Friday Night Lights

by H. G. Bissinger

  There were also times when his undisciplined running style seemed wilder than ever, as if he was frantically trying, in a single carry, to make up for an entire season that he knew was fleeing from him.

  II

  There was hope now, and bit by bit, with each game, it had gotten brighter and brighter. It still seemed impossible half the time but it was there, a glowing speck like the last drop of the sun on the horizon. Could he cradle it? Could he catch it?

  Was it totally ridiculous to think of this skinny, earnest kid wearing the orange and white of Texas next year? Maybe so. Even Mike Winchell wondered how he could possibly compete with the studs that he read about over and over in the worn pages of Texas Football magazine, guys from Hurst Bell and Denison and Langham Creek who were taller and faster and stronger, guys with discreet half-smiles on their faces who always looked as if there wasn’t a thing in the world that could ever get to them or rattle them.

  Mike himself had a wonderful smile, but it suggested warmth and innocence, not serene self-confidence in the face of all challenges. “I was kind of an oops,” was the way he described his entrance into the world. Sometimes he half-jokingly suggested that he should have gotten out of football back in Pop Warner when he was at the top of his game. And yet, on days when he was feeling good about himself and everything just seemed to click, he knew he threw the ball with a special gift.

  The Abilene Cooper game had been like that. It was all so wonderfully, effortlessly easy. He already had had several great games—the opener against El Paso Austin, the one against Midland High—but this was his greatest. Midway in the first quarter, when he had seen the Cooper cornerback go into motion before the play started, he knew they were going to be in man-to-man. He looked for flanker Robert Brown down the right sideline and threw the ball crossfield on a dime about forty yards. Brown caught it in stride for a sixty-two-yard touchdown. In the second quarter, he lined up and saw the Cooper secondary once again out of kilter. They were giving Brown too much cushion, laying off him six or seven yards. Once again he won the chess match and laid the ball in for a nineteen-yard touchdown. Still in the same quarter, he lined up over center and saw Cooper in one-on-one coverage against Lloyd Hill. That was more idiotic than giving Robert Brown a seven-yard cushion. The play immediately formed in his mind. Hill ran a fly pattern and Winchell hit him for a forty-five-yard touchdown. Still in the same quarter, he backpedaled, saw Robert Brown break free, and threw another touchdown pass, this one good for eighteen yards.

  By the time the first half ended, Winchell had thrown nine passes. Five had been incomplete. The other four had been for touchdowns. He didn’t throw any more passes that night, but it hardly mattered. Through the first eight games of the season he had thrown for seventeen touchdowns. Assuming Permian got into the playoffs, which seemed automatic at that point, he was destined to break the single-season record for most touchdown passes.

  “Michael has had so many strikes against him, and has struggled so hard, you just want to see him succeed,” said Deborah Hargis, a social studies and history teacher at Permian. “There just aren’t a lot of good kids, and he’s a good kid.”

  Like many who met him, she became both intrigued and enchanted with him. She saw something rare there, and when she thought of him a particular image often came floating back to her.

  The year before, when he had been in her history class, they had held a Beautiful Baby contest. Mike brought in a picture of himself, but it wasn’t one of those smiling-from-ear-to-ear shots taken at Sears or Penney’s. Mike had never lived a life like that. Instead he was holding a piece of gum while a single tear, like the wispy trail of a jet, fell down his cheek. Mike explained that he was crying because he had never seen a camera before and thought it was a gun. Hargis always remembered that picture and the softness of those brown eyes as Mike apparently thought he would be shot the second the shutter button clicked.

  She loved the way he was with children, particularly those who worshiped him and came to the school pep rallies wearing a jersey with his number, 20, on it. She loved the relationship he had with his grandmother, how he delighted in her and always watched out for her. She loved the way he was a klutz off the field despite his enormous athletic abilities, how he invariably spilled food on himself when he went out to eat or how when he got up from his desk in class one day he knocked it over.

  There were times when a dark cloud descended over him, making him virtually silent. His face became filled with a look of sad, aching brooding, as if he was thinking about something that only he could understand and somehow resolve. But there were other times when he became alive and animated, like a child gingerly touching the edge of the ocean before plunging in, displaying a curiosity unique among kids who lived in Odessa.

  New York, Philadelphia, the towering cities of the East beckoned to him with the exoticism of stories by Kipling, and he wanted to know about them, to see if the things he had read in magazines and saw on television were true. Were there muggers on every corner? Was there really a Mafia? The absolute lack of guile in his voice as he wondered about places that seemed to exist in a universe separate from the one he occupied in Odessa, the twinkle of a smile spreading over the flat contours of his face, made it easy to see why his favorite book, outside of the sports autobiographies he had read of Jim McMahon and Ken Stabler and Reggie Jackson, was Huckleberry Finn. Floating on a raft down the Mississippi to one mysterious place after another with nothing else around except trees and water, it beckoned to him. “I could stand to do that, go down the river,” he said.

  As he probed and pawed about worlds so different from his own, something in his own life would suddenly hit him—the time he had gone deer hunting and had one in his sights but couldn’t bring himself to shoot it; another time when he had camped out near the Devil’s River down around Del Rio; fishing trips on the Pecos, where he and a friend went river rafting on old tables they had found; the road trip with his brother to the state high school football championship between Mart and Shiner. He talked for a minute, or maybe two or maybe even five, as if something inside him had been punctured, had been unleashed and come alive again. And then, abruptly, the torrent stopped and his face once again regained its brooding stare.

  Hargis knew there were days when it was best to leave Mike alone, when he seemed impervious to the emotional gestures of anyone. But there were also days when her poking and prodding led to a small foothold inside him, a tiny ray of light inside an intricate cavern with more depth than anyone could possibly have realized.

  She desperately wanted him to make it, as did everyone else who had ever met him and become aware of some of the tidbits of his past—the death of Billy, the way he refused to let virtually anyone inside his home, the way he had raised himself.

  As Boobie’s season became a sad and sour struggle, Mike Winchell’s only continued to rise. As Boobie tried to find the natural rhythm of the year before, Mike edged closer and closer to a dream he had quietly harbored for much of his life.

  As they headed into the ultimate showdown against Midland Lee, they were two opposites, one plunging so fast he could barely hold on anymore, the other soaring beyond all expectations.

  Led by Winchell, Permian trampled the Cooper Cougars 56-14 to push its record to seven and one. Everywhere you looked that night you saw a star—Winchell at quarterback, Comer at fullback, Hill at split end, Brown at flanker, Christian at middle linebacker, Chavez at tight end—a team so damn good it hadn’t missed a single beat when Boobie had wrecked his knee and went on without him as if he had never been there. And every fan couldn’t help but believe that the following week’s game would be little more than a continuation of the Cooper obliteration, only a thousand times more sweet.

  It was hard to get too worked up over Abilene and the Cooper Cougars. They didn’t look down their noses and act as if Odessa was some sort of primeval desert wilderness with people whose intellectual capacity fell somewhere between that of the Goths and the Visig
oths. No, there wasn’t any reason in the world to hold a grudge against Abilene.

  But the same couldn’t be said for Midland, which held a unique place in the hearts of almost every Odessan. Even the most liberal ones who had spent a lifetime fighting racial and social injustice and who cherished the notion of open-mindedness drew the line at the Midland border.

  “Texans everywhere, except Midland, are tolerant of each other,” said Odessa attorney Michael McLeaish, still smarting from the time he had gone as a kid to a party in Midland over at the country club and walked around in a bow tie that began to feel as big as a ski jump while everyone else looked so cool and casual. “Midland is a principality. I don’t like people from Midland. They don’t like us and we don’t like them. I just can’t stand those bastards and they feel the same way about us.”

  PUSH FOR THE PLAYOFFS

  (11)

  SISTERS

  I

  Logically, they should have been united, not only by the common bond of oil that had kept them in clothes for sixty years, but by the bonds of loneliness. As your car fought its way across West Texas along Interstate 20 in the blistering heat and it felt as though you had been in the state for a week and had another week to go before you saw any sign of human life, they suddenly rose out of the emptiness like territorial forts.

  There was Midland with its improbably tall buildings, glassy and shimmering in the sun like misplaced tanning reflectors. Fifteen miles to the west there was Odessa, sprawling and oozing, its most striking feature the fenced-off fields with row after row of oil field equipment that looked like rusting military weapons from a once-great war.

  It seemed natural that they needed each other, as all good sister cities should, but instead they had spent most of their histories trying to prove just the opposite.

  Midland was the fair-haired, goody-goody one, always doing the right thing, never a spot on that pleated dress, always staying up late to do her homework and prepare for the future. Odessa was the naughty one, the sassy one, the one who didn’t stay at home but sat at a bar with a cigarette in one hand and the thin neck of a bottle of Coors in the other humming the tune of some country and western song about why it was silly to worry about tomorrow when you might get flattened by a pickup today, the one who dressed like an unmade bed and could care less about it, the one who liked nothing better than to drag her sanctimonious sister through the mud in a little game of football and then kick her teeth in for good measure.

  In 1983, when the editors of Forbes compiled their annual list of America’s four hundred richest individuals, they had discovered that six people, each worth $200 million or more according to their calculations, lived in Midland. As for plain old millionaires, which in a town like that had become as notable as people saying they were going to church on Sunday or planned to vote Republican (in 1976 Midland County became the first county in Texas where more Republicans voted in a primary than Democrats), various estimates pegged the number at two thousand or so during the height of the boom. If the number was accurate, one out of every forty-five people in the town in the late seventies had reached millionaire status.

  Forbes published a glowing nine-page article about Midland. Despite its eye-popping wealth, the article said Midland had still retained all the quaint virtues of a small town. “There are no chained storefronts, traffic jams or pedestrians wandering around wearing Walkman headsets. The Texas League baseball park still has billboards on the outfield fence.” There were a few blemishes, according to the magazine, but they came from Odessa.

  “Why, I can pick out Odessa guys on sight,” said a high school student. “The guys are big, muscular, wear gaudy jewelry and belt buckles big enough to eat their lunch off of.”

  At virtually the same time, Odessa found its way into the national press as well.

  “For Murder Capital U.S.A., it isn’t much—just a depressed oil town in an arid stretch of West Texas,” wrote Newsweek. “But last week little Odessa, with 29.8 homicides per 100,000 residents, gunned its way past Miami to take dubious honors as the most perilous city in the nation this year. . . .”

  It was easy to see why the two towns hated each other.

  When oil started booming in the late forties the availability of office space had made Midland a corporate center. As the grunts of the oil business flocked to Odessa to work and service the fields, the majors and colonels and generals came to Midland to control those grunts who worked the fields. They were a different breed, with eastern roots that often included four years at St. Paul’s or Choate or Lawrenceville or Andover, followed by four years at Yale or Harvard or Princeton or M.I.T. They were men with the hearts of pioneers and teeth sharpened to razor points by years spent dutifully at the knee of their good daddy capitalists back east. Although he turned out to be the most famous among them, George Bush was just one among friends. In 1951, shortly after Bush had moved to Midland, the New York Times described it as a “modern” city whose twenty-three thousand inhabitants could raise $200 million in capital with little effort.

  As the years passed the place became ever more exclusive. Residents named streets Harvard and Princeton. They played at the Polo Club, which had been started by a graduate of St. Paul’s and Princeton whose father had been an executive at U.S. Steel. They sang high praises of a black waiter named Max because of his flawless performance at formal dinner parties at their homes. They clearly saw their town as the one exception in an area of the country once described as having enough ignorance to support not simply a four-year university but an eight-year one.

  People in Odessa, watching what was going on over in Midland, could only shake their heads amid the smoke in the bar and wonder why God, of the millions of damn places in the world he could have put them next to, had chosen one as strange as Midland. The Ivy League didn’t cut much muster in Odessa, unless “Yalie” meant the same thing as “Okie,” and Odessans didn’t seem bothered one bit by the oft-repeated slogan that people went to Midland to raise a family and to Odessa to raise hell. There was no dispute that Odessa had its share of one-word bars and prostitutes and sometimes the only way to win an argument was to shoot the guy, but it was free and fun-loving and a man was measured by who he was, not by how well he concealed the size of his income.

  Beyond oil, the two towns had nothing in common, not in outlook, not in the style of the clothes they wore (Odessans dressed free and casual, whereas it could be presumed that Midlanders wore Polo Shop pajamas to bed), not even in the quality of excess that marked these towns during nine very remarkable years from 1973 through 1981.

  II

  There were some nice stories about the boom that came out of Odessa. There was the one about Jerry Thorpe, pastor of the Temple Baptist Church, going with a parishioner down to Vegas by private jet to watch the Holmes-Cooney fight and being given a $10,000 watch by him as a token of appreciation for all those inspiring sermons.

  There were several wonderful stories about the legendary Ron Wells, who, according to his banker, had started his oil field supply business with about $10,000 and suddenly found himself with monthly cash flows into the hundreds of thousands. There was the one about how he invited his banker out to the warehouse under the guise of discussing business and they sat around drinking champagne instead and then hopped over to the airport to pick up the Lear jet that Ron had just given himself for his thirtieth birthday, and since it was kind of stupid to let the plane just sit there and the day was pretty much shot anyway, they flew to Vegas and gambled all night.

  There was another one about the huge party Ron threw for his customers out at the warehouse, where huge cattle tanks were iced high with beer, and how he got up toward the end to thank everyone for coming and then mentioned something about his air force, and how his two planes (by that time he had a sixteen-seater Gulfstream I prop as well as the Lear) flew low overhead with the symmetry of the Blue Angels and how some of those in attendance were pretty impressed by the sheer balls of it all and how one guy immediately
whispered to his partner that from now on he wanted ol’ Ronnie to pay for his supplies in cash so they wouldn’t get stuck with a huge unpaid bill down the road when the upkeep of the air force and all the other toys got too expensive.

  There were stories of welders who had trouble getting through the alphabet without taking a break making between $80,000 and $90,000 a year, and were so flushed with money that when the state Highway Patrol picked them up for drunken driving in West Odessa they often had $8,000 or $9,000 in cash on them. There were stories of them marching into Gibson’s, the big discount chain that eventually went belly up like everything else, and plunking down $2,000 or $3,000 to redecorate their mobile homes from head to toe. There were stories of big, burly men coming into town in Rolls Royces to sell as many Rolex watches as they could dish out.

  There were stories of competition in the oil patch turning into a Mafia turf war. Companies arranged kickbacks for buying certain products, and a black market in stolen equipment thrived. There were stories of men who suddenly realized that they were born to be oil operators, not the doctors and lawyers and shoe salesmen they had been before their conversion, men who, as independent oilman Ken Hankins put it, “wouldn’t know a drilling rig if they walked up on one.”

  There were the usual hair-raising statistics, how, over a ten-year period through 1979, total construction in Odessa rose 520 percent and population 31 percent and bank deposits 294 percent and retail sales 276 percent and divorces 28 percent.

  They were all nice stories, until you compared them to what was going on in Midland. Then they seemed like the kind of stories passed around an Amish quilt circle. Greed, delusional visions of grandeur, the mercenary mercilessness that made every relationship expendable—Midland perfected all these long before they became the standard of the eighties around the rest of the country.