Friday Night Lights

by H. G. Bissinger

  “Let’s get after these guys, okay? Let’s get after ’em. Let’s win it for ourselves. Let’s win it for our school, win it for our parents. Let’s win it for West Texas.”

  Minutes before game time, Gaines called the team to gather around him.

  “Everybody in this room has paid a dear, dear price to be where you are,” he told them. “That ought to make your effort that much more intense, that much more fanatical, because of all the hard work and sacrifice that’s gone into gettin’ you here. It ought to make you play that much harder.

  “You represent a lot of people. We’re gonna represent ’em well, and we’re gonna win this sucker.”

  They huddled in that long tunnel of Texas Stadium amid cries of “Let’s go, baby, let’s go!” They broke through the banner made by the cheerleaders that took up almost half the end zone. They heard the cries of “Mojo!” and the enormous swell of the band. They played with a flawlessness and sense of purpose that had been building inside them all their lives. After it was over tears flowed freely down their faces, and also down the faces of the grown men and women who depended on them year after year after year.

  It was hard to fathom the shock of what Odessa had gone through during the eighties, from a world where everything seemed possible to one in which it was hard to hold on to anything with certainty. So much had happened. So much had changed. But one anchor was still there, as strong and solid as ever. It didn’t really matter who was playing, or who was coaching. It would always go on, just as Jerrod McDougal had realized, because it was a way of life.

  The Permian Panthers ended the decade exactly the same way they had begun it.

  Two days before Christmas, they became the state football champions of Texas.

  AFTERWORD

  Ten years have passed since the publication of Friday Night Lights, and still the words continue to influence and reverberate. Barely a week goes by without my getting a call or comment about it. Over the past decade I have heard strange and remarkable stories of the book’s impact—a man who left his job in Brooklyn so he could become a football coach in Texas, a songwriter who wrote a ballad inspired by the book, teenagers forsaking Florida to make spring break pilgrimages to Odessa. When readers tell me they have been touched by this book in a way that no other has ever touched them, their words leave me humbled.

  How did it all happen? Why did it all happen? In light of the controversy that erupted in Odessa after the book was published and the accusations of betrayal that still ring in certain corners today, are there any regrets about what I wrote?

  I have had ten years to think about it all, ten years to examine what it was that catapulted this book into the reading consciousness of so many, ten years to examine the harsh judgments made of me as well as my own decisions about the words I chose and the words I did not, ten years too to think about this team that I grew to know so intimately during a remarkable year of my life. I adored the players on the Permian Panthers, whose lives I followed during the 1988 season. It is a feeling that still stays with me. Memories crease through me at unexpected times—the awesome silence in the locker room with those eyes locked tight, the gleaming shape of a playoff trophy held high as another rung on the ladder of goin’ to state is climbed, the thrust of a fist into a wall in the helplessness of defeat, the silence of the plains suddenly broken by adoring screams.

  I still think of how it all began, in the rocket ship of Ratliff Stadium, on a sweet and still night, when those teenage boys crashed through the handheld banner that had been made for them by the cheerleaders and a sea of fans drenched in black came to their feet. I still think of how it all ended, in spitting rain and misery, when the hand of Jesse Armstead came out of nowhere to swat down a pass that should have been the winning touchdown for Permian against Dallas Carter, the same Jesse Armstead who is now an All-Pro linebacker for the New York Giants.

  In particular, I think of the six players who so graciously allowed me to intrude on their worlds. Our lives have all spread in different directions. But I still keep up with several of them on a regular basis, and both directly and indirectly, I am familiar with the roads their lives have taken.

  Brian Chavez returned to the football field at Harvard for his undergraduate house tackle football team. He graduated Cum Laude in 1993, and I was honored to be at his graduation. He successfully navigated a monumental transition from Odessa to Cambridge (it is hard to imagine any two places in the world at more opposites), and it was a special delight to watch Brian receive his diploma under the proud gaze of his family. Brian looked at the east coast with a combination of curiosity and anthropological interest, as if he were studying a different species, and he concluded that it was no place for a human being to actually live. At the personal invitation of the dean, Brian went to law school at Texas Tech University on a full scholarship. He started the Mexican-American Law Student Association there and graduated in 1996. Afterward he returned to Odessa to his family’s law practice. He opened a satellite office in El Paso and has aspirations of becoming a federal judge. Although he seems eternally wed to the haunted plains of West Texas, he is also thankful he spent time beyond its borders.

  “It was hard as shit for me to adjust and hard for me to deal with, but Harvard changed my life. It showed me that there’s more out there than West Texas.”

  Jerrod McDougal went to Odessa College in the spring and fall of 1990. He did not play football because Odessa College does not field a team, and he was not invited back to school after the fall semester. “I didn’t have any enthusiasm for it at all,” he said at the time. Jerrod also went to Midland College, as well as several community colleges, but he has never received a degree.

  He went to work full time for his father’s oil field construction company in Crane at the beginning of 1991. In 1999 he moved to Bandera, near San Antonio, to work for Roger Stevens, a contracting company acquired by his father. He has had his personal traumas over the years, including a serious car accident that shattered his ankle. But he has still maintained his West Texas spirit of passion and emotion.

  At one point he tried to erase his memories of playing football for Permian because he felt emotionally stunted by it. But he realized it was impossible. “It will never be lifted off of me,” he said, and if it was football that consumed him at Permian, it was also football that kept him in school. “Otherwise I would’ve been down on dynamite crews blowin’ shit up, because that’s what I liked,” he said. Sometimes Jerrod thinks about the 1988 season with the wincing anger of not winning a state championship. But mostly he thinks of the private beauty of what he and his teammates shared and will always share.

  “I got a group of brothers, a set of friends that you could never ask for and get. There’s nothing I wouldn’t do for any of ’em and there’s nothing they wouldn’t do for me.”

  Don Billingsley, the Permian player targeted by the coaches and teammates as most likely for an early grave, proved that the worst predictor of future behavior is behavior in high school.

  Don stopped playing football in the fall of 1989 after arthroscopic surgery to his knee. Instead of falling prey once again to alcohol and drugs, he began to actively study for the first time in his life. “It feels good to be learnin’ somethin’,” he said at the time. Don also went through a religious reawakening during that period of his life, and he has kept the keenness of his faith ever since.

  Don remained at East Central University, graduating with a bachelor’s degree in public relations in 1993. He then received his master’s in human resources counseling from the university in 1995 and did counseling work in Oklahoma City and Norman. In April of 1999 he married Melanie Fannin and moved to join her in Dallas. Melanie already worked for Southwest Airlines, and Don became a care manager for Magellan Behavioral Health. There are still certain aspirations that elude him. He would like to make more money, and he isn’t sure about the trajectory of his career. But he has no complaints about life.

  “I feel good about it.
”

  Mike Winchell went to Baylor after he graduated from Permian and quit at the end of the 1989-90 school year because of cost and the realization that he had no future there as a football player. “Heck, I’m not going to play in the pros,” he said at the time.

  Winchell went to Texas Tech for a semester and then transferred to Tarleton State University in Stephenville. He graduated with a bachelor’s degree in marketing in 1995. He returned to Odessa for roughly a year and then moved to the Dallas-Ft. Worth metroplex. When the Odessa American interviewed him in 1998, he was working as an independent surveyor in Decatur and also playing golf on the Iron Man Tour. Sponsored by the Texas Professional Golf Tour, Iron Man tournaments consist of twenty-seven holes in a single stretch. Winchell tied for fifty-fifth in 1998 and was still competing on the Iron Man Tour into the summer of 1999. He values his privacy, and during the interview he made it clear that he no longer was interested in questions relating to Friday Night Lights.

  “People always want to talk about the book, but I don’t care. That was a long time ago.”

  Ivory Christian had a successful freshman football season at Texas Christian University in 1989, starting two games at middle linebacker and receiving playing time in seven others. But frustrated over a strained knee and his drop in the depth chart the following year in 1990, he quit the team and left school. His father prodded him to stay at TCU for the obvious athletic and educational benefits, but Ivory told him he was no longer interested in playing football.

  He returned to Odessa, where he received his associate’s degree at Odessa College. He worked at the Midland International Airport for several years doing plane maintenance. He then moved to Austin to work for the Texas Aircraft Pooling Board, a state agency that maintains and operates a fleet of planes for official government business. Ivory had always been ambivalent about his Permian football experience, consciously resisting any of its trappings. But on the cusp of turning thirty, he had begun to take some measure of pride in what it meant.

  “Now, twelve years later, I think about it.”

  Boobie Miles flunked out of Ranger College at the end of the 1989-90 school year when, according to his football coach, Joe Crousen, he just stopped going to class. He returned to the Odessa-Midland area and has basically been there ever since, with the exception of a brief and unhappy stint with a semi-pro football team in Culpeper, Virginia. He has held a series of jobs over the years, most of them involving warehouse work such as driving a forklift. Most recently, he had landed a job in the Odessa area doing inventory work.

  Life has not been economically easy for Boobie. I often wonder how different his fate would have been if his cleat had not gotten caught in the artificial turf of Jones Stadium that terrible August night. The moment took a fraction of a second, and yet its impact on him was forever, a brutal reminder of the very fragility of sport. But Boobie refuses to look back with self-pity on what could have been. He still loves football, although his links to Permian have understandably broken down completely. “I don’t go to the games,” he said.

  At the end of 1998, Boobie’s uncle, L. V., died of heart complications. Boobie has continued on, working to provide for a family that includes a four-year-old daughter, a three-year-old son, and twins born earlier this year. But L. V. ’s absence is felt by Boobie, as it is felt by everyone who knew this uniquely fine and decent man.

  “I miss him.”

  When Friday Night Lights was first published in September of 1990, it set off a storm of controversy in Odessa that still flares at the very mention of the book’s name. Shortly after its release, I was scheduled to do a series of appearances in Odessa as part of a tour. But the trip was cancelled after several bookstore owners said that threats of bodily harm had been made against me. The owners took those threats seriously and so did I, particularly because the book’s release coincided with Permian being banned from participation in the playoffs by the University Interscholastic League for conducting supervised workouts before the official start of the season. To make the tension even more palpable, Permian had been turned in by Jerry Taylor, the head coach of crosstown rival Odessa High.

  The game between Permian and Odessa High had always been something of a spiritual civil war in town, but feelings now rose into the ozone as the two teams prepared to meet each other the following week. On its front page several days before the game, the Odessa American made a plea to the presidents of the booster clubs of both schools asking for harmony. As the situation began to receive national attention, the mayor of Odessa at the time, Lorraine Bonner, taped a public service message asking for calm. “The eyes of a nation are focused on us this week,” said Bonner. “And it’s up to us to reach out and pull together.” The Odessa police force doubled security for the game, and a final call for peace came during the pre-game prayer to the sellout crowd of 20,000: “There’s a lot of tension built up at this game tonight. Oh Lord, please give us strength to relieve the tension tonight.”

  There were in fact no incidents as Permian beat Odessa High that night, 24-6, to run its winning streak over the Bronchos to twenty-six years. The animosity between east and west died down, but animosity over Friday Night Lights has never died. The book still evokes feelings that are raw and passionate, particularly because one of the most enduring and attractive characteristics of West Texans is their utter contempt for moderation.

  Over the years I have been accused of betrayal, and sensationalism, and taking information out of context, and misquoting. I am not surprised by these accusations, nor am I troubled by them. When I first arrived in Odessa, I anticipated a book very much in the tradition of the film Hoosiers, a portrait of the way in which high school sports can bring a community together. There were elements of that bond in Odessa, and they were reflected in the book. But along the way some other things happened—the most ugly racism I have ever encountered, utterly misplaced educational priorities, a town that wasn’t bad or evil but had lost any ability to judge itself. It would have been a journalistic disgrace to ignore these elements.

  The book is fair and true. It was never intended as a diatribe or an exposé. It was written instead with enormous affection and empathy, because as deeply troubling as the overemphasis was on high school football, those games were, and always will be, the most exquisite sporting events that I have ever experienced.

  For all the controversy and verbal volleys of unfairness, the book has actually had a profoundly positive impact on Odessa. It clearly forced certain individuals in power to look in the mirror and examine the culture of football that had been erected. To their enormous credit, they realized it was a reflection that had to be altered. “I think for some people [the book] was a wake-up call,” Chuck Hourning, the public information officer for the Ector County school district, said in 1998. “I think the community kind of reassessed itself. I don’t think the community of today would necessarily identify with the community then.”

  “The book was a bit like medicine,” wrote the city’s most respected voice, Odessa American columnist Ken Brodnax. “Perhaps it was a bit bitter to the taste, and it probably had some bad side effects that were hard to shake. But the dose also healed a few ills.”

  The result of that medicine has been a stronger academic curriculum. SAT scores for boys have improved and the number of female students taking the test has nearly doubled. The school district has spent some $5 million to upgrade technology at both high schools. Strides have also been made in establishing equal athletic programs for males and females with the $1.1 million construction of a new softball and soccer complex.

  A softball and soccer complex in Odessa?

  Miracles do happen.

  When I was there, nothing was considered more socially acceptable than being an unabashed Permian football booster. Living, and eating, and breathing high school football had become a way of life. Today such fanatical behavior has been tempered, in part, believes Brian Chavez, because fans don’t want to be associated with the kinds of extr
emes that were so evident in the book. “People have kind of shied away from being real avid fans,” he said. Devotion is still there, but it no longer routinely rises to the level of worship, and as Brian puts it, people are more likely to “express it under their breath.”

  There is no doubt that the fixation on Permian football made it great. There is also no doubt the same fixation caused the educational system to suffer in the shadows. The shift in priorities was desperately needed. But as a consequence of that shift, the glory of Permian football has dropped to an all-time low.

  Gary Gaines left as Permian’s head coach after the 1989 season when the team won the state championship, embarking on a course that would take him to college as an assistant at Texas Tech, back to high school, and most recently to Abilene Christian University where he was named the head coach earlier this year. Gaines was replaced at Permian by assistant Tam Hollingshead, who promptly led the team to another state championship in 1991 and then left after the 1993 season to become an assistant at Texas A&M. Hollingshead was replaced by Randy Mayes, who had been an assistant.

  Mayes’s first two seasons were in keeping with Permian tradition as the most storied program in Texas football history. The team went to the state semifinals in 1994 and the state championship in 1995. And then it fell apart. Permian finished 3-6 in 1997, ending a string of 32 straight winning seasons. That was difficult enough, but Permian also lost to Odessa High for the first time in 32 years. There were, as usual, 20,000 people in the stands that night, and the impact of the final score was like the after-shock of some profound religious sighting in which no one could quite believe what they had just witnessed. After the game, Permian fans dressed in black sobbed on one side while Odessa High fans dressed in red sobbed on the other.