Friday Night Lights

by H. G. Bissinger

  The Bulldogs were big, with a defensive line that averaged 220 pounds across, including one 263-pound defensive tackle whom the Permian coaches described as a “big ol’ humper.” On offense they averaged 364 yards a game, and they had the leading rusher in the district in Dwane Roberts.

  “I’m pretty scared,” said Chavez, and if he was scared, then the Bulldogs must be for real. “They’re pretty quick and pretty good. They’re pretty fucking big.”

  During Gaines’s speech in the locker room minutes before the game, the obligatory phrases about the kicking game and field position gave way to something more emotional, the treble on his West Texas twang turned up high like the fat wail of a guitar string in a country and western tune. The players knelt before him as willing, eager supplicants, echoing his phrases with their own uncontrolled snatches in the brightly lit room, which was decorated in the Bulldog color of passion purple.

  “We gotta have that Permian swarming defense!”

  “Let’s go, guys!”

  “Permian swarming defense!”

  “Let’s go now!”

  “We’re gonna match ’em physical for physical!”

  “Let’s go now!”

  “We’re gonna be more physical!”

  “Yes sir!”

  “We’re gonna hit ’em longer! We’re gonna hit ’em harder!”

  “Yes sir!”

  “Four full quarters. That’s our credo!”

  “Let’s go!”

  “Four full quarters and we’re gonna be tougher than they are! They’re gonna come out fired up and we’re gonna knock hell from ’em!”

  “Let’s go! Alright!”

  Outside the Midland High band, dressed in its purple and gold costumes, played the national anthem. An announcer’s voice then came over the public address system, asking the sellout crowd of eleven thousand to rise for the prayer, which everyone eagerly did. At the kickoff, hundreds of purple and gold balloons dreamily floated into the sweet, gorgeous night.

  The two teams traded punts back and forth to begin the game. Comer scored from two yards out to cap a fifty-four-yard drive. Several minutes later Winchell threw a thirty-six-yard touchdown pass to Hill. It was a nice enough throw. But it was his second touchdown pass that lit up the night and stirred wonderful fantasies of what he might be capable of, how the idea of a scholarship to a Southwest Conference school might not be so farfetched after all. Rolling to his left, he lofted a pass forty yards downfield, the spiral true and perfect. The stadium became absolutely quiet as everyone tried to gauge where the ball was going to land. It sailed on an arc right into Hill’s hands. He never had to break stride and easily shed cornerback Julius Bowers for a forty-nine-yard score.

  Hill and the rest of the Permian offense went off the field exultant while Bowers lay flat on his face on the turf, abject and humiliated in the glare of the stadium lights, as if he had just been run over. Had it been his choice, he probably would have stayed there forever, but then a teammate went over to hoist him up. That made the score 21-0, and the rout was on.

  With the score 35-0 by the fourth quarter, the Midland High Bulldogs, sufficiently humbled, might have expected a little letup from Permian, but there was none. Just as it had been at the beginning of the Odessa High game, the team was in that special fifth gear. As Permian drove for its last touchdown of the night, Jerrod McDougal, from his tackle position, hit defensive end Jeff Rashall at the knees. Rashall got up and McDougal hit him again. When he didn’t go down, McDougal hit him again. After the play was over Rashall went to punch him, and McDougal responded by saying, “Your mother’s a whore.” Chavez went at it with one of the Midland High defensive players as well. Every time he made a good block, the defender would line up across from him on the following play and simply say, “Fuck you.” Chavez didn’t say much in return, just pinned him to his back again with another crushing block and lined up to hear the comforting lilt of another fuck you.

  From the stands Brian’s father, Tony, beamed with pride.

  Tony didn’t profess to know his son very well. At home Brian was virtually silent, and Tony wasn’t sure what had been the catalyst for his keen intellect, or how and from where he had acquired it. But he had great admiration for Brian and when he thought about what his son had done, and what he wanted to do, it seemed like nothing short of a miracle. Not only was he one of the captains of the Permian team, not only was he number one in his class, but now he was thinking of applying to Harvard.

  Harvard?

  Never in a thousand years could Tony Chavez have imagined it turning out this way. Never in a million.

  Not back in South El Paso, where he had first lived in a little apartment above a bar, then in a little adobe house that had a cesspool instead of a sewer. Not when he had grown up with humble, mismatched parents who had come from Mexico, his father a door-to-door insurance salesman who was laid-back and easygoing, his mother a dental assistant who was red-haired and high-strung. Not when he cut class as a sophomore to cross the border to Juarez to shoot pool and drink. Not when he finally found a high school, his fourth, that let him graduate instead of kicking him out for drinking and fighting and chronic truancy.

  When Tony was Brian’s age the thought of college, any college, was as funny as it was ridiculous. Just getting through high school was miracle enough, and the way Tony and most other kids from South El Paso looked at it, everything after that in life was gravy, a gift.

  He entered the army in 1964 when it became clear that if he didn’t join the military and get off the streets, something serious was going to happen. Tony was stationed in Germany. He got drunk one night, took a truck without authorization, and hopped from town to town until he wrecked it. He wasn’t court-martialed, but he was stripped of his rank and confined to the base for six months.

  “It scared the shit out of me,” he remembered, and he’d decided he’d better straighten up. He went to various army missile schools and intelligence schools and communications schools. For the first time in his life he realized that he wasn’t born to be a delinquent but actually had some smarts, or else the army was filled with exceptionally stupid people. “It was amazing how dumb these motherfuckers were,” he remembered. He came out of the army and went back to El Paso without any idea of what he should do. He got a job as an electric meter reader, and then he saw an ad in the newspaper for openings in the El Paso police department.

  He became a cop in 1967 at a time when just about everyone in the world hated cops. It was a fascinating, bizarre line of work that he was perfectly suited to because of his street smarts and not so suited to because of his liberal outlook, and he quickly realized that 50 percent of his colleagues “had no business carrying a fucking gun.” He worked patrol for five years, then became a detective in vice and narcotics, then made sergeant.

  In the meantime he had gotten married, and right after his first child, Adrian, was born, he decided to go to college full-time to get a degree. He worked the late shift as a cop from eleven at night to seven in the morning, showed up for class at the University of Texas-El Paso an hour later, went all day with a full course load, got in a few hours’ sleep, and then went back to the late shift. He majored in political science and English and by going year-round he graduated in three years. He never had a weekend off during that period, and looking back on it, he didn’t know how he had done it. But something was pushing him. If the opportunity was there to get a college education under the G.I. Bill, he figured he might as well take advantage of it.

  He came up for lieutenant, but then he decided to quit the police department altogether and go to law school. He went to Texas Tech University in Lubbock at the age of twenty-nine.

  When he graduated from law school in 1978, he had hoped to get a job in neighboring Midland instead of Odessa. On his trips between Lubbock and El Paso he drove through Odessa, down the hodgepodge of Second Street with its junkyards and cheap motels and auto supply stores, across Andrews Highway with its endless row of fast
-food restaurants and corrugated warehouses, and he thought the town was dirty and seedy and trashy. But the district attorney’s office made him a job offer even though he didn’t have his license yet, and he accepted it. He was the first Hispanic lawyer ever to work for the office, and he later found out why the offer had been made so quickly—the office had come under a lot of heat for its investigation of the death of a Hispanic inmate in the county jail. Several witnesses claimed he had been beaten to death. The allegation was never substantiated, but the office needed a token Hispanic fast, and Tony was it. He worked in the district attorney’s office for two years and then opened a criminal practice of his own. It became a gold mine. Seventy percent of his clients were Mexican-American, and much of his work was in the lucrative area of drug-related cases. In 1982 he moved his family from an apartment to a house in the most elite section of town, the Country Club Estates.

  His law practice thrived and soon Tony Chavez had it all, money, a six-figure income, a fancy house with a pool, fine cars, an American Express Platinum card. When he was growing up he had never once gone out to dinner with his parents or to the movies. He lavished his sons with all those things and much, much more, trips, jewelry, a brand-new RX-7 sports car for Brian that took him less than a week to crack up in a mall parking lot.

  His life seemed the embodiment of the American Dream, living proof that anything could happen if a person had enough drive and a willingness to take risks. But Tony had never forgotten where he came from. Beneath the successful lawyer was still a kid on the run in South El Paso—a little boyish, a little roguish, a little unorthodox, a little iconoclastic, and he didn’t feel imperial or privileged because of what had happened to him.

  He had done well in Odessa. He had come at a time when it was impossible anymore to ignore Hispanics, and he made good from that circumstance. He and his family had assimilated as well as any Hispanic family in town had, but there were still signs of subtle and not-so-subtle racism.

  Even now it was still hard for Tony to get used to many of the popular values of the place—the love for Reagan, the rise of the religious right with what he felt to be its thinly disguised hatred for blacks and Hispanics and homosexuals, the hue and cry in favor of the death penalty, the way people had no tolerance for others who were less fortunate.

  “They treat Reagan like he’s a saint,” he said. “He never went to church. They look at him like a family man. His family hates him. They think he’s a war hero. The only place he was a war hero was in the movies.” He sometimes wondered if the country had lost its moral center, its sense of benevolence. He had come to Odessa at the height of the boom. He had seen men with fourth-grade educations who could barely read making money hand over fist, and he saw the place overcome by decadence and greed until the bust.

  Because of the success of his son Brian, he had become as faithful a devotee of the Permian football program as anyone. He went to all the games and made all the Tuesday night booster club meetings. He went to the annual steak feed, where the coaches and the booster club board sat at long tables inside a warehouse and ate delicious slabs of rib eye as thick as a Bible. He sat in the stands of Memorial Stadium cheering and clapping and feeling delighted as the Permian Panthers destroyed the vaunted Midland High Bulldogs. He wore the same black garb as everyone else, and he admitted that he was to some extent living vicariously through his son, who was doing something that he had never done in South El Paso.

  But despite these common characteristics he was different, very different from those who surrounded him—in background, in what he believed in and what he did not. And despite his own conversion to Mojo he seemed not to understand it all quite, the devotion, the obsession, the way some people clung to it as if there was nothing else in life. But he also knew it had become a kind of sacred value.

  “When Permian football goes in Odessa,” he said with a laugh late one night, “then everything will go.”

  Permian scored again to make it 42-0, and some of the starters stood on the benches behind the sidelines, finally able to relax. The win raised their record to four and one overall and a perfect two and zero mark in the district. They were on top now and it didn’t seem possible for anyone to catch them. They had their helmets off and they looked like a row of beauty queens. There was Chad Payne with his hands on his hips and his chiseled California surfer good looks, the hard jaw, the opaque eyes, the blond hair. There was Chavez, who wasn’t scared anymore but was laughing uproariously after a wonderful performance. There was Billingsley, who after another good night with ninety-four yards rushing on twelve carries, now had his mind on more important pursuits, like what party to go to and what girl to charm and who might be worth fighting if he got drunk enough. There was Stan Wilkins, who had played a heroic game despite a painful thigh bruise that required a special pad and wasn’t helped at all by the medication he had been given because it made him throw up. They smiled and laughed and turned to wave at proud parents and proud fans.

  All around them the world seemed to be caving in; the way of life that had existed in Odessa for sixty years was badly shaken. Wherever you looked the economic news for this already hard-strapped area was dismal. Echoes persisted of the 1986 crash, when the area had become a scavenger hunt for repossessed Lear jets, Mercedeses, mobile homes, oil rigs, ranches, and two-bedroom houses with walls so thin they seemed translucent. The very day of the game, oil prices, the bread-and-butter benchmark of everyone who lived here, had skidded to $13.25 a barrel, their lowest level since August 1986 and far from that of the halcyon days of 1981 when $35 a barrel oil had made this part of the country a combination of Plato’s Retreat and the Barnum and Bailey Circus.

  The same day, federal regulators announced they were spending $2.49 billion to rescue six Texas savings and loan institutions that had finally fallen under the weight of the crash in oil prices, and everyone knew that that was just the tip of the iceberg. On the immediate local front, reports showed that rental rates for apartments in Odessa had dropped 10 percent and occupancy rates 8 percent, boding disaster for a market that was woefully overbuilt from the boom. In addition, a news report showed that over the past six years the number of employed workers in Odessa had dropped by 22,400, from 65,200 to 42,800.

  But here in Memorial Stadium in Midland, where a near-sellout crowd had gathered to watch a high school football game, none of that seemed to matter. The joyous swells of the band, with no note ever too loud or too off-key, the unflagging faith of the cheerleaders and all those high-octave cheers served up without a trace of self-consciousness, the frenzied screams of grown men and women as the boys on the field rose to dizzying, unheard-of heights—little was different now from how it had been almost forty years ago when a young businessman had sat in this very stadium.

  It was the most feverish Friday night of the season: Odessa against Midland, the grudge game to settle bragging rights between the two towns for the next twelve months. There was an overflow crowd of twelve thousand-plus fans in the stadium, rattling the stands from the opening kickoff. Our guest put his hands to his ears, then shook his head. [We] could empathize ... it would take us several seasons, living in both Odessa and Midland, before we understood the game, not as we knew it back east but West Texas-style as a quasi-religious experience.

  The man who wrote those words never forgot that moment in the stands. It gave him a valuable insight, one that he would find useful at another point in his life. By conjuring up an image of America as simple and pure as the scene of pomp in Memorial Stadium, by telling people that he was no different from any of them sitting in those packed stands and rooting for the Bulldogs or the Panthers, that he understood exactly how they felt and how they thought, about Friday night football, about life, about religion, about America, he managed to become the president of the United States.

  II

  A week after the game, Republican presidential candidate George Bush came to the Midland-Odessa area for a campaign appearance. The scene on the tarmac at
the airport wasn’t as feverish as the one at the parking lot of Ratliff Stadium, where Permian fans had been lined up for two nights to buy tickets. Some things, after all, would always be more important than others. But it did have the aura of a Friday morning pep rally.

  Shortly before noon the parking lot outside the south terminal was filled with people carrying cardboard signs that read MIDLAND LOVES BUSH or MOJO LOVES BUSH. There were little boys dressed in white shirts and blue ties, and high school girls wearing lovely red velvet dresses with white shoes. There were baby strollers decorated with American flags. And there was a whole bus full of kids from Midland Baptist Temple School, the girls in red dress uniforms that went to the knee and the boys in blue ties and red cardigan sleeveless sweaters that made them look grandfatherly. There was a smattering of people in cowboy hats, and a man in a PHILLIPS 66 cap, and another man who wore a military-style cap that said BRAZOS VALLEY WAR GAMES. When he took it off during the rally to put on a free one that said BUSH/QUAYLE 88, he didn’t look any different.

  Cheerleaders from Midland High milled about in their uniforms, which made them look a little like old-fashioned movie ushers, and in the middle of it all sat a red Mercedes convertible with a paper sign taped to the side: LEE HOMECOMING DUCHESSES WELCOME HOME GEORGE AND BARBARA BUSH.

  There were almost no blacks or Hispanics in the audience. There were no signs of poverty, no signs of homeless-ness, no signs of drug abuse, no signs of the social fissures that were tearing apart America’s urban centers to the east and west. The country was perfect and unblemished on this day. As the crowd eagerly awaited the arrival of Air Force II, it snacked on the free hot dogs and cups of Coke that were neatly laid out on long picnic tables sprinkled with brimming bowls of mustard and onions. Everything was neat and orderly. Everything you could have wanted was there.