Friday Night Lights

by H. G. Bissinger

  “It was gerrymandering over football,” said Gomez, who had not been in the least surprised. In the endless deliberations over desegregation, the board spent more time worrying about how the high school athletic programs might be affected than how the curriculum might be affected. “Whatever they did, they did not want to hurt the dynasty that was being established at Permian,” she said. “I think it clouded their vision. We spent more time talking about the athletic program than the curriculum.”

  IV

  You could search high and low for a black city councilman in 1988, or a black county commissioner, or a black school board member in Odessa. You wouldn’t find one. You could search high and low for a black at the Rotary Club breakfasts over at the Holiday Inn. Or at the luncheon meetings of the Optimist Club over at the junior college. You wouldn’t find one there either, just like in every other community in America. But on Friday nights in Odessa, you could gaze down at the football field and see several black players tearing up the field for Permian.

  Thanks to desegregation, football was blacks’ claim to fame in Odessa, the thing they were known for, and there was no better proof than the Wall of Fame. Just inside the entrance to the Permian field house, the wall contained the framed pictures of sixty-one players, each of whom had been All-State. To have one’s picture hanging there in a little frame with black trim was a cherished honor.

  The wall also offered a quick and easy lesson on the history of race relations in Odessa. From 1959, when Permian opened, until 1982, there was only one black face on that wall out of pictures of forty-five players. (The name of the player was Daryl Hunt. He happened to be from the first black family ever to live across the tracks in the northeast part of town. He also happened to be the best football player ever at Permian, becoming an All-American linebacker at Oklahoma University and then a member of the Houston Oilers for six years.) Since the desegregation of the schools, the representation of black players on the Wall of Fame had dramatically increased. Of the sixteen pictures added to the Wall of Fame since 1982, five were of blacks.

  Desegregation had not altered the essential character of the Permian program. It was still a white institution. The overwhelming majority of its fans were still white. The overwhelming majority of its players were still white. But those few blacks attending Permian had made enormous contributions, one after another shipped across town to Permian for the mass enjoyment of an appreciative white audience and then shipped right back again across the railroad tracks to the Southside after each game. Boobie Miles came from the Southside. So did his replacement, Chris Comer. So did Ivory Christian. So did Brian Johnson, who started at defensive end.

  “We fit as athletes, but we really don’t fit as a part of society,” said Nate Hearne, the only black coach at Permian in 1988. “We know that we’re separate, until we get on the field. We know that we’re equal as athletes. But once we get off the field we’re not equal. When it comes time to play the game, we are a part of it. But after the game, we are not a part of it.”

  In the fall of 1988, there were 147 blacks—6 percent of the student body—attending Permian. There were none among the forty-seven students taking honors physics I. There were none among the eight taking honors physics II. There were none among the fifty-two students taking honors biology II. There were three among the sixty-five taking honors chemistry I. There were four among the ninety-three taking honors algebra II. There was one among the eighty-two taking honors pre-calculus. There were none among the thirty-seven taking honors calculus. There were none among the ninety-nine students taking honors English III. There were two among the ninety-one students taking honors English IV. There were none on the student council. There were none who were cheerleaders.

  On the Permian team, six of the fifty-five players were black. In the basketball program, fifteen of the thirty-nine players were black. Blacks also made up relatively high percentages in remedial courses.

  Numbers aside, their domination of the football team was astounding. Of the six who were with the team at the beginning of practice in August, five were starters and the sixth was hurt. Two of these players started both ways, the only ones on the entire team to do so. On offense black athletes started at flanker, split end, and fullback. On defense they started at middle linebacker, defensive end, safety, and rover.

  There was an apocryphal story that football coaches all over the state of Texas had cried when desegregation came to Odessa, because it gave Permian the one thing it had never had before—black running backs. The story may have been apocryphal, but it was also true that Permian football benefited from desegregation. It was clear that the coaches expected black athletes to be better because of a belief that their bodies matured earlier than did those of whites. If a black didn’t perform up to expectations, it usually had to do not with ability but work habits. “There will never be a mediocre black athlete to play at Permian,” said Hearne.

  Because of their skill, blacks were openly coveted in Odessa in the football arena. Some would never accept their presence on the team, but many others did, based on the ability to meet the following special conditions: having a speed of 4.6 or better in the forty, great hands, and the perceived ability to cover twice as much ground from the middle linebacking position as could any white boy. The only way to lose that preferred standing, of course, was by not performing.

  “We don’t have to deal with blacks here,” said Lanita Akins. “We don’t have to have any contact with them, except on the Permian football team. It’s the only place in Odessa where people interact at all with blacks.” As she sat in the stands, Akins watched with fascination how the fans accepted the presence of blacks on the Permian team as if they were for the time being part of a different race altogether, as if something magical happened when those boys donned the black and white.

  “Those boys are not niggers to them,” said Akins. “They are Mojos.”

  To Laurence Hurd, there was nothing surprising in that attitude.

  He was well aware of the enormous allure of the black athlete and the doors that participation in sports supposedly opened, the barriers that it supposedly broke, the way whites suspended all racist judgments when they sat in the stands and gazed down at a football field or a basketball court or a baseball diamond.

  He also knew that many black kids thought their easiest way out of the ghetto, perhaps their only way, was through sports. After all, what universally accepted black role models did these kids really have besides the Three J’s—Michael Jordan and Bo Jackson and Magic Johnson? Where else in the world, particularly the white world, did they see blacks consistently gain such praise and prominence and acceptance? Considering the circumstances of their lives, how could they be expected to accept the harsh reality of studies showing that of the thirty million children taking part in youth sports in the United States, only about two hundred would go on to become professionals in any given year?

  Laurence Hurd had an opinion about sports. He firmly believed that football, like other sports, used blacks, exploited them and then spit them out once their talents as running backs or linebackers or wide receivers had been fully exhausted. For a few lucky ones, that moment might not come until they were established in the pros. For others, it might come at the end of college. For most, it would all end in high school.

  And what would they have after pouring every hope and dream into sports? Hurd believed he knew the answer: a few memories and an education so inadequate they might have difficulty reading their names in “big boxcar letters.”

  “Before, it was take the blacks and put ’em in the cotton field. Let ’em do farm work. Let ’em do share crops. In the twentieth century, because of football, the real smart people use these blacks just like they would on the farm. And when it’s over, they don’t care about them. Some people say in their mind, that’s all they were good for anyway.

  “Today, instead of the cotton field, it’s the sports arena.”

  They were strong, provocative, important
words, the very trademark of Laurence Hurd. But no one was listening.

  He wasn’t any longer a gifted, powerful minister leading a community in a struggle for social change. Instead he was just another repeat offender in the middle of the desert, in the middle of nowhere, behind rows of razor wire that glinted and gleamed in the sun like jagged teeth.

  Some considered his life a poignant tragedy, an impossible battle that he ultimately lost between the two souls that raged within him—the Laurence Hurd capable of doing marvelous good for the community, and the Laurence Hurd who had spent much of his life as a street hustler after finding little appeal in being a pantry man for the rest of his life.

  “If only he could have kept that other boy down,” sighed the Reverend Hanson. “I don’t understand how you can do so much good for people, speak up for them and care about them, and do so much harm to yourself.”

  Others, not quite so benevolent, believed his actions had let down a community where the role of black leader was a precious, almost sacred commodity. Hurd had had it all in Odessa—recognition, respect, dignity, clout—and then he let it go for reasons that were hard to fathom.

  “I guess that’s the mystery, I guess that’s the mystery that I’ve never been able to figure out myself,” he said in the prison visiting room one day, his voice, turned throaty with age, sounding like the bristles of a broom pushing against a slate floor.

  Sometimes when he talked his eyes would close and the fingers of his hands would splay across the table, as if they were trying to touch the very part of him that had caused his life to go so wrong just when it seemed to be going right. But then his eyes opened, eyes that were jaundiced and tired, and he spoke with a melancholy weariness. He was tired of giving explanations, tired of being held up to the light and examined as if he were some rare specimen being taken out of an airtight jar, Laurence Hurd the social activist, Laurence Hurd the bank robber, Laurence Hurd the eloquent spokesman for integration, Laurence Hurd the master of three-card monte, Laurence Hurd the model of black success, Laurence Hurd the model of black failure. There were others like him who had fallen off the path and given in to the old demons. He wasn’t the only one.

  “I guess sometimes there’s some force within me that takes great control of me. Who knows? I can’t say. You ask me why there has been such drastic change. I wish I knew.”

  (6)

  THE AMBIVALENCE OF IVORY

  I

  There were moments when Ivory Christian loved the game he tried so much to hate.

  You could tell by the very way he lined up at the middle linebacker position, up on the balls of his feet in a cocked crouch, fingers slicing slowly through the air as if trying to feel the very flow of the play, elbows tucked and ready to fire off the snap of the ball in a mercuric flash.

  He even liked it sometimes during the early morning work-outs that were held twice a week before classes started inside the school gymnasium. The players ran at full strength under the angry glaze of the lights, the first-string offense and defense going against so-called scout teams simulating the offense and defense of the coming week’s opponent.

  No one was supposed to tackle, but every now and then Ivory pounced out of his crouch and drew a bead on some poor junior running back unfortunate enough to have become the focal point of his frustration and the need to unleash it on someone. As the unsuspecting prey went around the end, still adjusting to the slightly surreal notion of practicing football indoors on a basketball court at seven-twenty in the morning, Ivory just smacked him. There was the jarring pop of helmet against helmet, and then the trajectory of the underclassman as he went skittering across the gleaming gym floor like a billiard ball hopping over a pool table after a wild cue shot. Ivory then sauntered back to the huddle as if he were walking down the runway at the Miss America contest, basking in the glow of ultimate victory but careful not to show too wide a smile because he had, after all, a reputation for self-restraint to keep up.

  Much of the time Ivory fought to rid football from his life, to call a merciful halt to the practices, the dreaded gassers, the reading of page after page of plays and game plans, the endless demands on his time. He liked the games, there was no denying that, but it was hard not to find the rest of it pointless.

  There were other coaches around the league who drooled over Ivory’s size and speed (195 pounds and growing with a 4.7 in the forty) and his strength (he could bench-press 275 pounds as a sixteen-year-old). They thought he had major-college talent written all over him, but Ivory didn’t. He was so sure of it he wasn’t even going to bother to take the SAT or ACT entrance exams, which made it virtually impossible for him to get a major-college scholarship even if anyone was interested.

  Maybe it would have been different if the coaches had let him start at middle linebacker his junior year. He had had the talent for it, there was little question about that, but the coaches simply didn’t trust Ivory at the show position of the Permian defense. They switched him to offensive guard, and he played it brilliantly.

  But something snapped in Ivory after middle linebacker was wrested from him. The common explanation, he wasn’t rah-rah enough, didn’t make any sense to him, although the coaches were hardly the only ones who found him to be stubborn and headstrong. But the way Ivory saw it, they just wanted to deprive him of glory, of what was rightfully his.

  And where was all this rah-rah stuff supposed to come from? Was it simply expected that he would become indoctrinated into the blinding passion of the Mojo mystique just like everyone else? He was aware of it—everybody in town was—but up until the sixth grade Permian was off-limits to him because the school system was segregated.

  If you lived on the Southside, as Ivory’s family did, there was no way of going there. Instead, the big school in town was Ector, which wasn’t too far from his home. Ector didn’t have the football tradition that Permian had. But it had won State twice in basketball, residents of the Southside packing the tiny school gym to the rafters with twelve hundred fans while others who couldn’t get in climbed the roof and stared in the windows. That was the tradition Ivory had grown up with, not Mojo.

  Relegated to the position of guard, he had played football out of a dutiful sense of obligation, because it made his father proud and also because it somehow seemed his destiny to do so, regardless of what he thought about it. After all, if you were a strong, fast black kid in Odessa, what else were you encouraged to do? What other outlet did you possibly have? When you looked around, where else did you see a single black role model, except in church?

  He had talked with his father, Ivory senior, about it, and he told him he wasn’t sure he wanted to play college ball even if he had the chance. The way the words came out of his mouth, so flat and dispirited, Ivory senior thought his son might be burned out on the whole thing altogether, the rigors of being seriously involved in football since the age of nine finally getting to him. He had been playing the game for eight years, as long as it took to go to medical school, serve an internship, and complete a residency, but what loomed down the road because of it?

  Ivory couldn’t see a thing.

  His father had played football in Odessa in the sixties when there was an all-black high school in town called Blackshear. The team had played in its own stadium on the Southside, with equipment that looked like something used in a junior high, and it played in the high school version of the Negro League, its opponents the all-black schools of Amarillo and Lubbock and Midland. Those were the days of strict segregation, and the idea of playing for Permian was of course almost inconceivable.

  Ivory senior took great pride in his son’s accomplishments. In the back of his mind it was probably hard not to think about what football could do for his son and how it could make him the first member of the Christian family ever to go to college. But Ivory senior, who drove a truck for a living, wasn’t going to push him. He would abide by his son’s decision if Ivory chose not to play football anymore after high school. He also knew his son
was a teenager going through changes who had, perhaps for the first time, found there might be something else in life besides football to fill up the empty spaces of Odessa that loomed as large as skyscrapers.

  It had come to Ivory in a dream. When he related it to his father he talked about being in a narrow tunnel with a tiny light that he could barely see but he knew he had to find no matter how difficult it was.

  To Ivory, the message of the dream was crystal clear. He was living his life wrong, emphasizing all the wrong things, football and hanging out in the streets with his friends and alcohol and marijuana. The day after he had the dream he went to church with a hangover on his breath and Jesus in his heart, as he later described it. He told the pastor at his church, Rose of Sharon Missionary Baptist, about the dream and how he was convinced that it had been a calling to preach and become part of God’s ministry.

  Pastor Hanson welcomed Ivory’s conversion. He knew that Ivory was an influential kid whose actions made a tremendous impression on his peers. But there was something worrisome about it, and he didn’t want Ivory moving from one world of isolation into another where the only difference was the level of standards.

  Before, Ivory had displayed undisguised contempt for just about everything, an attitude of what Hanson perceived as arrogance. Now he displayed a rigid righteousness that made him almost a kept prisoner. At home he hardly communicated with anyone but went immediately to his tiny room, where he listened to the gospel music of James Cleveland. He went on this way for hours on end, until his mother began to worry and think there was something wrong with him. Why was he so withdrawn, so quiet?

  As the result of his conversion, he hated alcohol and had contempt for those who touched it. He also hated swearing, and other players in the locker room figured it was better to abide by his wishes rather than run the risk of messing with him. Before his calling to the ministry he had dated. Now he started grilling girls about their habits to see if their moral standards were high enough for him.