Friday Night Lights: A Town, a Team, and a Dream (8 page)

In the solitude of the field house on that beautiful August
morning, it was hard to believe that anyone else did matter. But
the feeling was only temporary. In just about a week the team
would be officially unveiled to the public. And from that moment on, it would become the property of those so desperately
devoted to it.

There were certain events in Odessa that had become timehonored traditions, essential elements in the biological clock of
the town. There was the annual downtown Christmas treelighting ceremony sponsored by one of the banks, when people
gathered on bleachers in front of the city hall and sipped free
hot chocolate while waiting for Santa to arrive on a flatbed
truck. There was the biennial Oil Show, which out-of-town
hookers always marked on their calendars in red because of the
tantalizing possibility of having thousands of out-of-towners
stuck in Odessa for what might possibly be the three longest
days of their lives.

And, of course, in late August, there was the Permian booster
club's Watermelon Feed, when excitement and madness went
quickly into high gear.

THE FAITHFUL SAT ON LITTLE STOOLS OF ORANGE AND BLUE
under the merciless lights of the high school cafeteria, but the
Spartan setting didn't bother them a bit. Had the Watermelon
Feed been held inside the county jail, or on a sinking ship, or
on the side of a craggy mountain, they would still have flocked
to attend.

Outside, the August night was sweetly cool and serene with
just a wisp of West Texas wind. Inside there was a teeming
sense of excitement, and also relief, for the waiting was basically
over; there would he no more sighs of longing, no more awkward groping to fill up the empty spaces of time with golf
games and thoroughly unsatisfying talk about baseball. Tonight, as in a beauty contest, the boys of Permian would come
before the crowd one by one so they could be checked out and
introduced. And after that, in less than two weeks, would come
the glorious start of the season on the first Friday night in
September.

Each of those little stools in each of those rows, about four
hundred seats in all, was taken well before the scheduled starting time of seven-thirty. It didn't take long before the open area
at the back of the room had filled up with several hundred
other people who hardly minded standing as long as they were
inside. Finally it got so crowded that those who came didn't
even bother to try to get in, but stayed in the hallway and
watched with their faces pressed up against a long window, like out-of-luck shoppers peering into the bedlam of a once-in-alifetime sale.

A concession stand in the corner did a brisk business in hats
and T-shirts and jackets and flags. Another one sold decals
and little good-luck charms. And each devotee, as he or she
walked in, carried a special program about as thick as a city
phone book.

Many had their kids with them, for it was clear they thought
it was important for children to see this spectacle at a young age
so they could begin to understand what it all meant. A little boy
wore a T-shirt that said HOLD ON, MONO, I'M A COMIN'. And another had a towel and a flag emblazoned with the Moto rallying cry.

People had come dressed up for the event. They weren't in
black tie or anything outlandish like that, but just in blackblack caps, black shirts, black pants, black jackets. Many others
went a step further. They had black key chains and black checkbook covers. If you went to their homes you might find black
toilet seats, or black seat cushions, or black phone book covers,
or black paper plates, or black clocks, or black felt on their pool
tables. To get to and from those homes, they might drive cars
with brake lights in the back windows that lit up with the word
MoJo every time they touched the pedals. And next to them in
those cars might be handmade black purses in the shape of a
football with the word MoJo inscribed on them in white. Or the
less lavish MoJo handbags, sold exclusively at J. C. Penney ("Our
Permian Panther leather, two-toned bag has an understated
designer look" extolled the newspaper advertisement), which
were regularly $24.99, but were sometimes on sale for $8.99.

There were about eight hundred persons crammed into the
Permian High School cafeteria by the time the Watermelon
Feed began. Almost all of those in the crowd were white, and
their faces had a certain flattened, nonfrilled look, like the land
in which they lived. The women tended to be more handsome
than pretty with high, articulated cheekbones. The men tended
to be taut and well built regardless of age, dressed in beige or gray pants the color of the plains and cowboy boots that were
worn for function.

The starkness of the room seemed to heighten the natural
warmth of the occasion. About the only items on the white walls
were two announcements for Permian students on long strips
of computer paper that had nothing to do with the Watermelon
Feed, but still embodied the intrinsic spirit of the event.

The one on top read YOU MUST HAVE A STUDENT I.D. TO BE
ADMITTED TO FOOTBALL GAMES WITH STUDENT TICKETS. The one
underneath it read YOU MUST HAVE A STUDENT I.D. CARD TO
CHECK OUT A LIBRARY BOOK.

The fans clutched in their hands the 1988 Permian football
yearbook, published annually by the booster club to help generate funds for the program. It ran 224 pages, had 513 individual advertisements, and raised $20,000. Virtually every
lawyer, doctor, insurance firm, car dealer, restaurant, and oil
field supply business in town had taken out an ad, both as a
show of support for Permian football and, perhaps, as a form
of protection. The Ector County sheriff had taken out an ad.
So had the Ector County Democratic party, just in case there
were a few closet Democrats who, under conditions similar to
those offered a Mafia informant in the witness protection program, might be willing to divulge their political persuasion.

The grand dukes of Permian, men in their fifties and sixties
who had become as dependent on the Panthers as they were on
their jobs and children and wives and treated the memory of
each game as a crystal prism that looked more beautiful and
intricate every time it was lifted to the light, were there in full
force, of course.

Friday nights under a full moon that filled the black satin sky
with a light as soft and delicate as the flickering of a candle.
The road trips to Irving and Abilene and San Angelo in that
endless caravan of RVs and Suburbans and plain old sedans
rising forth so proudly from the bowels of West Texas. The
family reunion atmosphere of each practice where they knew
everyone and everyone knew them. They could hardly wait.

"I have to have something to look forward to, or life is just a
blah" was the way Jim Lewallen, a retired grocery chain supervisor, had put it earlier in the month as he sipped on an iced
tea over at Grandy's and counted off the days until the beginning of practice. "That football is just something that keeps me
goin'. You know the kids' moves, you know 'em personally. It's
just like your own kids," said Lewallen, built solidly with a fine
shock of gray hair, who didn't look right unless he had a thick
wad of tobacco chew nestled inside the deepness of his cheeks
as sweetly as a squirrel burrows a nut away in its mouth. "Mojo
football, it helps you survive all this sand, the wind, the heat. I
wouldn't live any other place."

Bob Rutherford, who was sitting next to him in the booth
and spent his days in the herculean task of' trying to sell real
estate in Odessa, felt the same stirrings. "It's just a part of our
lives. It's just something that you're involved in. It's just like
going to church or something like that. It's just what you do."

They wouldn't have missed the Watermelon Feed for the
world. Neither would Ken Scates, a gentle man with a soft sliver
of a voice who had been to the very first Permian practice in
the fall of 1959, when the school opened. Since that time he
had missed few practices, and it went without saying that he
hadn't missed any games, except for the time he had heart bypass surgery in Houston. But even then he had done what he
could to keep informed. After his surgery, he had resisted taking painkillers so he would be conscious for the phone calls
from his son-in-law updating him every quarter on the score of
the Permian-Midland Lee game. When he learned that Permian had the game safely in hand, he then took his medicine.

More toward the back of the room was Brad Allen, president of' the Permian booster club in the early eighties when
billionaire businessman H. Ross Perot had made his pitch for
educational reform in the state. Perot had routinely rubbed
shoulders with the most powerful men in the world-presidents, senators, heads of state, chief executive officers of Fortune 500 companies. But the machinations behind building up multi-million-dollar companies or working up a deal to get the
hostages out of Iran proved to be mere trifles in comparison to
what happened when Perot threatened the sanctity of football
in Odessa.

The dominance of football in Texas high schools had become
the focus of raging debate all over the state in 1983. The governor of Texas, Mark White, appointed Perot to head a committee on educational reform. In pointing to school systems
he thought were skewed in favor of extracurricular activities,
Perot took particular aim at Odessa.

On ABC's "Nightline," he called Permian fans "football crazy,"
and during the show it was pointed out that a $5.6 million high
school football stadium had been built in Odessa in 1982. The
stadium included a sunken artificial-surface field eighteen feet
below ground level, a two-story press box with VIP seating for
school board members and other dignitaries, poured concrete
seating for 19,032, and a full-time caretaker who lived in a
house on the premises.

"He made it look like we were a bunch of West Texas hicks,
fanatics," said Allen of Perot. The stadium "was something the
community took a lot of pride in and he went on television and
said you're a bunch of idiots for building it." Most of the money
for the stadium had come from a voter-approved bond issue.

The war against Perot escalated quickly. The booster club
geared up a letter-writing campaign to him, state legislators,
and the governor. Nearly a thousand letters were sent in protest of Perot's condemnation of Odessa. Some of the ones to
him were addressed "Dear Idiot" or something worse than that,
and they not so gently told him to mind his own damn business
and not disturb a way of life that had worked and thrived for
years and brought the town a joy it could never have experienced anywhere else.

"It's our money," said Allen of the funds that were used to
build the stadium. "If we choose to put it into a football program, and the graduates from our high schools are at or above the state level of standards, then screw you, leave us alone." At
one point Perot, believing his motives had been misinterpreted
and hoping to convince people that improving education in
Texas was not a mortal sin, contemplated coming to Odessa to
speak. But he decided against it, to the relief of some who
thought he might be physically harmed if he did.

"There are so few other things we can look at with pride,"
said Allen. "We don't have a large university that has thirty or
forty thousand students in it. We don't have the art museum
that some communities have and are world-renowned. When
somebody talks about West Texas, they talk about football.

"There is nothing to replace it. It's an integral part of what
made the community strong. You take it away and it's almost
like you strip the identity of the people."

The pull of it seemed irresistible. Allen's stepson, Phillip, had
been a fullback on the 1980 Permian team that won the state
championship. Allen readily admitted that Phillip was not a
gifted athlete, but he had the fire and desire that came innately
in a town that drank as deeply from the chalice of high school
football as Odessa.