Friday Night Lights: A Town, a Team, and a Dream (51 page)

"The superintendent was pushing it because he was going to
get lynched if he didn't push it," said assistant state attorney
general Kevin T. O'Hanlon, one of more than a dozen lawyers
who eventually became caught in the quagmire. "The Dallas
Independent School District hadn't had a state champion in I
don't know how long."

Edwards's reversal set off great celebrations of joy as black
students from Carter held hands and danced at an impromptu
pep rally. It also set off protests of fury as about five hundred
students from South Grand Prairie, the school that initially was
supposed to go to the playoffs in Carter's place, staged a walkout and had to be urged to go back to class.

Back in the playoffs, the Carter Cowboys beat Piano East
21-7 with two touchdowns in the fourth quarter. Gary Edwards scored the go-ahead touchdown, intercepted a pass to
squelch a Piano East comeback, and then scored again.

The following week, the Texas Education Agency ruled that
Carter should remain in the playoffs. The same day, the school
board of Piano, a predominantly white suburb outside Dallas,
announced that it was filing suit to seek an injunction preventing Carter from continuing in the playoffs the next night. That
Friday, the scheduled day of the playoff game, Texas education
commissioner William Kirby, the state's highest education official, became the latest in a long list of people trying to figure out Gary Edwards's grade in algebra II, and also figure out
what on earth was going on in the state of Texas.

III

Peering out into the crowd in the hearing room, one contingent of which was black and from the city of Dallas and another
contingent of which was white and from the suburbs, Commissioner Kirby couldn't help but wonder if the priorities of the
public had gone slightly mad.

American education was faltering and Texas was no shining
exception. The state ranked thirty-fifth in the nation in expenditures per pupil for public education. Its average SAT scores
ranked forty-sixth in the nation. Earlier in the year, a landmark $11 billion lawsuit that would determine how local school
districts were funded by the state had played to an empty courtroom. Here, with the issue of whether the Carter Cowboys
would stay in the playoffs or be replaced by the Piano East
Panthers, the place was packed and frothing.

"The secretary of education spoke here in Austin on Monday
and decried the academic achievement of American children
when compared with other industrialized countries. We ranked
thirteenth out of thirteen in science," Kirby noted before beginning the hearing. "Yes, football and extracurricular activities
are important, but shouldn't we also concern ourselves with science, and math, and reading, and writing? Tonight I'm told
there may be forty thousand people in the Cotton Bowl watching a [high school] football playoff. Today this room has many
interested and concerned individuals. The papers have been
filled with stories of the controversy. All of these are appropriate and all of these should have been done.

"But I urge you all and all of the people of Texas and
America, don't leave the weightier matters undone. Put some
of your time and effort and attention and energy on improving
academics and on emphasizing academics."

After saying that, Kirby then plunged into the morass. It
seemed a trivial thing for the state's highest education official
to spend time doing, but Kirby felt compelled to uphold the
integrity of the no-pass, no-play rule. If a principal could come
in and simply change a grade from fail to pass without any compelling reason, then what was the purpose of the rule and how
could it possibly achieve the intended purpose of shifting the
focus of Texas high schools away from the gridiron to the
classroom?

Kirby patiently listened to the testimony and ruled that Gary
Edwards had flunked algebra II and was ineligible to participate in football under the rule of no-pass, no-play. An hour
later, the University Interscholastic League, which sanctioned
high school sports in the state, kicked Carter out of the playoffs
and replaced it with Plano East. Supporters of Plano East
cheered and said that justice had been done.

But lawyers for Carter and the Dallas school district weren't
about to quit. With the kind of frantic behavior that is usually
associated with trying to stay the execution of a death row inmate, they rushed to the Travis County Courthouse in Austin
and asked district court judge Paul Davis to grant a temporary
restraining order delaying the playoff game until the court had
had an opportunity to consider all the issues in the case. Among
their legal arguments, the lawyers said that depriving the Carter Cowboys from competing in the playoffs would cause irreparable harm.

With ninety minutes left before the game, Davis granted
the order.

The Carter Cowboys had been saved from the electric chair.
They were back in the playoffs. The game was rescheduled to
Saturday, and Carter won 28-0. A week later, Carter easily
won its third playoff game against Lufkin, 31-7. Gary Edwards
scored a touchdown and intercepted a pass.

The following week, a hearing began in judge Davis's courtroom to consider once again Carter's right to play football. Carter supporters had raised $17,000 to help pay legal fees, and the number of lawyers representing Carter and the Dallas
school district in the case, eight, was more than the number of
lawyers who had represented the school district in various
stages of a federal desegregation suit filed against it. There
were some other unusual developments as well.

Will Bates, who a month before had been an unheard-of
math teacher, was suspended from his job with pay, reportedly
because of concerns over his safety if he continued to teach at
Carter. Gary Edwards, a high school senior, suddenly found
himself as hounded by the media as Ollie North.

"I didn't have any privacy," he later said. "I would walk into
my classes and there they were, right there in my classroom. I
was walkin' down the hall, there they were. I would go to football practice, there they were at my locker. I'm standin' there
naked and there they are trying to nail me. I go out to practice,
they want to ask questions, this and that.

"Then I go home and the phone's ringing and they want to
talk to my mother, my father, and me and drive by. Sometimes,
I just snuck out the back door and went to my grandmother's
or somethin'."

By the time the Carter Cowboys were scheduled to face the
Marshall Mavericks in the quarterfinals, the hearing hadn't
ended. Carter went ahead and played Marshall, who was undefeated and ranked tenth in the country. Blessed with a certain magic at this point, the Cowboys won on a touchdown pass
in the final three seconds, 22-18.

That put them into the semifinals against the magic of Mojo.

As the contest approached, it didn't seem as if Permian and
Carter were playing a football game at all, but were representing two vast constituencies desperately intent on bludgeoning
each other, one exclusively black, the other exclusively white.

To whites across the state of Texas, Dallas Carter was a nogood bunch of cheaters who didn't deserve the honor of playing for a state championship. What else could you expect from
a bunch of niggers whose idea of passing a course was showing
up for class? To blacks, Dallas Carter was being persecuted by whites who did not want to witness a black school with black
players and black fans go to State and win it. What else could
you expect from a bunch of racist rednecks who couldn't stand
the fact that the best damn team in the state of Texas didn't
have a white starter on it?

In any playoff contest there were always several issues that
had to be negotiated before the game. They were normally
taken care of over the phone, but that proved impossible in this
case. Instead, Permian and Carter agreed to a sit-down the
Sunday before the game at the Midland airport.

Four members representing Carter flew into town, where five
members representing Permian were waiting to meet them.
With the suspicion of warring Mafia families, they exchanged
bloodless greetings. Then they moved to the back room of the
coffee shop where they could have some privacy and try to resolve the various issues associated with playing high school football in this particular instance-money, where the fans should
sit to minimize possible outbreaks of violence, how many officials should be black and how many white.

They first tried to settle the thorny question of where to hold
the game. One possible option was for each side to agree on a
neutral site. Another was for each side to pick a mutually agreeable "home site" and then flip a coin for it.

Carter initially picked Texas Stadium as its home site. "What
would it take you to come to Texas Stadium?" asked Carter
coach Freddie James.

"Sixteen," replied Wilkins, the athletic director for the
county. He wanted $16,000 up front to defray transportation
costs, which included a chartered jet for the team and hotel
expenses the night before the game as well as the costs of travel
for the band and Pepettes.

Permian in turn picked Ratliff Stadium as its home site. The
Carter contingent said it would only consider playing there if
the Permian band, Pepettes, and student section were moved
from their normal location on the visitor's side to the home
side. It said the move was necessary because of a concern that noise from the Permian band would distract the Carter coaches
when they tried to talk to their players. But a few minutes later
they indicated it wasn't noise from the band they were worried
about at all, but the ramifications of putting white supporters
of Permian next to black supporters of Carter.

Permian principal ,Jerald McClary said police were always on
duty at the stadium to handle any crowd control problems.
Bringing in the police, the Carter contingent responded, would
only make the situation worse.

"We've got an all-black community," said Loie Harris, a representative from the Dallas school district athletic director's
office negotiating for Carter. "You send police over there and
it says-"

"You don't want police over there or what?" snapped Wilkins,
his lower jaw throbbing up and down, those bottomless eyes
shooting off darts.

"We have a lot of problems we don't want to get into this
table," she reiterated. "It's just different. We have a different
community than you-all have."

Wilkins then asked Carter how many tickets they wanted set
aside if the game was held in Odessa.

Russeau, the Carter principal, sat up in his chair and
abruptly gave the answer.

"Two thousand student, six thousand adult," he said.

Wilkins considered the request ridiculous. There was no way
that many people from Dallas would come to a football game
350 miles away in Odessa, and he did not want to tie up such a
large number of tickets. The only people who traveled such
long distances to games in massive numbers were Permian fans.

"There's no way you'll sell six thousand," he told Russeau in
a tone that was terse and scoffing.

Russeau shifted in his chair and became slightly indignant.
"You don't understand the gravity of what's been going on in
this community and we do," he said.

"It isn't just the Carter community, it's the whole black community," added Harris.

"The issue's not football anyway," said Russeau.

"It's the attack on the black community all over Dallas," said
Harris. "The football game is just a catalyst."

The negotiations became more and more tense, and the Carter contingent changed its mind. Forget the thought of ever
playing in Texas Stadium in the white suburb of Irving. Think
now about playing in the Cotton Bowl, deep in the heart of
Dallas. That was Carter's new choice for a home site if it came
down to a coin toss.

The Permian side was momentarily stunned. Even Wilkins
became speechless, and his face smoldered to a deep red.

The Cotton Bowl.