Friday Night Lights

by H. G. Bissinger

  Belew asked Gaines what kind of coin he was going to use, if he had some special one imbued with magical powers. He said he wasn’t much of a gambler and talked about the time he had stopped in Vegas on the way back from a coaches’ convention and couldn’t bring himself to play blackjack.

  “I was just an ol’ country boy with my britches hangin’ out,” Gaines said to Belew with a little deprecating laugh. “I was kind of intimidated.” Instead he had played the slots and also went to see the Siegfried and Roy magic act. He told Belew it was one of the most incredible spectacles he had ever seen, stumbling over his words as he described how some of the girls in the revue hadn’t worn much in the way of lingerie.

  He told the story the same ingenuous way he told the one about his trip out east when he was still at Monahans and had gone with another coach to look at artificial-surface tracks; they took a commuter plane from Philadelphia to Kennedy that was so tiny it looked for a moment as though the only way to get the other coach on board was to lasso him and throw him in the baggage compartment.

  The car went past the twinkling lights of an oil rig lit up like a lonely Christmas tree, past the white clapboard houses of Garden City where the town sign heralded the seven and one record of the Garden City football team. The talk fell to snow skiing, to money, to what it had been like when they had gone to college, to anything but the coin toss.

  They talked a little about the game, about who had played well and who hadn’t. Belew related an anecdote about a player who had tried to quit the team earlier in the year and how his father had coaxed him back into playing by sharing a case of beer with him.

  “I can’t even begin to imagine that,” said Gaines, who in his own life could only remember disappointing his father once, in seventh grade, when he had played a football game over in Kermit.

  His father, who worked at a natural gas plant for Gulf as a shift supervisor, had not gone to the game that day. But he got back reports from friends saying that his son had broken free with the ball and then hesitated near the goal line, as if he was scared of getting hit. In the world of a small Texas town, where the four seasons of the year were football, basketball, track, and baseball, there was no greater condemnation. In stony silence later that evening, the elder Gaines sat down and ate his supper. Few words were exchanged, few words had to be exchanged, until he called his son into the backyard of their home.

  He told Gary that if he couldn’t be any tougher, he might as well not play. Suddenly he ordered his son into a stance and told him to fire off and start blocking. Over and over, Gary fired off into his father, who was much stronger than he was. Over and over. Then he tackled his father, and then his father tackled him. Over and over, with tears streaming down his face, scared that his father was going to hurt him, which he never would have, his mother listening to the painful commotion but not daring to interfere, because this clearly was a rite of passage between father and son.

  Almost thirty years later, Gary Gaines recalled the backyard incident in his office one day with a sheepish half-smile on his face, describing the “bawlin’ and a-squallin’” that had gone on as he tried, without success, to tackle his father. Looking back on it, it was the one memory of his youth he remembered above all others, although he wasn’t even sure if his father had any recollection of it at all. But he did.

  “I did it because I wanted the kid to be the best he could possibly be and I didn’t want anyone to make the remark that he was shirking his responsibilities,” he said. “If he didn’t put out, he might as well not play.”

  If there had been a motto for Gary Gaines’s life, that would have been it. It had always gotten him through, always enabled him to succeed, always given him a certain special edge.

  Except now, as he left the serenity of the Concho Valley and headed for the Convoy.

  Gaines pulled slowly into the driveway and seemed a bit taken aback. “Too many cars,” he said. “I don’t like this.”

  Two sheriff ’s cars from Midland were parked in front with their lights off, there just in case the location of the coin toss had leaked out and crowd control was needed. Gaines could stomach the police cars, but he wasn’t necessarily prepared for the towering antenna rising up from the KMID-TV van.

  The television station, recognizing the importance of the event for the community, had decided to broadcast it live even though it would not take place until after one in the morning. The last time it had broadcast a local event live at such an hour had been when a little girl named Jessica McClure was rescued from an abandoned well.

  Inside the Convoy, cigarette smoke mingled with fumes of grease from the back-room grill to create a filmy substance that hung near the ceiling like a patch of stubborn fog. Gaines walked inside the restaurant and immediately went to the back, past the red and yellow leather stools that ran down along the white countertop like pieces in a checker game. He talked quietly with Wilkins, who was so miserably nervous he had become virtually mute, and Wilkins’s wife, who wore a little pin that had a picture of their son Stan in his football jersey. At the other end of the room, Gaines’s eternal nemesis, Earl Miller, and several assistant coaches from Midland Lee sat on chairs with the inscrutable look of Buddhas. They glanced up at their adversaries but didn’t say anything.

  Gaines was pale and sallow-looking. Away from the cocoon of the car with those velvety songs and that meandering chatter, little beads of sweat began to form on his forehead. He fumbled with the handle of a pinball machine in the darkness of the game room, his liquid eyes as yearning and sincere as those of a puppy.

  A little after one-fifteen the third coach to participate, Midland High’s Doug McCutchen, arrived from Abilene. He was a roly-poly man, his stomach hanging amply over the bright purple shirt he wore.

  The three coaches moved to the front of the restaurant and sat in little yellow chairs. The glare of the television lights immediately bore down on them, making the bags and circles around their eyes even more noticeable. Surrounding them in a hushed, solemn circle were reporters from television stations and radio stations and the two local papers. The men in the white cowboy hats looked up momentarily from their half-eaten steak fingers, trying to figure out what was going on in a place where excitement usually meant not getting charged for an extra cup of coffee, why all these hot lights were on at one in the morning when the world was supposed to be asleep unless you drove a truck for a living, and why three grown men were now standing in the middle of the room solemnly listening to meticulous instructions on how to throw a coin and how it had to hit the dropped ceiling or it wouldn’t be considered a valid throw. They stared back down again and returned to inspecting their food.

  No one would have believed it anyway.

  Miller was on the left. Gaines, feeling nothing but a numbness inside, was in the center. McCutchen, wearing a white cap that said bulldogs on it, was on the right. He had a look of sad bemusement on his face, as if to acknowledge that no job in the world was stranger than that of a high school football coach.

  “Good evening, ladies and gentlemen,” Big Two News sports anchor Skip Baldwin said in a hushed voice at 1:19 A.M. to begin the station’s live coverage. “Welcome to an undisclosed location.”

  McCutchen held in his hand a 1922 silver dollar that he had gotten from a friend. He claimed it had been successful in eleven straight prior coin tosses. Miller used a quarter that he had gotten from a player. He claimed that the player had told him, “Use this and we win.” Gaines reached into the back pocket of his pants and fumbled for a 1969 nickel. He claimed nothing about it at all.

  “Who’s gonna caaalll it, caaaaallll it, Gareeee,” barked Miller.

  “One, two, three, go,” said Gaines. They lifted their arms stiffly in the air with the same awkward motion of a bride reluctantly throwing her bouquet.

  The coins flew to the ceiling, then ricocheted and spun around the room before landing on various parts of the red tile floor with tiny pings. Miller did a little skip to get out of the w
ay of his quarter, which landed under a red leather booth against a wall.

  Gaines’s nickel took off from the ceiling at a forty-five-degree angle and ended up toward the back of the room under a camera tripod.

  McCutchen’s silver dollar landed smack in the middle of the room.

  For several seconds there was silence as a dozen pairs of eyes frantically darted back and forth trying to pick up the outlines of the three metal objects.

  “Heads,” said Miller, pointing to McCutchen’s coin.

  Another voice said that Miller’s own coin had turned up heads as well.

  Now it was up to Gaines.

  He went slowly to look for his nickel, as if he really wasn’t sure that he wanted to see what it was. His hair was matted with sweat and he walked on the tips of his toes.

  If the nickel came up tails, Permian was out of the playoffs, and the chorus of complaints and criticism against him would only intensify to the point that it might become unbearable for his family to remain in town. If it came up heads, it simply meant that the three men would have to line up in a row and make jackasses of themselves once again in front of the live television cameras.

  Gaines bent down to find his nickel.

  Perhaps for the first time in history, not the single clatter of a fork nor the clink of a coffee cup against a saucer nor the weary command of “Check please” to a bleary-eyed waitress could be heard inside the Convoy restaurant. Gaines finally saw it, wedged up against the tripod.

  “Heads,” he said in a loud voice.

  It was a dead heat. They would have to do it again.

  Skip Baldwin neatly summarized the action so far for viewers. “We got three . . .” But then he hesitated and didn’t quite finish the sentence.

  “Is that a heads on this one?” he said, gesturing toward the silver dollar in the middle belonging to McCutchen of Midland High.

  “What is thaaat, tails? Thaaaat’s tails, ain’t it?” chimed in Miller, who looked ready to snap someone’s neck.

  McCutchen walked to the center of the room and slowly bent down to pick up his silver dollar. He looked at it momentarily, as if the deep sorrow of his gaze would somehow change what he saw. And out of his mouth came two words, spoken with the tone of a child sadly confessing to something that he had hoped and prayed would go unnoticed.

  “That’s tails,” he whispered.

  He was the odd man out.

  “So it’s Permian and Midland Lee in the playoffs,” said Baldwin in a reverential whisper. “Midland High will not be going.”

  Gaines, still quiet and subdued, shook Miller’s hand and then gave McCutchen a hug. He flashed a small smile and that was all.

  “Congratulations,” said McCutchen.

  “Man, a cruel way to do it,” replied Gaines.

  For the next ten minutes he patiently answered questions from television, radio, and newspaper reporters, as if he had just become the second man in history to throw a perfect game in the World Series. He left the Convoy carefully and circumspectly, as if he was exiting a wake.

  The second he got outside, he started scampering to the car with the speed of a little boy going to open his birthday presents. He took off like a madman, doing eighty-five down Highway 80 without being aware of it, giggling and grinning, and had you been next to the car at that very moment you would have heard a grown man yell something that you didn’t think grown men ever yelled, unless they had grown up in Crane:

  “Hot diggety dog!”

  At about two-twenty in the morning, the members of the Permian team arrived by bus from San Angelo at the field house. They had listened to the coin toss on the radio (KCRS had broadcast it live as well), so they already knew the outcome.

  There were hugs and bear-sized claps on the backs of letter jackets that reverberated like yells in a tunnel. The season was still alive, the hope renewed of donning jackets with wonderful white patches saying state champions, jackets that would have everything on them except flashing markers.

  Twenty minutes later, members of the Midland High team arrived home by bus from Abilene. They too knew the outcome of the coin toss before they arrived.

  “I told you that we had no control over a coin flip,” McCutchen said to his players. “I wish I could change the way things are, but I can’t. It was out of our hands.

  “I’m proud of each and every one of you,” he said. As he tried to console them, there came a sound of high school football as familiar as the cheering, as familiar as the unabashed blare of the band, as familiar as the savage crash of pad against pad.

  It was the sound of teenage boys weeping uncontrollably over a segment of their lives that they knew had just ended forever.

  II

  As all the commotion unfolded, Boobie Miles lay at home. He had officially quit the team earlier in the week, figuring it was better to undergo the knee surgery he needed at some point anyway and try to be ready to play in college rather than spend another hideous Friday night of his life languishing on the bench. When the doctor opened the knee up he discovered that Boobie had torn the anterior cruciate ligament. It seemed remarkable that he had been able to come back to play any games at all, since it was this ligament that prevented the lower leg from shifting forward and made it possible for a football player to plant his foot and cut.

  Trapper thought it might take Boobie as long as two years to rehabilitate, and he still didn’t know anyone who had ever come back 100 percent from it. The doctor had put in a replacement ligament, but it was hard to construct one that could handle the natural stress caused by the constant starting and stopping of running with the football. And the magic speed that had made Boobie so spectacular would be gone for sure.

  By the time he got out of the hospital the town had come alive again, like the miraculous re-blooming of a withered desert flower that all but a handful had given up for dead. There was no more talk of Gaines’s getting fired, no more for sale signs on his lawn, no more pumpkins smashed into his car, no more petitions passed around. The crowd that hung around the practice field was up and smiling again. People were making plans to go to Amarillo to face the Tascosa Rebels in the first round of the playoffs, and they knew in their hearts that by the middle of December they would be making plans to go to the great mecca to the east, Texas Stadium, to watch their boys in the state championship. Goin’ to State was in the hearts and minds of everyone again, still at the center of the universe.

  Except for Boobie. Football didn’t entice or thrill him anymore. It just taunted him.

  Football . . .

  He couldn’t stand the word now. Everything in his life reduced to a series of qualifying statements—could have done this, would have done that, might have been this, should have been that . . .

  Are you gonna play college football?

  It seemed as though everywhere he went there it came again, that awful question sounding like a nasty cackle as the wondrous universes of Nebraska and Oklahoma and Arkansas and Houston spun away from his touch. They were gone now, on to other specimens, and no amount of hoping and praying and wishing would ever get them back.

  “Everywhere I went, everybody was askin’ me, ‘Are you gonna play college football?’ Every time someone said football, I couldn’t take it.”

  He came from a religious home and he believed in the lessons of the Lord. “Everything was goin’ so good and he took it away from me just like that,” said Boobie. There must have been a reason for it, an explanation.

  But what was it? What on earth was it? And who was he anymore, besides a teenage kid who three months before had been beatified with a halo of invincibility and now was being laughed at and scorned because it was somehow his fault that his football skills were as fragile as the flesh of his knee?

  “It’s hard for me to feel sorry for someone who already shit in his bed,” said Trapper, convinced that Boobie had been nothing but a quitter even before the surgery.

  “The sad part is, there are thousands of Boobies all over this worl
d,” said Gaines. “A lot of them don’t have a chance, welfare cases. He had several. He had a chance to fight back and he threw up his skirt.”

  On the practice field, a trio of men gathered one afternoon to joke about his plight. One of them suggested that maybe it was best for Boobie just to kill himself since he didn’t have football anymore.

  “No,” one of them objected. “When a horse pulls up lame, you don’t waste a bullet on him.” There was unrestrained laughter and the three enjoyed the analogy of comparing Boobie to an animal. It was repeated.

  “You don’t waste a bullet on a horse.”

  Only Nate Hearne had a different perspective on it all. His struggle to keep Boobie on the team when he had tried to walk out the door during halftime against the Rebels wasn’t some act. He understood the psychological pain Boobie was going through, how unimaginably hard it was to sit there and watch someone else perform with brilliance a role that had once been his. He understood Boobie for what he was, a kid who had been through so much in his life that just to be standing in one piece was a terrific accomplishment. But he also understood the world of high school football: when Boobie got hurt, he became obsolete.

  “He needed special, special, special attention, but he wasn’t going to get it because he wasn’t healthy,” Hearne said. “He was expendable because we had a heck of a running back.”

  It was as simple as that.

  When Boobie came home from the hospital, everyone was an enemy, an adversary, a contributor to the wreck of his senior year. Late that Saturday night, he and his uncle began to argue with one another in their home on the Southside of town. They traded words, their shouts echoing through the tiny rooms. There was a flurry of accusations, both of them lost in the misery of what wasn’t and the painful reality of what was, Boobie feverish, despondent, with a puffed-up knee that no longer contained the God-given gift of speed as sweet as the wind, L.V. heartsick at how all that work, all those attempts to mold his nephew into the next winner of the Heisman, all those hours spent teaching him the spins and the jukes and the angles for the corner, had ended up like this.