Friday Night Lights

by H. G. Bissinger

  It was a view that every traveler had seen a million times before, and maybe if you were a passenger on a plane bisecting the night, you looked down and saw those lights and wondered what it would be like to live in an Odessa, to inhabit one of those infinitesimal dots, to be in a place that seemed so painfully far away from everything, so completely out of the mainstream of life. Perhaps you wondered what values people held on to in a place like that, what they cared about. Or perhaps you went back to your book, eager to get as far away as possible from that yawning maw that seemed so unimaginable, so utterly unimportant.

  In the absence of a shimmering skyline, the Odessas of the country had all found something similar in which to place their faith. In Indiana, it was the plink-plink-plink of a ball on a parquet floor. In Minnesota, it was the swoosh of skates on the ice. In Ohio and Pennsylvania and Alabama and Georgia and Texas and dozens of other states, it was the weekly event simply known as Friday Night.

  From the twenties through the eighties, whatever else there hadn’t been in Odessa, there had always been high school football.

  In 1927, as story after story in the Odessa News heralded new strikes in the oil field, the only non-oil-related activity that made the front page was the exploits of the Odessa High Yellowjackets. In 1946, when the population of Ector County was about thirty thousand, old Fly Field was routinely crammed with thirteen thousand five hundred fans, many of whom saw nothing odd about waiting in line all night to get tickets. Odessa High won the state championship that year, which became one of those events that was remembered in the psyche of the town forever, as indelible as Neil Armstrong landing on the moon. Where were you the moment the Bronchos won the championship? Everyone knew.

  In the sixties and seventies and eighties, when the legacy of high school football in Odessa transferred from Odessa High to Permian High, instead of just waiting all night for tickets, people sometimes waited two days. Gaines and the other Permian coaches were all too aware of the role that high school football occupied in Odessa, how it had become central to the psyche of thousands who lived there. Expectations were high every year and in 1988, if it was possible, they were even higher than usual. The team had an incredible array of talent, the devout boosters whispered, the best of any Permian team in a decade. Winchell back at quarterback . . . Miles back at fullback . . . Chavez back at tight end . . . Brown back at flanker . . . Hill back at split end . . . They listed off the names as if they were talking about the star-studded cast of a movie spectacular, and they frankly didn’t see how Permian could miss a trip to State this season.

  They weren’t the only ones to think so. The Associated Press, making its predictions for the season, had picked Permian to win it all. “Although Aldine, Sugar Land Willowridge, Hurst Bell, San Antonio Clark, and Houston Yates are gaining big support, the guess here [is] that there will be a big surprise from out west,” the article said. “Remember Odessa Permian? The Panthers and their legendary ‘Mojo Magic’ always contend for the title.”

  To the boosters, that story was music to their ears, further confirmation that when the middle of December rolled around they would be on their way to Texas Stadium for the state championship. To Gaines, it only created more room for anger and disappointment if the team didn’t get there.

  When he spoke to the players that very first time, he told them to ignore the outside pressure that would inevitably swirl around them during the thick of the season. “I’m gonna get criticism and you’re gonna get criticism,” he said. “It don’t mean a hill of beans, because the only people that matter are in this room. It doesn’t make a difference, except for the people here.”

  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 time-honored traditions, essential elements in the biological clock of the town. There was the annual downtown Christmas tree-lighting 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.

  (2)

  THE WATERMELON FEED

  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 be 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-a-lifetime 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, MOJO, I’M A COMIN’. And another had a towel and a flag emblazoned with the MOJO rallying cry.

  People had come dressed up for the event. They weren’t in black tie or anything outlandish like that, but just in black—black 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 GAMES WITH STUDENT TICKETS. The one underneath 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.

  Allen knew Phillip was something special in eighth grade, when he had broken his arm during the first defensive series of a game. Rather than come out, he managed to set it in the defensive huddle and played both ways the entire first half. By that time the arm had swelled up considerably, to the point that the forearm pads he wore had to be cut off, and unwillingly he went to the hospital. Allen said he was not proud of the incident, but he told the story freely, for it showed that his son had the ingredients to wear the black and white.

  And certainly he wasn’t the only one to have learned the much-admired lesson of no pain, no gain. In seasons past playing for Permian had involved other sacrifices. It had meant the loss of a testicle to a sophomore player when no one bothered to make sure he was thoroughly examined after he had injured his groin several hours earlier during an away game. Subsequently the testicle swelled up to the size of a grapefruit, and by the time the doctor saw him it was too late; it had to be removed. His mother was livid at what had happened, but the player pleaded with her not to push it because he feared it might inter
fere with his career at Permian and be held against him. He lost the testicle but he did make All-State.

  In seasons past, playing for Permian had meant routinely vomiting during the grueling off-season workouts inside the hot and sweaty weight room. It had meant playing with a broken ankle that wasn’t x-rayed because, if it had been known that it was broken, the player would have had to sit out the next game. It had meant playing with broken hands. It had meant a shot of novocaine during halftime to mask the pain of a deep ankle sprain or a hip pointer. It had meant popping painkillers and getting shots of Valium.

  But few in the community blanched at any of these things or even questioned them. Because of such an attitude, Permian had established itself as perhaps the most successful football dynasty in the country—pro, college, or high school. Few brands of sport were more competitive than Class AAAAA Texas high school football, the division for the biggest schools in the state.

  Odessa was hardly the only town that nurtured football and cherished it and went crazy over it. But no one came close to matching the performance of Permian. Since 1964 it had won four state championships, been to the state finals a record eight times, and made the playoffs fifteen times. Its worst record in any season over that time span had been seven and two, and its winning percentage overall, .825, was by far the best of any team in the entire state in the modern era of the game dating back to 1951.