Friday Night Lights

by H. G. Bissinger

  If he wasn’t a typical brain filled with anguish and neurosis, he wasn’t a typical Permian football player either. He was lucky, but he always knew in the back of his mind that if he failed in football it didn’t really matter anyway.

  He had become as indoctrinated into the cult of football in Odessa as anyone. After all, it was something he had lived, eaten, and breathed since seventh grade. But as he headed into his senior year he also realized that he wanted something more. No matter how glorious and exciting the season was, he also knew it would come to an end.

  In his own private way, he found far more inspiration in the classroom than he did on the football field. And nowhere did he seem more determined than in English class, under the spell of a special teacher named LaRue Moore.

  She saw in him a metamorphosis his senior year, a fascination with vocabulary and literature and trying to write essays with perception and clarity. He was striving for something she hadn’t quite seen before, and when he told her he was interested in going to Harvard she joyously encouraged him as much as she could and agreed to read his application essays.

  It was simply part of her style. Whenever she could, she tried to show students the bountiful world that existed past the corporate limits of Odessa and how they should not be intimidated by it but eager and confident to become a part of it. On five different occasions, she and her husband, Jim, the former principal of Ector High School before it closed, had taken students to Europe to let them see other cultures, other lands. What she aspired to as a teacher was embodied by a written description she prepared of her senior honors English class for a group of observers:I work not only for the gathering and assimilation of knowledge, but also to teach the fact that one can be brilliant without being arrogant, that great intellectual capacity brings great responsibility, that the quest for knowledge should never supplant the joy of learning, that one with great capacities must learn to be tolerant and appreciate those with lesser or different absolutes, and that these students can compete with any students at any university anyplace in the world.

  A teacher such as LaRue Moore should have been considered a treasure in any town. Her salary, commensurate with her ability and skill and twenty years’ teaching experience, should have been $50,000 a year. Her department, of which she was the chairman, should have gotten anything it wanted. She herself should have been given every possible encouragement to continue what she was doing. But none of that was the case, of course. After all, she was just the head of the English department, a job that in the scheme of natural selection at Permian ranked well behind football coach and band director, among others.

  As Moore put it, “The Bible says, where your treasure is, that’s where your heart is also.” She maintained that the school district budgeted more for medical supplies like athletic tape for athletic programs at Permian than it did for teaching materials for the English department, which covered everything except for required textbooks. Aware of how silly that sounded, she challenged the visitor to look it up.

  She was right. The cost for boys’ medical supplies at Permian was $6,750. The cost for teaching materials for the English department was $5,040, which Moore said included supplies, maintenance of the copying machine, and any extra books besides the required texts that she thought it might be important for her students to read. The cost of getting rushed film prints of the Permian football games to the coaches, $6,400, was higher as well, not to mention the $20,000 it cost to charter the jet for the Marshall game. (During the 1988 season, roughly $70,000 was spent for chartered jets.)

  When it came to the budget, Moore did have reason to rejoice this particular year. The English department had gotten its first computer. It was used by all twenty-five teachers to keep grade records and also to create a test bank of the various exams they gave to students.

  The varsity football program, which had already had a computer, got a new one, an Apple IIGS, to provide even more exhaustive analyses of Permian’s offensive and defensive plays as well as to keep parents up to date on the progress of the off-season weight-training program. At the end of the year the computer would be used to help compile a rather remarkable eighty-two-page document containing a detailed examination of each of the team’s 747 defensive plays. Among other things, the document would reveal that Permian used sixty-six different defensive formations during the year, and that 25.69 percent of the snaps against it were from the middle hash, 67.74 percent of which were runs and 32.26 percent of which were passes.

  Moore’s salary, with twenty years’ experience and a master’s degree, was $32,000. By comparison, she noted, the salary of Gary Gaines, who served as both football coach and athletic director for Permian but did not teach any classes, was $48,000. In addition, he got the free use of a new Taurus sedan each year.

  Moore didn’t object to what the football program had, nor did she object to Gaines’s salary. She knew he put in an enormous number of hours during the football season and that he was under constant pressure to produce a superb football team. If he didn’t, he would be fired. She had grown up in West Texas, and it was obvious to her that high school football could galvanize a community and help keep it together. All she wanted was enough emphasis placed on teaching English so that she didn’t have to go around pleading with the principal, or someone else, or spend hundreds of dollars out of her own pocket, to buy works of literature she thought would enlighten her students.

  “I don’t mind that it’s emphasized,” she said of football. “I just wish our perspective was turned a little bit. I just wish we could emphasize other things. The thing is, I don’t think we should have to go to the booster club to get books. I don’t think we should have to beg everyone in town for materials.”

  But that was the reality, and it seemed unlikely to change. The value of high school football was deeply entrenched. It was the way the community had chosen to express itself. The value of high school English was not entrenched. It did not pack the stands with twenty thousand people on a Friday night; it did not evoke any particular feelings of pride one way or another. No one dreamed of being able to write a superb critical analysis of Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake from the age of four on.

  LaRue Moore knew that. So did Dorothy Fowler, who fumed to a visitor one day, “This community doesn’t want academic excellence. It wants a gladiatorial spectacle on a Friday night.” As she made that comment a history class that met a few yards down the hall did not have a teacher. The instructor was an assistant football coach. He was one of the best teachers in the school, dedicated and lively, but because of the legitimate pressures of preparing for a crucial game, he did not have time to go to class. That wasn’t to say, however, that the class did not receive a lesson. They learned about American history that day by watching Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid on video.

  III

  When Hugh Hayes became the new superintendent of the Ector County school system in 1986, he had known exactly what he was getting into. When he interviewed for the job and was given a tour of Odessa, one of the very first sights he was shown was the football stadium. He was also given a look at the enormous sign heralding the team’s fantastic achievements in the state playoffs. When he took the job, the only piece of advice he was given by the outgoing superintendent was never to promise anyone Permian season tickets.

  “I felt like not a lot of attention had been paid to academics,” he said. “That’s not to say they had an inferior program. I don’t think an effort had been made to capitalize on the potential they had in the kids. Whatever you did in academics, you were going to look pretty good, because there wasn’t much going on.”

  With the backing of a school board dedicated to making improvements, Hayes went to work to boost academic performance in Odessa. He pushed to improve test scores. He raised the number of honors courses from five to thirty. He started an advanced placement program and stopped making excuses for poor academic performance on the basis of a child’s socio-economic background. A school district this
size, with approximately twenty-six thousand students in all grades, should have eight to ten National Merit Scholars a year, not just one, said Hayes.

  But he also knew there was only so much he could do. As he put it, “Public schools reflect a community’s desires, feelings, dreams,” and nowhere did those dreams unfold more powerfully than they did on a football field.

  “It has put Odessa on the map. It has given them a sense of pride I’m not sure could be achieved any other way. It has created a sense of expectation for the kids that is admirable. I think it has instilled in these kids that go through Permian a real sense of confidence.

  “If that sort of confidence and attitude could be transferred into the academic arena, that would be wonderful. I don’t see that transfer.”

  The effect of creating those values in an academic setting had been well documented. The most famous example had occurred at Garfield High in Los Angeles, where a teacher named Jaime Escalante had astounding success in turning Hispanic students, most of whom had been labeled delinquent dunces, into some of the finest calculus students in the country. Escalante, whose efforts were chronicled in the film Stand and Deliver, did it by turning his class into an important symbol of status. He did it by accepting nothing but the best from students, by forcing them to sign contracts and to come early to class. In the classroom he cajoled and badgered and tormented and loved. A mystique built up around his calculus class—if you could make it through there, you had truly accomplished something spectacular, something no one thought you could do—and success bred more success. Soon almost everybody wanted to prove that he or she had the stuff to master calculus with Escalante.

  Permian had a program every bit as remarkable, one that tradition and mystique had made an irresistible symbol everyone coveted, one whose demands were ceaseless, one in which the instructors cajoled and badgered and tormented and loved.

  It was all a matter of values, of priorities.

  At Garfield High the priority was calculus, where a student’s mastery could potentially lead to an academic scholarship and a career in computer science or engineering. At Permian the priority was football, which beyond the powerful memories and the wonderful joy it created year after year for the town of Odessa, rarely led to scholarships or careers. In the history of the program, only two players had gone on to extended careers in the pros.

  “If we prepared our kids academically as we prepared them for winning the state championship, there is no telling where we would be now,” said former school board member Vickie Gomez with typical bluntness. “If we prepared them half as hard academically, there is no telling where we would be.” But Gomez didn’t foresee any great changes.

  “Football reigns, football is king,” she said. “In Odessa, it’s God, country, and Mojo football.”

  IV

  In his first class of the day, correlated language arts, a class for students at least two years below their grade level in English, Boobie Miles spent the period working on a short research paper that he called “The Wonderful Life of Zebras.” He thumbed through various basic encyclopedia entries on the zebra. He ogled at how fast they ran (“Damn, they travel thirty miles”) and was so captivated by a picture of a zebra giving birth that he showed it to a classmate (“Want to see it have a baby, man?”). By the end of the class, Boobie produced the following thesis paragraph:Zebras are one of the most unusual animals in the world today. The zebra has many different kind in it nature. The habitat of the zebra is in wide open plain. Many zebras have viris types of relatives.

  He then went on to algebra I, a course that the average college-bound student took in ninth grade and some took in eighth. Because of his status as a special needs student, Boobie hadn’t taken the course until his senior year. He was having difficulty with it and his average midway through the fall was 71.

  After lunch it was on to creative writing, where Boobie spent a few minutes playing with a purple plastic gargoyle-looking monster. He lifted the fingers of the monster so it could pick its nose, then stuck his own fingers into its mouth. There were five minutes of instruction that day; students spent the remaining fifty-odd minutes working on various stories they were writing. They pretty much could do what they wanted. Boobie wrote a little and also explained to two blond-haired girls what some rap terms meant, that “chillin’ to the strength,” for example, meant “like cool to the max.” Boobie enjoyed this class. It gave him an unfettered opportunity to express himself, and the teacher didn’t expect much from him. His whole purpose in life, she felt, was to be a football player. “That’s the only thing kids like that have going for them, is that physical strength,” she said.

  After creative writing it was off to Boobie’s favorite class of the day, biology I, where just about everyone else was a sophomore. He took a seat in the back row of the room. Except for Boobie, the students had their notebooks open, while the rip of an envelope and the shuffling of paper floated from his desk. He was busy reading a mailgram from University of Nebraska head coach Tom Osborne wishing him luck on an upcoming game.

  “Okay, phenotype and genotype,” said the teacher.

  There was the sound of another rip as Boobie opened yet another letter from the University of Nebraska.

  The teacher lectured for about five minutes, and then it was time to do a worksheet on genetic makeup.

  “Where are your notes from yesterday?” she asked Boobie.

  “I left ’em,” he said with a smile.

  “You didn’t leave ’em. I watched you. You didn’t take any notes.” She shrugged. He smiled some more.

  While other students casually worked to complete the worksheet, Boobie ate some candy and left blank the entire second page, which asked for definitions of certain genetic terms. He leaned against his book bag and poked his pen into the hair of the girl sitting in front of him. She smiled at him as if he were a badgering but endearing little brother and he laughed. The teacher had the students complete some Punnett squares and then began lecturing again in a straightforward, no-nonsense style. She obviously wanted to teach the kids something. But Boobie seemed uninterested.

  After a while he gathered up his things and left class ahead of time. He was being excused a few minutes early so he wouldn’t be a second late for football practice. Off he went down the empty hallways of Permian High School, happy and cheerful, the mailgrams from Nebraska tucked safely away in his knapsack.

  (8)

  EAST VERSUS WEST

  I

  The night before the fourth game of the season against Odessa High, Gaines locked the doors of the field house for a team meeting. Private gatherings such as this were not held very often—only when the idea of defeat became not only unthinkable but intolerable. Losing to the cross-town rival from the west was one of those situations, a possibility even more horrid to Permian fans than that of Michael Dukakis becoming president.

  To put the game into perspective and draw the proper parallels, Gaines told the players the story of Sam Davis.

  Davis had been a Confederate scout during the Civil War when he came face to face during battle with a scout from the Union army. With the battle over for the day they sat in the moonlight and talked, and before they parted the Union scout revealed secrets about his own army’s position. When Davis was subsequently captured by Union forces, he was told he could go free if he revealed the name of the person who had given him the information. But Davis had no interest in such a low-handed compromise. “I would die a thousand deaths before I would betray a friend” were his final words.

  It was a vignette that was deemed appropriate on the occasion of the Odessa High game, much like the quotation from H. L. Mencken that had been posted on the field house bulletin board:Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats.

  The boys in front of Gaines, out of uniform and away from the hue and cry usually sparked by their appearance, looked strangely vulnerable. Dressed in blue jeans and short-slee
ved shirts and well-shined cowboy boots, their hair neatly combed and their eyes still capable of expressing admiration for stories such as this, it was one of those rare moments when it suddenly became apparent that they were nothing more than high school kids.

  “I am sure there are many applications that can be drawn from that little story,” said Gaines of Sam Davis’s eager willingness to die. “The main applications I get from it are twofold. One is friendship, and the second one is loyalty.

  “We’ve got a big challenge ahead of us tomorrow night. I want us to play like fifty-two brothers. All for one and one for all. I want us to have that cohesiveness, that unified spirit. Fifty-two people pulling together is hard to beat, men. Fifty-two brothers are hard to beat.

  “We know that OHS is going to be fired to the hilt and I want to match them emotion for emotion. . . . It’s gonna be a big crowd. It’s an exciting game. I wish everybody that has an opportunity to play the game of football all over the United States had an opportunity to play in a game like this. You’re part of a select group.”

  As part of the tradition in these meetings, Gaines and the other coaches then left the room so the captains could address the players privately.

  “I don’t care what they think over there,” said Ivory Christian. “We oughta just run over them like sixty-two to nothin’ or somethin’. We oughta blow ’em out. I don’t think they can stay on the field with us, man. We play hard like we always do on Friday night. . . . We know how they are, the first quarter you start hittin ’em a couple of times, get a couple of sticks on ’em, they want to quit.”