Friday Night Lights

by H. G. Bissinger

  Permian had regained the lead, 9-7.

  The defense played with even more fire, swarming, running for their lives. A reverse snuffed out perfectly by Ivory Christian for no gain. Billy Steen, who bore no resemblance whatever to a football player but had become one through sheer will, fighting off an offensive lineman four inches taller and fifty pounds heavier to sack the quarterback. Felipe Davila looping around a lineman thirty-five pounds heavier than he was to force the quarterback into an off-target throw. Chad Payne diving to trip up a running back and stop a draw play from going all the way. The Carter offense was fidgety, nervous, rattled. But so was the Permian offense.

  Billingsley on a pitch and immediately smothered by the two All-Americans, Armstead and Evans, for a loss of two. Comer on a pitch, smothered by defensive end Joseph Tips. Evans sacking Winchell and lying on top of him after the play so he could whisper into his ear, let him know that he was a pussy, a motherfucker, a sissy bitch. Hill open for the first down over the middle but the ball floppy and fluttering and out of his reach.

  The third quarter ended with Permian still ahead by two points.

  Carter’s Hall dropped back to pass with a first and ten at the Permian 48. The rain was falling in sheets, and there were puddles all over the field. He threw deep and the ball sliced through Marcus Grant’s fingers and fell to the turf, but Grant deftly cradled the ball in as if he had caught it. Television replays unquestionably showed that the ball had been dropped. But the official in charge of making the call ruled it a completed pass. It gave Carter a twenty-five-yard gain and a first down at the Permian 27. Permian supporters, accurately noting that the official had never been in position to see the play in the first place, later grumbled that he made it the way he did because he was black and favored Carter. Whatever happened, the Cowboys had just gotten a wonderful gift.

  The beat of drums started up from the Carter side. With a second and ten, Hall dropped back to pass. He made a spin move to escape outside linebacker Greg Sweatt on a blitz and then threw a little dump-off pass to fullback David Jones. He got the block he needed and ran untouched down the left sideline for a touchdown. He knelt down to pray afterward in the end zone before several delirious teammates went to pull him up. The extra point was good.

  Carter led 14-9 with eleven minutes left.

  Permian got the ball, stalled, and punted. Carter got the ball, stalled, and punted. Permian got the ball, stalled, and punted. Carter got the ball, stalled, and punted. Permian got the ball at its own 48-yard line.

  There was a minute and fifteen seconds left.

  It had stopped raining and the field glistened under the flood of the lights, looking like an empty skating pond. For a moment everything seemed stopped in time. There was a strange sense of detachment in the air, as if no one was there at all, just these two teams having it out with such relentless bitterness, and the rain and the cold temperatures made everything seem fuzzy and out of place. There was no glory here, no pomp, just the raw-boned sound of bodies crashing into bodies.

  The Permian fans were on their feet, yelling with an urgent poignancy. The season was slipping away, the fabled cry of “State in eighty-eight!” that had been etched on the backs of cars and scribbled in yearbooks a minute away from becoming a failed dream. The rain-soaked hair of the cheerleaders looked lifeless. The band, sitting in an upper corner of the stadium to escape the rain, played its familiar marches, but the music seemed muffled and miles away. And yet there was still the chant.

  “MO-JO! MO-JO! MO-JO! MO-JO!”

  Fingers were crossed. Eyes were raised to the dull gray sky. In the cavernous stadium, the cheers seemed distant, tinny. But still there was hope, because there had to be.

  That was the very point of it all.

  Dale McDougal couldn’t bear the thought of it ending.

  Soaked through, wearing a black jacket with a pin that had a photograph of Jerrod on it in his uniform, she had been on her feet most of the game, cheering, yelling. Mojo magic. Mojo pride. Mojo tradition. It could not fail her now. She couldn’t imagine what she would do if the season was over now. She had built a life around it, a whole routine—the lasagna dinners, the booster club meetings, the practices in the dappled afternoon light with that sweet breeze blowing across, and of course, those wonderful games, so glorious, so exciting, the power of a million stars shining down on Odessa on a Friday night. She knew it had to end sometime, but she wasn’t ready yet, not in this final minute, not for her, not for her son, not for her town.

  “This is the last minute of your life,” said offensive lineman Ronnie Bevers in the huddle. McDougal talked about how hard they had worked. Winchell said little. He refused to look at the clock. He just knew the seconds were ticking away and to look at it would only make the tension worse. Normally the Permian team held hands in the huddle, but Winchell resisted. “Don’t touch me,” he snapped nervously, because he didn’t want to get his own hands any more wet than they already were.

  The first play, a sideline pass to Hill, went for four yards. It was the first pass Winchell had completed the second half, and it eased the pressure a little. The next play, a pitch to Comer, went for seven yards and a first down to the Carter 41. They were in a rhythm now. They could move the ball. They could sense a change in the momentum. It was about to happen like something out of a story-book, like something out of a Greek myth.

  Shawn Crow stood in the rain, wishing he could be out there.

  The year before all these same people dressed in black in the stands had been focused on him, his play in the quarterfinals of the playoffs against Arlington so magical it drew sobs of joy. No one had ever seen anything like it and he would always be remembered because of it, have a tiny place in their hearts and a picture up on the Wall of Fame. But with the herniated disc he had subsequently suffered, he still wasn’t in college yet, and it wasn’t just the herniated disc that football had given him, but the broken leg, the broken arm, the smashed-up thumb.

  He wasn’t sure he had wanted to come to Austin to watch Permian play. It wasn’t his season anymore, it was someone else’s, but he decided to go to the game at the last second. He cheered as hard as anyone and now, in the final minute, he thought about the Arlington game, how Permian had come back from 28-7 to win it when everyone thought the game was over, how he and several others had drawn from deep inside themselves a strength and endurance they never knew they had. And as he watched, he would have given anything to return to that high school field again, to take that ball and lower his helmet and show the remarkable balance that had once made him so invincible.

  The front four of Carter was exhausted and barely charging. Winchell took a quick drop back and hit Hill on the sideline. Hill eluded defensive back Gary Edwards and went out of bounds after a nine-yard gain. Permian had a second and one at the Carter 32 with fifty-six seconds left.

  Gene Ater had been yelling so hard he had already driven away a couple of fans sitting in front of him.

  He was a state district judge when he wasn’t rooting for Permian, and it was he who started every booster club meeting with the hoglike call of “Mojo!” that came out of him like a great spiritual release from all the problems of the world.

  He had come to Odessa from Dallas twenty-seven years before, so he had been in the town long enough to know exactly what it was like, tight-clenched, blue-collar, conservative. He didn’t expect any miracles as a result, but even so, it was hard sometimes not to get discouraged. When the bond issue to renovate the dilapidated civic center failed not once but twice he could not help but wonder if there could ever be any real progress in a place like that.

  But Ater, like thousands of others, found something to fall hopelessly in love with in Odessa, something to keep him going. Maybe it was his playing days as a 135-pound linebacker and guard at Pecos that did it, or maybe it was just a tendency to cling to what was there, but Judge Ater loved these boys playing for Permian as if they were his own children. He knew about their backgrounds. He
knew about their grades. He beamed when he saw them and he cherished the fantastic myth of them, how they never gave up, how size meant nothing to them, how beautifully they played together. Wearing a black sweater, a PERMIAN BOOSTER CLUB jacket, and a MOJO cap, he hadn’t given up in the final minute. He had seen these boys do it before and he knew they could do it now. He tried to ignore the cheers across the way from the Carter fans, cheers that sounded to him “like a bunch of African natives,” and instead yelled as loud as he possibly could.

  “Let’s go, Mojo! . . . Get your blocks, let’s go!”

  Winchell threw incomplete on the second down, the ball slipping off his hands and landing out of bounds. Permian had a third and one at the Carter 32.

  Ken Scates huddled by the radio at his home in Odessa, trying to keep calm.

  He actually had two radios going, one in the bedroom and one in the den so he could walk around and settle himself down and not give his heart any more trouble than it already had. In thirty years, he had never missed one of Permian’s sixty-nine playoff games. But his ride had fallen through that morning and by the time he tried to find another one, everyone had already gone. He was heartbroken over it, but he rooted for the team as if he was there.

  He had moved to West Texas in 1949 from California when the Snyder boom was on and had settled two years later in Odessa. He had hated it when he first got here. He thought it was at the very end of nowhere, filled with honkytonks and little better than the cesspool of Snyder. But it grew on him. There was something about it that touched him, or as his wife Mary put it, “They say when you get the sand in your craw, you never want to leave.” No, it wasn’t very pretty. Yes, it was still pretty much at the end of nowhere, but it had the things he wanted in a hometown—it was simple, friendly, God-fearing, patriotic.

  He had built his own oil field service company. It did wonderfully during the boom, but then he got trapped in the bust. The bank had called in a note he held, and it had been one horrible, humiliating headache after another. He had already developed an ulcer, and then he needed heart bypass surgery. He came to realize that any business in the oil patch was an enormous gamble, even when prices were sky high, and he really wasn’t much of a gambler. He didn’t have the stomach for the constant ups and downs that never let a man truly know where he stood.

  But through it all, he had always had something to fall back on, ever since 1959 when he had gone to that first practice. “I get out to the football field, everything wipes clear in my mind,” he said. He kept all the booster club programs and the newspaper clippings from Dallas. He was a familiar sight on the practice field, sometimes standing by himself, watching in silence as the boys silently shadow-danced across the field, and sometimes in little groups with men as devoted as he was, where the reminiscences came out sweetly and proudly. “You know, there’s not a lot to do in West Texas,” he said. “I’ve made more friends and acquaintances through football than anything.”

  Despite his best attempts to remain calm, he was still as jittery as he could be in the final minute. Over the radio, with the pauses and the strains of the crowd noise, it was hard to tell exactly what was happening. It wasn’t like being there. Yet he knew the Carter Cowboys were about to join the list of those who should have beaten Permian, but like every other team, would succumb to the magic he and ten thousand others had created.

  Comer dove forward for four yards and a first and ten at the Carter 28-yard line. Winchell backpedaled on the next play. He had good protection and saw Chavez break free down the middle of the field from his tight end position. There was no one within three yards of him. Winchell threw the ball with more authority than he had all day. Chavez ran to grab it. It was a perfect call, and up in the press box Belew thought they had a sure six points. And then he saw a hand shoot up out of nowhere. It belonged to Jessie Armstead, and it showed why he was the best high school football player in the country. Covering the field with his fantastic quickness, he swatted the ball down. A run by Comer went nowhere. Permian had a third and eight at the Carter 26 with thirty seconds left.

  Boobie Miles could feel himself getting nervous.

  Living with friends, he hadn’t seen L.V. in a month, and he had also lost all contact with the football team. He was still going to school, but he had missed over a week of classes because of the knee surgery. With the close scrutiny that football players’ grades received because of the no-pass, no-play rule, he had always passed his courses. Now that he wasn’t playing anymore, he found himself flunking three classes at the end of the second six-week grading period. When the coaches saw his name on the failure report, they quietly snickered.

  Boobie himself tried to take it all in stride. Sitting in the empty bleachers of the gym one day watching basketball practice, he said he enjoyed his newfound life—going home early in the afternoon, “chillin’ out” with his girlfriend, not worrying anymore about his knee.

  But when asked if he regretted his decision to quit, he became morose and silent, the glassy-eyed look on his face the same as it had been in Lubbock when he sat on the bench with a knee that had just been torn to shreds, the same as it had been during that Friday night against the Rebels when everything in the world stirred so brightly without him.

  “I don’t think people sympathized with him,” said Callie Tave, the college counselor for the senior class at Permian. “I don’t think they understood what he was experiencing. This was going to be his year. He was really going to be the star, and it just devastated him. I regretted so much what happened to him. I was hoping for nothing but good for him.”

  But her soft voice was in the minority. Many fans still remembered that image of Boobie in the Lee game, but they didn’t see an eighteen-year-old kid doubled over in pain on that bench. They saw someone who was selfish, who openly moped during the game and didn’t show the slightest concern for his fellow players. Among the team members he was almost never mentioned anymore, as if all record of him had been expunged; there was no trace of who he was, and what he had done unless you had witnessed it.

  He had no link to Permian football anymore, but he felt the familiar anxiousness during that final minute. He still wanted his teammates to score and win the game. And there was a part of him that could never leave the field, no matter where he was. He could feel the vestiges of the invincible fire, the urge to be out there on the field to take on Jessie Armstead and Derric Evans and let them know there was one player in the state of Texas who could match them size for size, strength for strength, who wasn’t scared of them at all.

  “I wish I was out there with ’em,” he thought to himself.

  But too much had happened for Boobie to be anyplace other than where he was, listening to the final minute on a car radio 340 miles away back in Odessa, cut off from L.V., cut off from a season that instead of bringing him the cheers of thousands, had only brought him silence.

  Hill took the hand-off from Winchell on an apparent reverse, then stopped and looked to the far sideline to throw. No one was open, so he took off, and made it all the way to the ten before getting pushed out of bounds. Permian had a first down at the Carter ten with twenty-two seconds left. Sharon Gaines paced up and down on the sidelines.

  All football seasons were hard and took their toll on her. It had been a condition of life ever since she had married Gary Gaines. But it was difficult to remember any season more emotionally wearing than this one. The letter to the editor crucifying her husband had hurt her terribly. Then came another letter, this one to school officials from an irate fan who ripped into her for standing up too much during games and blocking his view. She knew she stood up a lot during games, but it wasn’t through selfishness. She just felt the tension and the pressure every bit as much as her husband did—she had been through the nightmare of the 1986 season when the team didn’t make the playoffs—and she felt humiliated having to defend herself over something like this. “I don’t think people realize how much that team is a part of my life,” she said. But she al
so knew that most people could have cared less anyway, even if they did know. They weren’t interested in her feelings, or her husband’s. They were interested in winning.

  She looked at the clock and watched the seconds disappear.

  She watched Hill move downfield and her heart leapt, so close were they, just ten yards away!

  And then the Permian crowd turned sour and she knew something horrible had happened.

  Center Clint Duncan was called for holding. Jessie Armstead had been flying by him on the play, and desperate to do something to stop him, Duncan had tackled him. Permian had a third and seventeen at the Carter 35. They ran another trick play with Hill throwing to Winchell for an eleven-yard gain. It gave Permian a fourth and six at the Carter 24 with ten seconds left. Carter called time-out.

  Ronnie Bevers knelt to the ground to pray. Winchell was still afraid to look at the clock. Duncan, dwelling on the holding penalty despite efforts to block it out of his mind, said nothing. Winchell called the play that had been sent in from the sidelines, sixty-one pass. During their six-year careers they had practiced and run it a thousand times. The players were aware of nothing, the frantic yells of the crowd, the clock, the dwindling light, the gray sadness of it all. They were only aware that this was where they either went to State, or turned into has-beens as quickly as the golden coach turned into a pumpkin. Right before coming to the line of scrimmage, McDougal turned to Bevers and said simply, “This is it.”

  Winchell, lining up over the center, saw Hill double-covered and knew he would not be able to get the ball to him. He would have to look instead for flanker Robert Brown over the middle. Duncan hiked the ball and went into his pass block stance. He didn’t look up, because the sound of the crowd would tell him whether the pass was complete or not. Brown turned toward Winchell, a signal that he was open.