Friday Night Lights

by H. G. Bissinger

  “Shit no,” said Don Billingsley when asked if he was going to cut down on the post-party celebrations that night. “I’m gonna party, see how intoxicated I can get and how many rules I can flaunt. That’s my motto.”

  After the game ended, the trophy commemorating the win was held aloft, a golden football mounted on a pedestal. Permian had so many of these by now that there was no longer room for them in the school trophy case, and some of them sat atop the refrigerator in the coaches’ office as ignominiously as empty pop bottles. But there was still something magical about getting one, and dozens of hands reached out to touch it, to feel its smooth, gleaming surface and draw sustenance from it, to keep the wonderful moment going forever, to join the illustrious pantheon of those who had actually made it, who had gone to State. It was during times like this that they suddenly became resurrected again: Bizzell, Shipman, Mann, Hassell, Dale, Hix, Williams . . .

  Their pictures appeared on the Wall of Fame as in a shrine to eternal youth, men who no matter how old they were, no matter what they had done or hadn’t done, whether they had become lawyers or car thieves, whether they were happily married or had the beaten, sucked-in look of divorce, whether they were successful or were still groping to rekindle that indescribable moment when everything was all right and the entire world flickered beneath them with outstretched arms and every man looked jealous and every woman looked like a lover, whether they missed the game beyond their wildest dreams or had come to hate it beyond their wildest dreams, would always, always, be thought of in cleats and pads and a helmet with a P on the side that burned as brightly as the sun.

  II

  He remembered the turning point, as everyone who had ever been there always did.

  “Here’s the pass.”

  On the video Jerry Hix faked to the fullback, dropped back, and hit the tight end for a touchdown.

  “At that point right there, I knew we had ’em.”

  The play had taken place eight years before, five days before Christmas.

  The breathless voices of the announcers came on over the video. He sat on the couch and listened in silence.

  All season long we’ve talked about Jerry Hix to an extent making this Panther team go. . . .

  “Sitting there and watching this, still, it gives me a feeling. . . . Feel kind of odd all over, like you’re down on the field sweating.”

  And Hix scores! From a yard and a half out.

  On the screen he dove into the end zone for the touchdown, impossibly small to be playing football, five eight and 135 pounds. And yet not only was he playing football, he was excelling at it. He was the embodiment of the myth that had made Permian so enormously popular—small, overachieving, white, fearless. Two teammates helped pull him up to his feet like a beaten-up rag doll. On the screen he got up slowly and there was the slight shaking of a fist.

  “I guess I’m reliving.”

  He reached to the coffee table to check his stats. He remembered halftime when Coach Kennedy came in and kicked a trash can across the room with the team down 19-7.

  He knew the plays before they appeared on the screen.

  “We got here and ran thirty trap up the middle. . . . Then we throw the little dunk pass. . . . Try a reverse right here. . . . Two-thirty-six pass. . . . I hit the flanker on this one. . . . I think we ran twenty-nine here, sent the back in motion.”

  He watched the team score to take the lead.

  He watched the defense hold, only to fumble on the very next play.

  “This is a play I hate, I felt like crap when I went to the sidelines. That killed me, I thought I saw the hole inside and it closed up. I went to the sideline and took off my helmet and was damn near in tears.”

  On the screen, the team scored late in the fourth quarter to ice the game for good.

  Everyone knew Permian had done it, achieved one of the great upsets in the modern history of Texas schoolboy sports. They had won the state championship.

  “I’d give anything to go back out there.”

  It was wrong to think that life had been unkind to him. It was just different now from how it had been then. He had a nice house he had gotten on a mortgage repo for $48,000. He had a lovely wife and a lovely baby girl and two adorable stepdaughters. He had run the forty in 4.7 and he was All-State, but because of his size he knew there wasn’t a college in the world that had use for him as a football player. He had gone to the junior college in town, Odessa College, but then left after a year to work full-time at Odessa Builder Supply. He rose to shop foreman and then had quit the previous summer to start his own company, Brazos Door & Hardware. But something was missing, and he wasn’t ashamed to admit that the only way to remember what it was like was to pull out that worn video every month or so. It was a way of getting back there, just as his parents still kept his room filled with memorabilia—a picture of the championship team, a statue of a black panther that he had carefully put back together after it had been broken, a framed article and picture given to him by the booster club, a collage made for him by his Pepette.

  “We were hoarse from screaming and yelling. We didn’t want to leave the field.”

  When he finally did, he remembered dozens of kids calling to him for his chin strap or his mouthpiece or his arm pad or his earpiece, all these kids begging for a piece of Jerry Hix, begging for a piece of the quarterback of the state champions of Texas. It wasn’t a matter of feeling like Roger Staubach, or Terry Bradshaw, or a quarterback who had just won the Super Bowl. It was a matter of their not knowing what Jerry Hix felt at that incredible moment, unless they too had gone to State and won it.

  “I miss it. Like I say, if I could, I’d go back and relive that moment. Nothing can compare. I miss it. I guess that’s why I have season tickets and go to the games. I don’t want to be apart from it.”

  At the public pep rally out at the stadium the Thursday before the quarterfinal showdown against the Arlington Lamar Vikings, Hix stood on the glittering field. About five thousand people were there, and when he came to the microphone to give a short speech they rose and honored him with a standing ovation, because they would be thankful to him forever.

  “There were a lot of people who didn’t think we had much of a chance to win District, let alone a state championship,” Hix told all those loyalists in the stands. “But we believed in ourselves and each other. We believed in our hearts.”

  There were several more introductions of former players that night and there were dozens more who would have gotten the same adulation, the same standing ovations for deeds done five or ten or fifteen years ago, still remembered by everyone as if they hadn’t changed a single bit.

  They were players like Joe Bob Bizzell, the Golden Boy of golden boys, the one against whom all others were measured. Said one former classmate of him with dreamy reverence as he remembered Joe Bob’s place and time in high school in the early seventies, “You couldn’t touch ’im.” He had been All-State three years, making it as a sophomore, as a junior, and then both ways at receiver and defensive back as a senior. No one else at Permian had ever done that and no one had an instinct for the ball like Joe Bob Bizzell, something that rose beyond a rare gift, a natural talent, and had become a very part of him. “Before they even snapped the ball, I knew what play they were going to run,” he said. “It was weird, but that’s how it was done.”

  He wasn’t big, five seven and 132 pounds, but he had become the Paul Bunyan of Odessa, no story about him too tall, no feat too outlandish. On the edge of the practice field, boosters gently argued with one another over how many people he had knocked out on a single play. One booster pegged it at one. Another said two. Another said three. They smiled as they recalled the glory of Joe Bob Bizzell, and it was impossible not to think of the little picture of him on the Wall of Fame in which he was adorable-looking, his easygoing smile seeming to imply that he knew exactly where his life was headed.

  Despite his size, he had been too good a prospect to pass up. He got heavily recruit
ed and ended up going to the University of Texas in 1973 when the legendary Darrell Royal was still the coach. Toward the end of his senior year at Permian he had had an accident in the school parking lot when he drove his motorcycle while drunk and skidded. He lost a lot of blood and skin on the left side of his face and the left shoulder and left knee and Darrell Royal called him up, of course, to see if he could still play and when he said he could, everything was okay again.

  He had played for Texas as a freshman on a team that went to the Cotton Bowl and had on it two future big-time pros, Doug English and Raymond Clayborn. In a Thanksgiving day rout of Texas A & M, he intercepted two passes that helped set up scores. In a 19-3 Cotton Bowl loss to Nebraska, he started at safety and was in on nine tackles and intercepted a pass. Darrell Royal bragged about him on national television, and Joe Bob Bizzell seemed to have it made until the following fall, when Raymond Clayborn, who was faster and bigger than Joe Bob Bizzell was or ever would be, became the starting safety. Shortly afterward, campus police stopped Joe Bob in his car and found a marijuana pipe. Darrell Royal responded by kicking him off the team two days before the season opener against Boston College. Raymond Clayborn returned a touchdown ninety-five yards for a score in that game, indicating that when it came to football, Darrell Royal had shrewdly gauged the expendability of Joe Bob Bizzell.

  He had come back to the team in 1975 and returned a kickoff fifty yards in the Bluebonnet Bowl against Colorado. But it was too late by then for Joe Bob ever to get on the right track again. He was arrested by campus police for public intoxication and expelled from school for a year in 1976. When he tried to come back to play football in 1977, the coach then, Fred Akers, told Bizzell he didn’t want him back. He thought about transferring to North Texas State, or to Hawaii, but it got complicated and hopeless.

  “My life’s never been the same since,” said Joe Bob Bizzell one afternoon day fourteen years later of that moment when Darrell Royal had told him he was through and cut off his lifeline because of a marijuana pipe. “It ruined my career. I thought I was going to play football. I was good at football. It just changed my life.”

  His face bore little resemblance to the one on the Wall of Fame, with little webbed feet around a pair of eyes that looked like brittle coals. He had a drooping, saggy mustache and black hair that fell below the neck. He looked weary and exhausted and he gave off a deep laugh every now and then that came out of nowhere. He was home watching his kids and a “Ghostbusters” cartoon wafted over the television.

  Hold your fire, Peter. I think he wants to talk.

  He worked as a production operator, which was a fancy name for a pumper, for Amoco over in the North Cowden field west of town. The work was hot and dry and as monotonous as the maddening, slowpoke motion of the pumpjacks themselves. He checked them to make sure they worked correctly. Although his name was a household word among Permian fans, he didn’t have season tickets anymore. Although he had been on a state championship team, he never saw any of his old teammates, nor did he ever hear from them. Although just about everyone in town knew his name, he almost never went out because it was hard to find a babysitter, which was all right because he loved his wife and three boys. But there was also a limited amount he could do with them.

  The Texas Longhorns had washed their hands of him and let him go after they found someone who played safety better than he ever could, but he still carried the legacy of the Longhorns with him.

  He felt it during the mornings when he couldn’t bend over to tie his shoes. He felt it when it became painfully difficult to throw a ball. He felt it when he had to stop playing flag football because his body couldn’t take it.

  Bizzell traced the problem to his freshman year at Texas. He had been playing on the freshman team and was hit head-on in a game against Baylor. He couldn’t walk for three days because of pain in his back. And then he was called up to the varsity. He showed up in street clothes, and Bizzell said it was made clear to him that if he didn’t make good on this opportunity, he could go back down to the freshman team and rot there for the rest of his life. He said he was fitted in a corset and played in it all year on the presumption it was a sprain. But he said a doctor had looked at his back recently and told him he needed fusion surgery if he wanted it to get better.

  “I’ve learned to live with it, I know that,” said Joe Bob Bizzell. “My wife don’t like that, but shit, I’m not gonna get cut on.” In the meantime, he had finally come to grips with what had happened in his life and what hadn’t. But it had taken a painfully long time, and it wasn’t until the year before that he had finally explained it all to his wife after she repeatedly asked him what was wrong, what was eating away at him.

  He had cried when Darrell Royal told him he was kicking him off the team. Football was his identity, his life, the one and only thing people knew him for. “That’s all I knew how to do was football,” said Joe Bob Bizzell, the Golden Boy of golden boys. “It had been my life.”

  He felt he had been used as an example, and it was hard for him to see the evils of having a marijuana pipe when you could purchase them all over Austin. There had been other players on the team who smoked dope and did drugs. But there were those who got away with it because of who they were, and those who did not.

  Had he been given the chance, he believed that he could have had a career like the one he had had at Permian. After that he believed he would have had a shot at the pros. He even tried to walk on with the Cowboys in 1978, but they told him he was too slow and didn’t bother to give him a tryout.

  “I wish I could have had an opportunity to play pro. Not a ten- or thirteen-year-old career, but maybe one or two years . . . and maybe get a different job.”

  At Permian it had been victory after victory. It was one exciting week after another, and the world seemed only to consist of cheers and praise and glory and rules that had no meaning. He made twenty-odd interceptions his sophomore year and in one game alone against Abilene Cooper took down five. It was hard sometimes not to wish those days were back because there seemed something so old-fashioned, so wholesome, so simple and unfettered about them. It had all fallen apart after that, and though he wished it had turned out differently, he wasn’t so much embittered by it as hurt.

  “I’d do it all over again,” he said. He looked up with those sad eyes and then came the deep laugh out of nowhere that didn’t sound like a laugh at all, rising over the scratchy rattle of “Ghostbusters” on the television screen.

  Daniel Justis would have been another to receive a standing ovation at the pep rally that night. He was All-State and had also gone to State. But Justis hated the game of football and wanted his son to do the same and had programmed him to think that anyone who played it was a fool.

  “I’m gonna have a negative influence on him,” said Justis. “If he wants to play, I’m going to steer him into every other sport. I don’t think he has to play football to get an education. He doesn’t have to play football to be somebody or not. Maybe in my mind, I didn’t think I was anybody unless I played football.”

  He was the first to admit that football had helped him become a dentist. It was also a nice drawing card for his practice since just about everyone knew he had been the star running back on a Permian team that went to the finals in 1970. It was hard to forget, with the messages on the sign of Temple Baptist that said GIVE ARLINGTON “JUSTIS,” NOT MERCY or the banner headline in Pearl Harbor black that said JUSTIS FOR PERMIAN, 22-19. But he still hated the game.

  As he told it, it may have been because of the arthritis in both hips or the one arm that was shorter than the other or the constant pain in his legs. It may have been because of the two separated shoulders. It may have been because he “threw up and shit all over the place” before games with the realization that “you’re going out on the field and getting the shit knocked out of you.” It may have been because of the coach in ninth grade who thought he was faking a broken arm and wouldn’t let him leave the practice field until the
fluid built up.

  But it also may have been, as his wife Janet suggested, that despite how much he hated it, or tried to hate it, he couldn’t get it out of his blood, and he missed the adulation and attention, missed the woman in Dallas who had commissioned a black panther statue for him, missed the Pearl Harbor-black headlines, missed the church-sign slogans.

  “You live in a fairy tale for that one year of your life,” said his wife. “You’re worshiped, and that year is over and you’re like anyone else.

  “We all feel that our husbands have been unhappier with everything after they got out of it. You see your name up in lights and people follow you and they put your name in the newspaper and then all of a sudden the season is over. . . .”

  It was a phenomenon that Trapper had seen dozens of times before, a kid so caught up in it all that there was no room for anything else, another kid for whom nothing in life would ever be so glorious, so fulfilling as playing high school football. Trapper didn’t see the game as being a savior for these kids. He saw it as “the kiss of death.”

  “These kids think they’re invincible. They put that P on their helmet and that black and white, they think nobody can kick their ass. It doesn’t matter what state you’re from, how many players you got on your team.

  “They’re popular. They’re in very hot demand, like a hot rock group. No matter what they do, it’s a hit. Everything they do is right. And they just can’t find that again. What other job can they find that has that glamour?

  “What’s the substitute? Find the substitute for it. The only consequence of it is a mentally crippling disease for the rest of your life.”

  Trapper knew the amount of sacrifice that kids went through to be Permian football players, how they were willing to play, with the blessing of their parents, with broken feet and broken ankles and broken wrists.