Friday Night Lights

by H. G. Bissinger

  By the time the Carter Cowboys were scheduled to face the Marshall Mavericks in the quarterfinals, the hearing hadn’t ended. Carter went ahead and played Marshall, who was undefeated and ranked tenth in the country. Blessed with a certain magic at this point, the Cowboys won on a touchdown pass in the final three seconds, 22-18.

  That put them into the semifinals against the magic of Mojo.

  As the contest approached, it didn’t seem as if Permian and Carter were playing a football game at all, but were representing two vast constituencies desperately intent on bludgeoning each other, one exclusively black, the other exclusively white.

  To whites across the state of Texas, Dallas Carter was a no-good bunch of cheaters who didn’t deserve the honor of playing for a state championship. What else could you expect from a bunch of niggers whose idea of passing a course was showing up for class? To blacks, Dallas Carter was being persecuted by whites who did not want to witness a black school with black players and black fans go to State and win it. What else could you expect from a bunch of racist red-necks who couldn’t stand the fact that the best damn team in the state of Texas didn’t have a white starter on it?

  In any playoff contest there were always several issues that had to be negotiated before the game. They were normally taken care of over the phone, but that proved impossible in this case. Instead, Permian and Carter agreed to a sit-down at the Midland airport the Sunday before the game.

  Four members representing Carter flew into town, where five members representing Permian were waiting to meet them. With the suspicion of warring Mafia families, they exchanged bloodless greetings. Then they moved to the back room of the coffee shop where they could have some privacy and try to resolve the various issues associated with playing high school football in this particular instance—money, where the fans should sit to minimize possible outbreaks of violence, how many officials should be black and how many white.

  They first tried to settle the thorny question of where to hold the game. One possible option was for each side to agree on a neutral site. Another was for each side to pick a mutually agreeable “home site” and then flip a coin for it.

  Carter initially picked Texas Stadium as its home site. “What would it take you to come to Texas Stadium?” asked Carter coach Freddie James.

  “Sixteen,” replied Wilkins, the athletic director for the county. He wanted $16,000 up front to defray transportation costs, which included a chartered jet for the team and hotel expenses the night before the game as well as the costs of travel for the band and Pepettes.

  Permian in turn picked Ratliff Stadium as its home site. The Carter contingent said it would only consider playing there if the Permian band, Pepettes, and student section were moved from their normal location on the visitor’s side to the home side. It said the move was necessary because of a concern that noise from the Permian band would distract the Carter coaches when they tried to talk to their players. But a few minutes later they indicated it wasn’t noise from the band they were worried about at all, but the ramifications of putting white supporters of Permian next to black supporters of Carter.

  Permian principal Jerald McClary said police were always on duty at the stadium to handle any crowd control problems. Bringing in the police, the Carter contingent responded, would only make the situation worse.

  “We’ve got an all-black community,” said Loie Harris, a representative from the Dallas school district athletic director’s office negotiating for Carter. “You send police over there and it says—”

  “You don’t want police over there or what?” snapped Wilkins, his lower jaw throbbing up and down, those bottomless eyes shooting off darts.

  “We have a lot of problems we don’t want to get into this table,” she reiterated. “It’s just different. We have a different community than you-all have.”

  Wilkins then asked Carter how many tickets they wanted set aside if the game was held in Odessa.

  Russeau, the Carter principal, sat up in his chair and abruptly gave the answer.

  “Two thousand student, six thousand adult,” he said.

  Wilkins considered the request ridiculous. There was no way that many people from Dallas would come to a football game 350 miles away in Odessa, and he did not want to tie up such a large number of tickets. The only people who traveled such long distances to games in massive numbers were Permian fans.

  “There’s no way you’ll sell six thousand,” he told Russeau in a tone that was terse and scoffing.

  Russeau shifted in his chair and became slightly indignant. “You don’t understand the gravity of what’s been going on in this community and we do,” he said.

  “It isn’t just the Carter community, it’s the whole black community,” added Harris.

  “The issue’s not football anyway,” said Russeau.

  “It’s the attack on the black community all over Dallas,” said Harris. “The football game is just a catalyst.”

  The negotiations became more and more tense, and the Carter contingent changed its mind. Forget the thought of ever playing in Texas Stadium in the white suburb of Irving. Think now about playing in the Cotton Bowl, deep in the heart of Dallas. That was Carter’s new choice for a home site if it came down to a coin toss.

  The Permian side was momentarily stunned. Even Wilkins became speechless, and his face smoldered to a deep red.

  The Cotton Bowl.

  Of all the places Permian wanted to play the Carter Cowboys, the Cotton Bowl was the last. Its location, a little east of downtown Dallas, made it a magnet for the city’s black community. The place would be crawling with them.

  “If it’s the Cotton Bowl, they’ll have the whole black community,” said Permian assistant Hollingshead in a private meeting out of earshot of the Carter contingent.

  The two sides finally agreed to play the game at a neutral site in Austin at Memorial Stadium of the University of Texas. In the meantime, both coaches agreed that a crew from San Antonio would officiate the game, with the stipulation that at least two of the officials be black.

  When Harris, jotting down conditions of the game that would have to be written into the contract, heard that, she blanched a bit. God forbid there was any hint, on paper at least, that race had been a factor in the negotiations.

  “Let’s not say black,” said Harris. “Let’s say mixed ethnic crew.”

  Finally, the only thing left to decide was the color of the teams’ uniforms. The Carter Cowboys had their sacred red. The Permian Panthers had their sacred black. But someone had to wear an away uniform, and in this case, Permian didn’t mind at all giving up black. It wasn’t a problem.

  They would just wear white instead.

  IV

  If a curious spectator had walked into courtroom 509 in the Travis County Courthouse in Austin the next day without knowing a single detail of the case, it would not have mattered. One look at the charged, tense atmosphere would have made the facts abundantly clear.

  Obviously, the man on the stand with the soft voice and gray hair had gone berserk. He had undoubtedly shot someone in a psychotic rage, maybe a child, maybe a cop, maybe more than one person. That would explain the jammed courtroom and why it was almost impossible to find a seat. That would explain the presence of half a dozen lawyers inside the room solemnly passing documents back and forth to one another, which they culled from the filled cartons surrounding them. That would explain the way he was being grilled on the stand, ominously reminded by the angry lawyer in front of him that he was under oath, that what he was saying today was different from what he had said previously.

  His denial of his heinous crime would explain the presence of television and newspaper reporters from Dallas and Austin and the Associated Press furiously scribbling down his every word. He was apparently a teacher, so he must have killed someone in his classroom. That would explain why Dallas school superintendent Edwards was there in the front row grimly listening to every word with obvious discomfort. That would explain
why Texas commissioner of education Kirby was there. That would explain why Dallas school board member Yvonne Ewell was there. That would explain why parents of some of the victims were there, having gotten up in the wee hours of the morning to make the two-hundred-mile drive from Dallas to Austin.

  Clearly, the man on the stand had done something so awful, so abhorrent, that it must be a death penalty case. But if the curious spectator stayed around long enough, it would have become evident that the crime of the man on the witness stand had nothing to do with murder. It had nothing to do with rape or robbery or assault or even a parking ticket.

  It had to do with a grade in algebra II.

  And the curious spectator would have found that the man on the stand wasn’t a murderer, or a child molester, or even a parking violation scoff-law who had taken a power saw to a boot.

  He was Will Bates the math teacher, and his crime had been giving a flunking grade to a Carter Cowboy football player who had a 49 average on his tests, had missed at least one class to watch football films, and hadn’t tried to do all his homework.

  The hearing reached absurd, numbing proportions as lawyers tried to ascertain Edwards’s algebra grade in a court of law. Yvonne Ewell sat and tried to calculate the grade as she listened to hour after hour of testimony from Bates and Russeau and others. But Ewell gave up. There were just too many numbers—daily grades, weekly grades, grades for participation, grades for homework, grades for tests—all part of the bewildering Carter grading system under the School Improvement Plan. The transfer from one teacher to another didn’t help either. Nor did the account of the meeting between Bates and Carter Cowboys defensive coordinator Arvis Vonner in which they sat down and figured out all the grades that Gary could possibly merit under the School Improvement Plan, as if the grade was little more than a tool of barter.

  It was too numbing to try to figure out the grade; too exhausting. What did become clear was that, given the Carter grading plan, it was possible to give Gary Edwards just about any grade. He could have passed. He could have flunked. Just about the only question that wasn’t asked during the hearing was whether Gary had actually learned any algebra or not. To Yvonne Ewell that was a salient issue, but no one seemed the slightest bit interested in it.

  “This case has taught me two things,” said Judge Davis in rendering his decision. “First, that grading is not an exact science. Second, this case has demonstrated amply the absurdity of setting grades by public hearing.”

  But Davis ruled that Carter had acted responsibly in determining Edwards’s grade and that education commissioner Kirby had no standing to determine that Edwards was ineligible. Kirby’s purview, said Davis, should be educational policy, not the setting of individual grades.

  “The commissioner should have been looking at: did the school act responsibly? He ought not to be in the business of establishing an individual grade in an individual six weeks because he will be overwhelmed by students who don’t like the grade they got.”

  Carter, Judge Davis ruled, would stay in the playoffs. The game against Permian would go on as scheduled.

  There were tears and hugs by Carter supporters at the decision, and in the aftermath, many who supported Carter and the Dallas school district couldn’t help but believe that the whole issue had been racially motivated.

  “I think the issue of race is paramount in it,” said Ewell. “If we had a white superintendent, the commissioner never would have done such a thing. I think race was an essential component in the whole procedure.”

  But Kirby said his involvement in the case had nothing to do with race, or wanting to get Carter or the Dallas school district. Instead he described Russeau’s changing of Edwards’s grade as a “blatant” example of grade-fixing to make sure that a football team would be eligible for the playoffs. And he said he entered the case not because he was interested in determining the grade of an individual student, but because Russeau and Carter had made a travesty of the no-pass, no-play rule.

  It was hogwash, he said, that this case had anything to do with preserving local control of school districts. It had to do with one thing and one thing only: keeping the Carter Cowboys in the hunt for the state championship.

  “We have a song down here that says Bob Wills is still the king,” Kirby said. “Well, this decision today says football is still the king, at least in the [Dallas Independent School District].”

  Even Ewell, who did see the court decision as an important victory for local control of schools, couldn’t help but feel overwhelmed by it all.

  Had it involved anything else—the educational rights of a student who was a writer, or a poet, or a merit scholar—Ewell acknowledged that “it would never have gone to court. It would not have gone to court. It would not have been up for debate. We got our goals skewed. That’s why I think schools are in a dilemma all over the United States.

  “I just hope we can carry that enthusiasm to the more substantive issues, particularly those schools which serve children of color,” she said. “I’m afraid that when it’s over, it will be over and it will be back to business as usual, and that would be a tragedy.”

  Out of the whole saga, there was one substantive change that was made rather quickly.

  Will Bates was drummed out of Carter and reassigned to teach industrial arts in a middle school. He was given an unsatisfactory evaluation rating, placed on probation for a year, and had his salary frozen. And, of course, he was forbidden to teach math to prevent further threats to the sanctity of football.

  Fervent supporters of the Cowboys, realizing, perhaps, the unseemliness of going to court and shelling out thousands of dollars on legal fees over high school football, said the victory before Judge Davis could serve as a great civics lesson for black kids that democracy does work.

  But the victory in court, instead of inspiring faith in the system, seemed to inspire the exact opposite. It seemed to fuel the belief of certain Carter Cowboys to a greater degree than ever that whatever they did, there would always be someone to rally around them and protect them, to provide them with a safety net that would avert the consequences of any act. If anything, some of the Carter Cowboys felt more than ever that there was something sacred about them, something invincible.

  With the court proceedings out of the way, with Gary Edwards’s passing grade in algebra sealed in cement by a state district court judge, the Carter Cowboys were on their way to State with messianic fervor, ordained and blessed not only inside the school, as they always had been, but now by the entire black community of Dallas.

  Three hundred and fifty miles to the west, there was no need to find a catalyst for the zeal that could be created by a winning high school football team. Such zeal was firmly in place, just as it had been for the past sixty years.

  “Between the referees’ whistles, I guarantee you, we’ll get after their ass,” Gaines told his players several days before the two kingdoms would face each other for the right to go to State. “If you’re not up to it, we’ll find a place for you somewhere else.”

  No one came forward.

  (16)

  FIELD OF DREAMS

  I

  As a child, Mike Winchell had dreamed of it, right down to the shoelaces he wore. And now he was here in that mystical place, the huge oval Memorial Stadium at the University of Texas, with those smooth flanks of concrete curving to the sky.

  During their road trips across Texas together, his brother Joe Bill had always made a point of showing Mike the great football baronies of Texas—Texas A & M, the University of Texas, Baylor. “Hey, if you work hard, you can go here,” Joe Bill told him. Of all those trips, and all those schools, it was the University of Texas that had made the greatest impression. He wore shoelaces with little orange Longhorns on them. He fought for its honor when other kids dared to sully it.

  Joe Bill had first taken him to Memorial Stadium in 1981. They had gone there other times since then, and Joe Bill remembered the time Mike got to try on the helmet of one of the Lo
nghorn players. When Mike was a junior at Permian, his brother took him to meet David McWilliams, the Texas head coach, and an assistant later took Mike into the field house and showed him the weight room.

  “That’s all he wanted to do,” said Joe Bill, “was go to Texas.”

  And now he was in that field house again, not as some gawking, starry-eyed kid, but as a football player, preparing for the semifinal game against the Carter Cowboys.

  Since the beginning of December, college recruiters had been coming to Permian to see who might be worth running after. They were interested in Ivory Christian, and they were particularly interested in two other black players who were only juniors, Hill and Comer, because it was never too early to start laying the foundations. When Gaines spoke to them, he also tried to steer them in Winchell’s direction.

  There was no doubt that Winchell had exceeded all expectations. As a senior he had come into his own. After fourteen games, he had completed 97 of 203 passes for 1,881 yards, twenty-four touchdowns, and only five interceptions. And there were moments when he had thrown the ball so exquisitely, with such a soft, intangible touch, that it was hard to believe he couldn’t make a contribution somewhere.

  Beyond the statistics, Gaines also thought they would never find a player who was more dedicated or disciplined. He was a one-in-a-thousand kid who would work tirelessly on the football field and then go back to the dorm to work tirelessly on his homework, a kid who actually believed that the purpose of an athletic scholarship was not only to play football but also to get an education.

  But football games were not won with noble role models and the cotton candy that college presidents liked to spin out for the media. They were won with kids who had rockets for arms and hydraulic pistons for legs and biceps and triceps and quadriceps that could carry refrigerators home from Sears and cross-eyed looks suggesting that to maim someone was sublime. Mike Winchell wasn’t at all what the college recruiters were looking for, and the fears that had always haunted him were probably right: he wasn’t fast enough, or tall enough. He didn’t possess a good enough arm, and no amount of work was going to make up for that.