Friday Night Lights: A Town, a Team, and a Dream (59 page)

About an hour before game time, Mike Belew met with the
defensive ends.

"They say they're gonna shut us out and say they're gonna
beat us like Yates did and all that. That's hard for me to live
with, men. That hurts my pride a little bit. It hurts for myself.
It hurts me for you guys, and for everybody from West Texas,
everybody from Odessa. They slandered us in the paper, and now, by God, we're gonna take care of business out there on the
field, okay? We're gonna make it all even on the football held
today.

"'T'his is something that you dream about and I'm sure you're
just like every other little boy that grew up in Odessa, you
thought about playin' for Permian. Golly, men, here you are in
the big 'un, in the big house, it's gonna be on TV, you got all
the elements.

"Let's get after these guys, okay? Let's get after 'em. Let's win
it for ourselves. Let's win it for our school, win it for our parents. Let's win it for West Texas."

Minutes before game time, Gaines called the team to gather
around him.

"Everybody in this room has paid a dear, dear price to be
where you are," he told them. "That ought to make your effort
that much more intense, that much more fanatical, because of
all the hard work and sacrifice that's gone into gettin' you here.
It ought to make you play that much harder.

"You represent a lot of people. We're gonna represent 'em
well, and we're gonna win this sucker."

They huddled in that long tunnel of Texas Stadium amid
cries of "Let's go, baby, let's go!" They broke through the banner made by the cheerleaders that took up almost half the end
zone. They heard the cries of "Mojo!" and the enormous swell
of the band. They played with a flawlessness and sense of purpose that had been building inside them all their lives. After it
was over tears flowed freely down their faces, and also down
the faces of the grown men and women who depended on them
year after year after year.

It was hard to fathom the shock of what Odessa had gone
through during the eighties, from a world where everything
seemed possible to one in which it was hard to hold on to anything with certainty. So much had happened. So much had
changed. But one anchor was still there, as strong and solid as
ever. It didn't really matter who was playing, or who was coach ing. It would always go on, just as jerrod McDougal had realized, because it was a way of life.

The Permian Panthers ended the decade exactly the same
way they had begun it.

Two days before Christmas, they became the state football
champions of Texas.

TEN YEARS HAVE PASSED since the publication of Friday Night
Lights, and still its words continue to influence and reverberate.
Barely a week goes by without my getting a call or comment about
it. Over the past decade I have heard strange and remarkable stories of the book's impact-a man who left his job in Brooklyn so
he could become a football coach in Texas, a songwriter who
wrote a ballad inspired by the book, teenagers forsaking Florida to
make spring break pilgrimages to Odessa. When readers tell me
they have been touched by this book in a way that no other has
ever touched them, their words leave me humbled.

How did it all happen? Why did it all happen? In light of the
controversy that erupted in Odessa after the book was published
and the accusations of betrayal that still ring in certain corners today, are there any regrets about what I wrote?

I have had ten years to think about it all, ten years to examine
what it was that catapulted this book into the reading consciousness of so many, ten years to examine the harsh judgments made
of me as well as my own decisions about the words I chose and the
words I did not, ten years too to think about this team that I grew
to know so intimately during a remarkable year of my life. I
adored the players on the Permian Panthers, whose lives I followed during the 1988 season. It is a feeling that still stays with me.
Memories crease through me at unexpected times-the awesome
silence in the locker room with those eyes locked tight, the gleaming shape of a playoff trophy held high as another rung on the
ladder of goin' to state is climbed, the thrust of a fist into a wall in
the helplessness of defeat, the silence of the plains suddenly broken by adoring screams.

I still think of how it all began, in the rocket ship of Ratliff Stadium, on a sweet and still night, when those teenage boys crashed
through the handheld banner that had been made for them by the cheerleaders and a sea of fans drenched in black came to their
feet. I still think of how it all ended, in spitting rain and misery,
when the hand of Jesse Armstead came out of nowhere to swat
down a pass that should have been the winning touchdown for
Permian against Dallas Carter, the same Jesse Armstead who is
now an All-Pro linebacker for the New York Giants.

In particular, I think of the six players who so graciously allowed
me to intrude on their worlds. Our lives have all spread in different directions. But I still keep up with several of them on a regular
basis, and both directly and indirectly, I am familiar with the roads
their lives have taken.

Brian Chavez returned to the football field at Harvard for his
undergraduate house tackle football team. He graduated Cum
Laude in 1993, and I was honored to be at his graduation. He successfully navigated a monumental transition from Odessa to Cambridge (it is hard to imagine any two places in the world at more
opposites), and it was a special delight to watch Brian receive his
diploma under the proud gaze of his family. Brian looked at the
east coast with a combination of curiosity and anthropological interest, as if he were studying a different species, and he concluded
that it was no place for a human being to actually live. At the personal invitation of the dean, Brian went to law school at Texas
Tech University on a full scholarship. He started the MexicanAmerican Law Student Association there and graduated in 1996.
Afterward he returned to Odessa to his family's law practice. He
opened a satellite office in El Paso and has aspirations of becoming a federal judge. Although he seems eternally wed to the
haunted plains of West Texas, he is also thankful he spent time beyond its borders.

"It was hard as shit for me to adjust and hard for me to deal
with, but Harvard changed my life. It showed me that there's
more out there than West Texas."

Jerrod McDougal went to Odessa College in the spring and fall
of 1990. He did not play football because Odessa College does not field a team, and he was not invited back to school after the fall semester. "I didn't have any enthusiasm for it at all," he said at the
time. Jerrod also went to Midland College, as well as several community colleges, but he has never received a degree.

He went to work full time for his father's oil field construction
company in Crane at the beginning of 1991. In 1999 he moved to
Bandera, near San Antonio, to work for Roger Stevens, a contracting company acquired by his father. He has had his personal traumas over the years, including a serious car accident that shattered
his ankle. But he has still maintained his West Texas spirit of passion and emotion.

At one point he tried to erase his memories of playing football
for Permian because he felt emotionally stunted by it. But he realized it was impossible. "It will never be lifted off of me," he said,
and if it was football that consumed him at Permian, it was also
football that kept him in school. "Otherwise I would've been
down on dynamite crews blowin' shit up, because that's what I
liked," he said. Sometimes Jerrod thinks about the 1988 season
with the wincing anger of not winning a state championship. But
mostly he thinks of the private beauty of what he and his teammates shared and will always share.

"I got a group of brothers, a set of friends that you could never
ask for and get. There's nothing I wouldn't do for any of 'em and
there's nothing they wouldn't do for me."

Don Billingsley, the Permian player targeted by the coaches and
teammates as most likely for an early grave, proved that the worst
predictor of future behavior is behavior in high school.

Don stopped playing football in the fall of 1989 after arthroscopic surgery to his knee. Instead of falling prey once again to alcohol and drugs, he began to actively study for the first time in his
life. "It feels good to be learnin' somethin'," he said at the time.
Don also went through a religious reawakening during that period
of his life, and he has kept the keenness of his faith ever since.

Don remained at East Central University, graduating with a
bachelor's degree in public relations in 1993. He then received his master's in human resources counseling from the university in
1995 and did counseling work in Oklahoma City and Norman. In
April of 1999 he married Melanie Fannin and moved to join her
in Dallas. Melanie already worked for Southwest Airlines, and Don
became a care manager for Magellan Behavioral Health. There
are still certain aspirations that elude him. He would like to make
more money, and he isn't sure about the trajectory of his career.
But he has no complaints about life.

"I feel good about it."

Mike Winchell went to Baylor after he graduated from Permian
and quit at the end of the 1989-90 school year because of cost and
the realization that he had no future there as a football player.
"Heck, I'm not going to play in the pros," he said at the time.

Winchell went to Texas Tech for a semester and then transferred to Tarleton State University in Stephenville. He graduated
with a bachelor's degree in marketing in 1995. He returned to
Odessa for roughly a year and then moved to the Dallas-Ft. Worth
metroplex. When the Odessa American interviewed him in 1998, he
was working as an independent surveyor in Decatur and also playing golf on the Iron Man Tour. Sponsored by the Texas Professional Golf Tour, Iron Man tournaments consist of twenty-seven
holes in a single stretch. Winchell tied for fifty-fifth in 1998 and
was still competing on the Iron Man Tour into the summer of
1999. He values his privacy, and during the interview he made it
clear that he no longer was interested in questions relating to Friday Night Lights.

"People always want to talk about the book, but I don't care.
That was a long time ago."

Ivory Christian had a successful freshman football season at
Texas Christian University in 1989, starting two games at middle
linebacker and receiving playing time in seven others. But frustrated over a strained knee and his drop in the depth chart the following year in 1990, he quit the team and left school. His father prodded him to stay at TCU for the obvious athletic and educational benefits, but Ivory told him he was no longer interested in
playing football.

He returned to Odessa, where he received his associate's degree
at Odessa College. He worked at the Midland International Airport for several years doing plane maintenance. He then moved
to Austin to work for the Texas Aircraft Pooling Board, a state
agency that maintains and operates a fleet of planes for official
government business. Ivory had always been ambivalent about his
Permian football experience, consciously resisting any of its trappings. But on the cusp of turning thirty, he had begun to take
some measure of pride in what it meant.

"Now, twelve years later, I think about it."

Boobie Miles flunked out of Ranger College at the end of the
1989-90 school year when, according to his football coach, Joe
Crousen, he just stopped going to class. He returned to the
Odessa-Midland area and has basically been there ever since, with
the exception of a brief and unhappy stint with a semi-pro football
team in Culpeper, Virginia. He has held a series of jobs over the
years, most of them involving warehouse work such as driving a
forklift. Most recently, he had landed a job in the Odessa area doing inventory work.

Life has not been economically easy for Boobie. I often wonder
how different his fate would have been if his cleat had not gotten
caught in the artificial turf of Jones Stadium that terrible August
night. The moment took a fraction of a second, and yet its impact
on him was forever, a brutal reminder of the very fragility of sport.
But Boobie refuses to look back with self-pity on what could have
been. He still loves football, although his links to Permian have
understandably broken down completely. "I don't go to the
games," he said.

At the end of 1998, Boobie's uncle, L. V., died of heart complications. Boobie has continued on, working to provide for a family
that includes a four-year-old daughter, a three-year-old son, and twins born earlier this year. But L. V.'s absence is felt by Boobie, as
it is felt by everyone who knew this uniquely fine and decent man.

"I miss him."