Friday Night Lights

by H. G. Bissinger

  He asked one of the student trainers to dial the phone for him and call his girlfriend. The student held the phone out as Boobie, shaking with laughter, yelled from across the room, “What’s the deal, what’s the holdup on comin’ to the house?” When Trapper walked in, Boobie called him “cuz” and “cat-daddy.” A few minutes later he was handed a list of defensive plays to study. He looked at it for several seconds, the droning terminology of numbers and letters as appealing as Morse Code, and started to read it aloud in rap to give it a little flavor, a little extra pizzazz.

  He continued to play with the wall and then turned onto his stomach before flipping over again on his back. He spoke in little snatches.

  “My last year . . . I want to win State. You get your picture took and a lot of college people look at you.

  “When you get old, you say, you know, I went to State in nineteen eighty-eight.”

  He dreamed of making it to the pros, just as long as it wasn’t the New York Jets because he didn’t like the color green. And as he flipped onto his stomach one more time, he said he couldn’t ever, ever imagine a life without football because it would be “a big zero, ’cause, I don’t know, it’s just the way I feel. If I had a good job and stuff, I still wouldn’t be happy. I want to go pro. That’s my dream . . . be rookie of the year or some-thin’ like that.”

  He moved off the line against the Palo Duro Dons and everything was in pulsating motion, the legs thrust high, the hips swiveling, the arms pumping, the shoulder pads clapping wildly up and down like the incessant beat of a calypso drum.

  He went for fifteen yards and it was only a scrimmage but he wanted more, he always wanted more when he had the ball. Near the sidelines he planted his left leg to stiff-arm a tackler. But the leg got caught in the artificial turf and then someone fell on the side of it and when he got up he was limping and could barely put any pressure on it at all.

  The team doctor, Weldon Butler, ran his fingers up and down the leg, feeling for broken bones. Then he moved to the knee.

  Boobie watched the trail of those fingers, his eyes ablaze and his mouth slightly open. With the tiny voice of a child, he asked Butler how serious it was, how long he would be out.

  Butler just kept staring at his knee.

  “You might be out six, eight weeks,” he said quietly, almost in a whisper.

  Boobie jolted upright, as if he was wincing from the force of a shock.

  “Oh fuck, man!”

  “We won’t know until we x-ray it. It may be worse if you don’t stop moving that leg.”

  “You can’t be serious, man! You got to be full of shit, man!”

  Butler said nothing.

  “Man, I know you’re not talking about any six to eight weeks.”

  Boobie was placed on the red players’ bench behind the sideline and his black high tops were slowly untied. The leg was placed in a black bag filled with ice to help stop the swelling. He turned to Trapper.

  “Is it gonna fuck up my season, man?” he asked in a terrified whisper.

  “I sure hope not,” said Trapper.

  But privately, Trapper’s assessment was different. As a trainer he dealt with knee injuries all the time. His gut told him it was something serious, an injury that might prevent Boobie from ever playing football again the way he once had.

  Boobie lay down and several student managers took off his pads. In his uniform, with all the different pads he fancied, he looked a little like Robo Cop. But stripped of all the accoutrements, reduced to a gray shirt soaked with sweat, he had lost his persona. He looked like what he was—an eighteen-year-old kid who was scared to death.

  “I won’t be able to play college football, man,” said Boobie in a whisper as the sounds of the game in the gauzy light—the hits, the whistles of the officials, the yells of the coaches—floated over him, had no effect on him anymore. “It’s real important. It’s all I ever wanted to do. I want to make it in the pros.

  “All I wanted to do,” he repeated again. “Make it to the pros.”

  When the injury occurred, L.V. could only watch with silent horror. He had stayed frozen in the stands, not wanting to accept it or confront it, hoping that it would go away after a few nervous moments. But there were too many people around Boobie, looking at his knee as if it were a priceless vase with a suddenly discovered crack that had just made it worthless.

  He had always feared that Boobie would be seriously injured one day, but not like this, not in a scrimmage that didn’t count for a single statistic, not when he was about to have it all.

  He had pushed Boobie in football and prodded him and refused to let him quit. He did it because he loved him. And he also did it because he saw in his nephew the hopes, the possibilities, the dreams that he had never had in his own life when he had been a boy growing up in West Texas, back in a tiny town that looked like all the other tiny towns that dotted the plains like little bottlecaps, back in the place the whites liked to call Niggertown.

  II

  From one perspective, the quickest way to understand Crane, Texas, was by thumbing through the ad section of the high school yearbook. There the glossy white pages featured blurbs for T & P Clothiers (HEADQUARTERS FOR STYLE AND VALUE!), Crane Motor Company (JOY AND JIMMY EXHIBIT THAT HAPPINESS IS OWNING A DODGE CHARGER), Crane Flower Shop (SAY IT WITH FLOWERS. LET IT BE OURS), Southern Union Gas Company (IF YOU WANT THE JOB DONE RIGHT, DO IT WITH GAS), Crane Service Parts (YOUR NAPA JOBBER IS A GOOD MAN TO KNOW), and Gloria’s Salon of Beauty (BEAUTY IS OUR BUSINESS).

  It was the kind of town where the big hangout was the Dairy Mart on Sixth Street because it had curb service, where Saturday afternoons meant plunking down a quarter for a matinee at the movie theater on Fifth Street and Saturday nights meant either a dance over at the county exhibition hall or a drag or two up and down North Gaston looking for girls and a little beer.

  Fathers liked Crane because there was steady work in the oil field. Mothers liked Crane because there were few temptations that could entice their offspring. Children liked Crane because they hadn’t been anyplace else, except to Monahans or Marfa or Big Lake for a basketball or football game. For many people, it had all the comfortable fixtures and feelings of a small town.

  But not everyone liked it, and L.V. Miles had been one of those. For him, as for a handful of others who had the same skin color, the Crane he grew up in might as well have been on another planet.

  His life had been defined by a five-foot-high wall of rock and concrete. It ran along a street and had been built so the whites who lived on the edge of Niggertown would not have to see it. He and the handful of other blacks who lived in this town of thirty-eight hundred people could do whatever they wanted inside that wall; no one really cared. But whenever they ventured outside it, it was without welcome.

  He had grown up in a place where the only way he could go into a restaurant, if at all, was through the back; where he wasn’t allowed to go to high school football games unless he climbed a light pole or snuck under a fence; where it was perfectly fine to go to the Saturday afternoon matinee as long as he took the stairs to the right and sat in the balcony.

  The only time he had ever had contact with whites was during summer league baseball, but otherwise he stayed behind the concrete wall that fenced him and his friends in like cattle. He went to the colored school over on the corner. He swam at the colored swimming pool, not the white one where the teenage lifeguards had been placed on strict orders by a county commissioner to shut it down if any “nigger” tried so much as to stick his big toe into it. He played at the colored park, not too far from the spot where the cross had been burned when he was twelve. He went to the colored youth hall.

  At Bethune, the colored high school he went to, all the tenth, eleventh, and twelfth graders—about twenty of them—were housed in the same little room near the entrance. He played basketball in a gymnasium that was tiny and suffocating, and he would never forget the one time he was allowed to play in the gym at the white school, Cr
ane High, and how dazzled he was by the beauty of its back-boards, by the sweet rows of bleachers rising above the smooth, glistening floor, as impossibly huge to him as a big-city arena.

  When he went back to Crane one day more than twenty years after he had left it, it was easy to pick out the landmarks of his life because most of them were still there—the wall that had crumbled in places but was too well built to have disintegrated; the low-slung red brick of Bethune, with its row of grim windows like expressionless eyes; the red brick of the movie theater on Fifth, where he had had to sit in the balcony; the black cemetery where his mother was buried, an unadorned piece of ground with no trees to shield it from the constant clatter of supply trucks heading to McCamey or Texon or some other oil town outpost, next to a sign advertising the South Forty MX and ATV Track three-quarters of a mile down the road.

  As L.V. Miles drove through the streets of Crane, memories of the cross-burning and the colored pool and the wall that the whites built bubbled to the surface. They came out at random, with no special significance attached to one or the other, and he talked about them neither with bitterness nor with self-pity. That was just the way things were back then, and Crane had been no exception.

  But there was one memory that did seem to stand out above the rest, that he remembered in more detail than the others. It had to do with the one aspect of life that had kept him going while he lived there, which was sports. In 1961 and 1962 the basketball team at Bethune was the Class B state champion of Texas for “colored” schools, running a fast break so fast and fluid that it had the white folks in town actually setting foot in Niggertown to see it. L.V. had been on that team. He was a nice-sized kid back then, six feet and 230 pounds, and there was one thing he wanted to do more than anything else. He wanted with all his heart to play high school football.

  But that was impossible. Bethune didn’t have a football program. Only Crane High did, and L.V., who graduated from high school in 1963, wasn’t allowed to go there.

  Instead the best his younger brother James and he could do was watch the Crane Golden Cranes as they went against Monahans and Marfa and Alpine and Big Lake and other West Texas towns for whom the game of football had become a badge of courage. The two of them snickered as they watched, knowing they could do it much better than the bunch of white kids out there on the field who didn’t seem very tough or very fast. But inside they bled, wanting so badly to be a part of it, to hear the swell of an entire town that had turned out on a Friday night to rejoice and agonize with the Golden Cranes, except, of course, for those who lived behind the wall of Niggertown and weren’t welcome.

  “You’d watch these kids play, and it seem like somethin’ burning would be inside of you and want to come out,” said James Miles, remembering what it felt like to be deprived of the most important rite of male teenage passage there was in the state of Texas. L.V. felt the same sense of helpless frustration.

  “I wanted desperately to play football in high school and I never got the opportunity,” he said. But twenty-five years later, about forty miles up the road in Odessa at Permian, there was some consolation.

  It came in the form of Boobie.

  Some who knew L.V. thought that he had pushed Boobie too much, wasn’t living for him as much as he was living through him. Maybe that was true, maybe it wasn’t. From afar, it was easy to criticize. But no one except the two of them truly knew what they had been through together, how close Boobie had come to being devoured by the Texas Department of Human Resources and the county welfare agency, to become simply another nameless case number shuttled from one place to another.

  Boobie had been placed in a foster home when he was a young boy still living in the Houston area. L.V. had visited him and couldn’t get his image out of his mind, that of a seven-year-old kid wearing size nine tennis shoes that turned up at the toes they were so big, his hair mangy and unkempt, a wild child who looked as if he had spent his life in the streets among thieves and beggars and animals. L.V. could have turned his back on him, could have let the image go. After all, Boobie wasn’t his child. But he couldn’t do it. He just couldn’t do it, and he became determined to get him out of there. “I didn’t want to see him go anywhere else, get away from the family, and never see him again,” said L.V.

  He also knew that the longer Boobie stayed in a foster home, the greater the odds were of his ultimately landing in a juvenile detention center, or on the streets, or in prison. There was also something about Boobie that excited him, a certain rawness that if channeled the right way could make him into something that no one ever expected.

  There had always been something special about Boobie, even in the way he was born, on April 16, 1970, en route to St. Luke’s Hospital in Houston with a police escort. Boobie lived with his parents until he was three, when he went to live with his grandmother.

  He had a thick lisp when he was growing up and a craving for honey buns, and his grandmother remembered how much he loved to sing, belting out such songs as “Santa Claus Comes to the Ghetto” with relish.

  When he was about five, he went back to live with his father, James senior. His father was working two jobs then, and Boobie remembered spending a lot of time alone. Later his father started seeing a woman whom Boobie did not get along with at all.

  He remembered an attempt to tie him to a dresser so he could be beaten with an extension cord. He also remembered getting beaten with an extension cord when he was taking a bath. He went to school one day and officials there, believing he had been victimized, would not let him return home.

  Case number 32,101 was heard on October 20, 1977, in Fort Bend County District Court in the Houston suburb of Richmond. Subsequent to that hearing, a court order on December 6, 1977, named the Fort Bend County Child Welfare Unit as Boobie’s temporary conservator over the protests of his father, who said there had been no abuse but could not vouch for what happened to his son while he was away at work. Boobie was placed in a foster home, and his father was allowed to visit twice a month. The order also noted that a study of the home of L.V. Miles in Odessa would be arranged to see if it would be a suitable place for Boobie to live.

  On August 22, 1978, a legal agreement was reached placing Boobie in L.V.’s care. Two days later Jamie Kolberg, a social worker with the Department of Human Resources who had followed Boobie’s case, wrote L.V. a note: “I hope you all had a good trip home, and that James is getting settled in with your family. I feel confident that his life has taken a turn for the better, and that he has a good chance of being a happier child in the future.”

  The day L.V. went to the Houston area to get Boobie, he had a beard and was so massively built that he looked ominous. And yet there was something gentle and tender about him, in the way he had his arm around Boobie, who was wearing a red T-shirt and shorts with his shoulder tilting down slightly. They both had thin smiles on their faces and they both looked painfully uncomfortable, as if they were embarking on a strange and potentially explosive experiment for which there were no predicted results.

  Their initial time together had not been easy, and L.V. made many trips to the elementary school, where Boobie would get in trouble for fighting or talking back to teachers. He searched for something, an experience they could learn and grow from together, some way to channel all the anger that raged within Boobie. He found it when he asked him if he wanted to play on the Pop Warner football team that L.V. coached called the Vikings. From those underpinnings of football, an enormously strong bond developed between the two. They had something they shared.

  “He’s cool, I love ’im a lot,” said Boobie of his uncle. “If it weren’t for him, I wou’n’t be here. I’d be here but wou’n’t be as good because I wou’n’t have nobody to push me like he pushed me.”

  “Boobie, he’s the most complete back that ever went to [Permian],” said L.V. with pride. “He’s the only running back I ever saw who could take those two-hundred-pound linebackers out, I mean take ’em out.” When he said that, he had been wat
ching the video of the 1987 Plano-Permian state semifinal game inside his living room.

  The three-bedroom house was owned by L.V.’s wife, Ruby, and besides Boobie there were three other children living in it. Ruby worked for a department store in the mall. L.V. was a trucker, but with the oil bust, jobs had become increasingly difficult to find and he barely worked at all. Together, their combined income came to about $1,000 a month.

  The house itself sat on a corner lot on Lincoln Avenue in the Southside. The house seemed indistinguishable from others on the Southside—some were smaller and shabbier, some had better paint jobs—except for the shiny yard sign that Boobie’s Pepette had made heralding him as a member of the 1988 Permian football team. The gleaming white sign looked misplaced and almost silly in comparison to the ones over on the northeast side of town, which were set out on the expansive lawns of homes as serenely as rafts interspersed on a private sea.

  “See that little spin there, we worked on that,” said L.V. as he watched Boobie dart free from the grasp of a Plano defender and go for several of the 141 yards he gained that day. He watched silently for a while, and then some aspect of Boobie’s play struck him again.

  “His blocking and stuff, we worked on that even in Pop Warner.

  “The Arlington game, that guy from the University of Texas was very impressed with his blocking. He talked to me for a long time.”

  A dozen other college recruiters were impressed as well, their interest only increasing when Texas Football magazine, the Bible of high school football, named Boobie a “blue chip” recruiting prospect and one of the ten best running backs in the state.