee hand broke into "Dixie" and the taunting chant, now
stronger than ever, resumed:

"REB-ELS! REB-ELS! REB-ELS!"

With about six minutes left Permian moved to a first and ten
at the Lee 18, but the drive stalled and a thirty-yard field goal
was blocked.

Permian got the ball back at its own 26 with 2:55 left in the game, but instead of confidence in the huddle there was fear.
Chavez could see it in the eyes of the offensive linemen. He
tapped them on the helmet and said, "Com'on, let's get it, this
is it." But he could tell they weren't listening. The game was
slipping away.

They were going to lose. They were goddamn going to lose
and everything they had worked for for the past six years of
their lives, everything they cared about, was about to be ruined.

Winchell, after the glorious touchdown pass he had thrown,
now seemed hunted by failure. His face was etched in agony,
the passes coming off his hand in a tentative, jerky motion,
thrown desperately without rhythm. The Lee fans were on
their feet. There was the incessant beat of the drums from the
band. Both sides were screaming their hearts out.

"REB-ELS! REB-ELS!"

"MO-JO! MO JO!"

How could a seventeen-year-old kid concentrate at a moment
like this amid the frenzy of fifteen thousand fans? How could
he possibly keep his poise?

With a third and ten at the Lee 41, flanker Robert Brown
broke free down the left sideline after his defender fell down,
but the ball was thrown way out of bounds.

"Fuck! Winchell!" screamed starting linebacker Chad Payne
from the sidelines as the ball fluttered helplessly beyond Brown's
grasp. With a fourth and ten, another pass fell incomplete.

It wasn't even close.

Jerrod McDougal watched as the Lee players fell all over each
other on the field like kittens. He watched as they spit contemptuously on the field, his field, goddammit, his fucking field, defiling it, disgracing it, and never in his life had he felt such
humiliation. Some gladiator he was, some heroic gladiator. In
the dressing room he started to cry, his right hand draped tenderly around the bowed head of linebacker Greg Sweatt, who
was sobbing also. With his other hand he punched a wall.
Chavez and Winchell sat in silence, and Ivory Christian felt that creeping numbness. With a three-way tie for first and only one
game left in the regular season, now Permian might not get into
the state playoffs. But that wasn't potentially devastating to
Ivory. There had to be something else in life, if only he could
figure out what it was.

Boobie officially quit the team two days later. But no one paid
much attention. There were a lot more important things to
worry about than that pain-in-the-ass prima donna with a bad
knee who couldn't cut worth a crap anymore anyway. There
were plenty more on the Southside where he came from.

The loss to Lee sent Odessa into a tailspin, so unthinkable, so
catastrophic was it. As in a civil war, goodwill and love disintegrated and members of the town turned on each other.

Gaines himself was distraught, a year's worth of work wasted,
the chorus against him only growing stronger that he was a very
nice man who wasn't a very good coach when it counted. When
he got back to the field house he stayed in the coaches' office
long past midnight, still mulling over what had happened and
why the eighteen-hour days he had spent preparing for the
Rebels had not paid off. The idea of a team with this kind of
talent not making the playoffs seemed impossible, but now it
might happen. And if it did, he had to wonder if he would be
in the same job next year.

When he went home late that night, several FOR SALE signs
had been punched into his lawn, a not-so-subtle hint that maybe
it would be best for everyone if he just got the hell out of town.
He took them and dumped them in the garage along with
the other ones he had already collected. He wasn't surprised
by them.

After all, he was a high school football coach, and after all,
this was Odessa, where Bob Rutherford, an affable realtor in
town, might as well have been speaking for thousands when he
casually said one day as if talking about the need for a rainstorm to settle the dust, "Life really wouldn't be worth livin' if
you didn't have a high school football team to support."

IN THE BEGINNING, ON A DOG-DAY MONDAY IN THE MIDDLE OF
August when the West Texas heat congealed in the sky, there
were only the stirrings of dreams. It was the very first official
day of practice and it marked the start of a new team, a new
year, a new season, with a new rallying cry scribbled madly in
the backs of yearbooks and on the rear windows of cars: COIN'
TO STATE IN EIGHTY-EIGHT!

It was a little after six in the morning when the coaches
started trickling into the Permian High School field house. The
streets of Odessa were empty, with no signs of life except the
perpetual glare of the convenience store lights on one corner
after another. The K mart was closed, of course, and so was the
Wal-Mart. But inside the field house, a squat structure behind
the main school building, there was only the delicious anticipation of starting anew. On each of the coaches' desks lay caps
with bills that were still stiff and sweat bands that didn't contain
the hot stain of sweat, with the word PERMIAN emblazoned
across the front in pearly thread. From one of the coaches came
the shrill blow of a whistle, followed by the gleeful cry of "Let's
go, men!" There was the smell of furniture polish; the dust and
dirt of the past season were forever wiped away.

About an hour later the players arrived. It was time to get
under way.

"Welcome, guys" were the words Coach Gary Gaines used to
begin the 1988 season, and fifty-five boys dressed in identical
gray shirts and gray shorts, sitting on identical wooden benches, stared into his eyes. They listened, or at least tried to. Winning
a state championship. Making All-State and gaining a place on
the Permian Wall of Fame. Going off after the season to Nebraska, or Arkansas, or Texas. Whatever they fantasized about,
it all seemed possible that day.

Gaines's quiet words washed over the room, and in hundreds
of other Texas towns celebrating the start of football practice
that August day there were similar sounds of intimacy and welcome, to the eastern edge of the state in Marshall, to the northern edge in Wichita Falls, to the southern edge in McAllen, to
the western edge in El Paso. They were Gaines's words, but they
could have come from any high school coach renewing the
ritual of sport, the ritual of high school football.