Friday Night Lights

by H. G. Bissinger

  The next afternoon, the players filtered into the field house to get dressed and have final pre-game meetings. “I don’t want you gettin’ blocked by a finesse block. If you get blocked, it better be by a macho man,” Coach Belew told the defensive ends. “I want one hell of a wreck out there. I want that boy to be sorry he’s playin’. Run upfield like a scalded dog. Run upfield and contain that sucker.”

  By game time more than fifteen thousand fans had emptied into Ratliff Stadium, where a full moon, luscious and plump, sweetened the languid desert night and turned the sky an incandescent blue. On one side were the Odessa High fans, dressed in red, ready for this to be the year when the jinx was finally broken, when they joyously shed the yoke of football famine that had caused them so much embarrassment and so many feelings of inferiority. On the other side were the Permian fans, dressed in black, arms folded, looking like highland-mighty music teachers listening to the annual school recital, so used to superlative achievement from their star pupils that only the most flawless performance would break their cold impassivity.

  The game began. The kickoff fluttered in the warm air amid shrieks and screams. Permian’s Robert Brown took the ball and barely got to the 15 before he was smothered by a crowd of Odessa High defenders. They slapped each other on the helmet after the tackle and ran off the field with exuberance. Maybe that opening kickoff was an omen. Maybe it meant that parity had been reached, that tonight was the night for the west side of Odessa to reach back into history, to show that it too could excel at what mattered most.

  Or maybe it meant nothing at all.

  Ducking underneath the offensive line, Winchell took the snap from center and handed the ball to Billingsley on a tackle trap. He saw a hole and went for it.

  The game was on. . . .

  There was no better metaphor for the town, no better way to understand it—the rapidly changing demographics, the self-perpetuating notions of superiority that spread over one half and inferiority that spread over the other. The Permian-Odessa High game had become a clash of values—between the nouveau riche east side of town and the older, more humble west, between white and Hispanic, between rich and poor, between the suburban-style mall and the decrepit, decaying downtown.

  Twenty-three years.

  Twenty-three lousy, painful, shitty years without beating Permian, worse than the plague of locusts, worse than rooting for the Cubs, worse than the Dust Bowl droughts.

  Although some had seen slight improvement in recent times, there was no love lost between the two sides. Savannah Belcher, who had her own show on cable television here and was the closest thing Odessa had to Hedda Hopper, called the boundary line separating the two schools “the Mason Dixon line of Odessa. They’re not really at war, but a lot of those scars haven’t quite healed.”

  Each year there was always the dream that this was finally it, the game where the juggernaut of Permian would somehow self-destruct and the sheer emotion of Odessa High would finally prevail. The possibility of that tantalized everyone, whether they liked football or not.

  Vickie Gomez was a perfect example. During her two terms on the school board she had gotten more than her fill of sports, and she wondered what good high school football did for the kids who played it. But even Gomez had intense feelings about the rivalry because of what a win over Permian would accomplish not only for Odessa High fans but the whole west side of town—the side of town that seemed to have all the trailer homes and the apartment courts made of glue and papier-mâché and the junkyards and the sealed-off areas filled with the hulks of oil rigs that no one wanted anymore, the side of town that had become identified with white oil field trash and wetbacks up from the border.

  In the forties and fifties, most Hispanics who trickled into Odessa settled on the Southside. In the sixties and seventies and eighties, the influx of Hispanics rapidly increased and many began living not only on the Southside but the west side as well.

  Nothing else in town, not even the resurgence of the oil industry in another frenzied boom, could give the west side the same sort of psychological lift as a win over Permian. Even if the feeling was momentary, it would put Odessa High on equal footing with those east-siders who went home victorious time after time after time to those sprawling ranch houses in those sweet little cul-de-sacs with those names like something out of a Gothic romance. But every time the Odessa Bronchos got close something miraculously bad happened—a fumble into the end zone with the winning touchdown and no time left on the clock, an unheard-of snowstorm turning a potent offense into mush.

  It truly seemed as if nothing less than fate herself was working against them, somehow had it in for the Bronchos, who simply could not beat Permian no matter how hard they tried.

  “I’m just living for the day that Odessa High beats Permian,” said Vickie Gomez, the thought bringing a smile to her usually serious lips. “That’s the one thing I’m living for. I’m gonna get out of this town, but not before that happens.”

  II

  There had been a time . . .

  When Odessa High Broncho fans got to talking their fondest recollections centered on another era, an era when Odessa High was the only high school in town if you didn’t count the one the blacks went to, which no one did.

  Those had been the days back in the postwar boom of the forties and fifties. The Permian fans thought they had a lock on football and were the only ones in town who knew anything about it, but that wasn’t true. If you wanted to see real football mania, if you wanted to see a group of people who cared about a team and loved them as if they were their own children, go back to the 1946 season, when almost half the town was crammed together on the wooden benches of old Fly Field like pencil points. Go back to the days of Byron “Santone” Townsend, the mere memory of number 27’s angular moves in the open field, the way he could tilt and turn his body so that he was nearly parallel to the ground, making grown men almost misty-eyed. “God dog could he run!” was the only way Ken Hankins, an independent oil producer who had been born in Odessa in 1933 and was a die-hard Odessa High booster, could possibly describe it.

  Go back to the days when people camped out overnight for tickets with huge smiles on their faces, as if they were performing an important service for their country.

  “Odessa is a place you have to see to believe,” wrote Irving Farman in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram during the 1946 season. “At first I thought I was back in St. Louis before the seventh game of the World Series, instead of on the eve of the Odessa-Sweetwater football classic.

  “Chairs in the Elliott Hotel lobby were selling for the price of the diplomatic suite at the Waldorf—and for half price you could sit on someone’s lap.”

  Go back to the 1946 state championship game after the Red Hosses had already smitten down everyone else in their path—the Lubbock Westerners, the El Paso Tigers, the Big Spring Steers, the Abilene Eagles, the Amarillo Golden Sandies, the San Angelo Bobcats, the Sweetwater Mustangs, the Lamesa Tornadoes, the Midland Bulldogs, the Ysleta Indians, the Wichita Falls Coyotes, the Highland Park Scotties.

  Some thirty-eight thousand people filled Austin’s Memorial Stadium three days after Christmas for that state championship game. Thousands came from Odessa, and from all over, to watch one of the greatest schoolboy duels in the history of the game—Santone Townsend versus San Antonio Jefferson’s Kyle Rote.

  Rote, who later went on to star at SMU and the New York Giants, scored on a six-yard run. He threw a fifty-six-yard touchdown pass. He punted for a forty-seven-yard average and kicked both extra points. He did everything he was supposed to do, fulfilled every promise. But Townsend rushed for 124 yards, scored a touchdown, and threw for one as well. He led the Bronchos to their first, and only, state championship win over the Mustangs, 21-14.

  “Out in the middle of West Texas is an oil town named Odessa—a fast growing city that jumped from some 9,000 souls in 1941 to more than 31,000 in 1946. And all of them are football mad,” said the foreword to a special seventy-pag
e booklet commemorating that championship season. “A great football team will live in the minds of sports fans for years to come. If moving pictures were made of the Jeff-Odessa game, those pictures will be used to show future gridders just how great a high school football team can be.”

  One could just imagine the grainy images flickering on a postage stamp-sized screen of boys with sawed-off names wearing helmets that looked like bathing caps: Jug Taylor at center, Steve Dowden and Wayne Jones at the tackles, Herman Foster and Gorden Headlee at the guards, the Moorman brothers, Billy and Bobby, at the ends, Pug Gabrel and H. L. Holderman the halfbacks, Santone Townsend the fullback, and Hayden Fry the quarterback.

  “Whether or not Odessa again will win a state title, we can’t say,” said the commemorative booklet. “But, whether or not they repeat, the city of Odessa has had its moment of triumph.”

  That moment of glory was never repeated. Little by little the football teams at Odessa High started changing, and so did the makeup of the student body it served. Odessa was growing, the promise of good work in the oil field an irresistible lure. With that growth came the inevitable pattern of social stratification. In 1959 Permian opened, and it hastened the migration of affluent whites away from the downtown to the northeast part of Odessa. The east side increasingly became the repository for the town’s white-collar class. The west side increasingly became the repository for blue-collar workers doing grit labor in the oil field, and for Hispanics drawn to Odessa because of the availability of work and the relative proximity of the town to the Mexican border. “The attitude of success was moving in that direction and the don’t-give-a-shit was over here,” said Hankins of the transition that took place between east and west.

  In 1964, the Bronchos beat Permian 13-0. It was their last victory over their east-side rival, the beginning of a winless drought that showed no signs of stopping.

  As Permian began to build a dynasty, Odessa High football faltered. Little by little, support for the town’s original high school ebbed away, the fanaticism of the forties and fifties being replaced by bitterness. Some of those who had once been the Bronchos’ biggest supporters, who had gone to school at Odessa High and played in Fly Field, fled to the suburban-like security of Permian. They often said they did so because they were disgusted with what had happened to the football program. But behind that veil, many believed, was often a thinly disguised contempt for the fundamental social changes taking place at the school, and on the west side of town in general.

  When a suburban-style shopping mall was built in 1980 at the height of the oil boom, it opened on the east side of town, just a few blocks away from Permian. The mall was the final coup de grâce for the downtown area, taking with it the Sears and the Penney’s and leaving behind the dirty bookstores. When the new art museum opened, it was on the east side of town. When the new Hilton Hotel opened, it was on the east side of town. When the new stadium opened, it was on the east side of town.

  As one school official put it, Permian and the east side of Odessa offered disenchanted rooters a reminder of what Odessa High used to be like in the old days, that is, the days when it had had almost no Hispanic student population to speak of, the days when its football team had been the only game in town.

  In 1960, the Hispanic population of the county had been about 6 percent. By 1985, census data showed that 25 percent of the approximately one hundred thirty thousand people living in the county were Hispanic, and that estimate may have been low since the proportion of Hispanics in the school system was around 40 percent.

  At Odessa High the effects of the demographic shift were even more pronounced. In 1969 the school had been 94 percent white and 6 percent Hispanic. In 1983, a year after the implementation of court-ordered desegregation, the proportion of white students was 59 percent and that of Hispanics 36 percent. In 1988, for the first time ever, the proportion of white students dropped below half, to 48 percent. Hispanics made up 47 percent of the student population and blacks and other minorities the remaining 5 percent.

  There had been changes in the ethnic makeup of Permian, but they were not nearly as radical. In 1983, as a result of desegregation the proportion of white students at Permian was 76 percent and that of Hispanics 14 percent. In 1988 whites made up 69 percent and Hispanics 23 percent of the student body.

  To those who continued to remain loyal to Odessa High, the changed ethnic makeup had made the school almost unrecognizable. The place clearly had a stigma attached to it now, and nowhere was that better embodied than on the football field.

  There was Permian, where champion after champion was churned out on the gridiron, often with the help of blacks who went there because of the odd way the boundary lines between the two schools had been drawn. There was Odessa High, which many old-line supporters felt had become a dumping ground for Hispanics who, among other things, couldn’t play football worth a lick.

  “Some kids don’t like to play football and the Spanish-Mexicans are one of them,” said Vern Foreman, an electrical contractor and former city councilman who had graduated from Odessa High in 1951. “Look at the enrollment of the school, and damn sure that’s what you got. So they need to take up another sport, like beer drinking.”

  “My house sits on OHS property and I can’t sell it because OHS is the Mexican school, unless it’s [to] a rich Mexican,” said Hankins, who had been president of the Odessa High booster club for two years during the seventies.

  It became apparent that the quickest way to achieve better racial balance at the two schools would be to change the boundaries. The school board was clearly reluctant to take up the issue. Changing school boundaries was thorny under any conditions, but any effort to achieve a more balanced composition would inevitably be heightened by the politics of football. Would students living in areas of town that had been the nucleus of Permian talent suddenly find themselves in the Odessa High attendance district? If that happened, everybody agreed that all hell would break loose.

  “It would be very nice if we could make a decision irrespective of football,” said school board member Lee Buice, “but that may be where the gauntlet is thrown.” Raymond Starnes, the principal of Odessa High, agreed, stating that “football is in the eye of the storm in the controversy over boundaries.”

  Or as Ken Hankins put it, “When they start movin’ some boundaries around, you’re gonna see some people slingin’ snot and start crying.”

  Aware of Odessa High’s frustration on the gridiron and the image problems it caused, the administration had tried to shift the focus of Odessa High away from football into other areas. In the regional academic decathlon, a contest pitting teams of students from various local schools against each other, Odessa High had won four straight times. It was a wonderful accomplishment for a school where the background of many students was far more economically disadvantaged than that of students attending Permian.

  During the 1988-89 school year, Odessa High also had a greater percentage of students than Permian pass the state-mandated test in math and English that was required for a diploma. That too was a wonderful accomplishment. But it did not mitigate the feelings of failure on the football field.

  Permian’s streak over Odessa High had created deep-rooted convictions of inferiority, to the extent that Principal Starnes spent time after each loss telling students and teachers that losing to Permian wasn’t a reflection on anything. “I spend a good part of the year after the football season drumming that message into the students and the faculty that we are not second-rate,” he admitted. And Buice knew that many Odessa High supporters would give academic achievement up in a second for one victory against Permian, just one.

  Aware of the rivalry between the two schools, employers searched for some middle ground of impartiality, fearful that any inadvertent slip might cause a mutiny from one half of the work force or the other. One year, an employer simply split the office into two militarized zones on game day, thereby allowing Permian supporters to decorate their half black and Ode
ssa High supporters their half red. Even bank presidents found themselves acutely aware of the tricky diplomacy of east-west relations in Odessa. When Ron Fancher, president of Texas Commerce Bank, dressed up for work on the annual costume day for employees, he arrived in a shirt that tactfully proclaimed MOJO on the front and BRONCHOS on the back.

  But such evenhandedness still didn’t work. At every level, Odessa High fans saw a conspiracy against them. They pointed to the settlement of the desegregation suit and the strange zigs and zags of the boundary line that resulted in Permian’s getting more blacks than Odessa High.

  Painfully detailed letters were sent to members of the school board outlining how Permian boosters had recruited athletes who lived in the Odessa High district to move and play for Mojo with promises of cars and bargain prices on houses. The school board checked into the allegations and found no merit in them, but the investigation did little to lessen the air of suspicion, and animosity, between the two schools.

  Most of the time the Odessa High supporters did their grumbling in private, but once a year it all came out in the open. The Permian fans got tired of the incessant whining of the Odessa High fans, of hearing that the Bronchos’ ineptitude on the football field was always somebody else’s fault. The Odessa High fans got tired of the condescending smirks of the Permian fans. They saw an area of town changing in ways they had never dreamed of, the names Taylor and Townsend and Fry and Gabrel and Moorman on the beloved football field replaced by new names in a new era—Villalobos and Paz and Martinez and Limon.

  They wanted to feel the past once again, to bridge the gap to that time forty years earlier when the slithery moves of Santone Townsend had swelled their hearts like nothing else. They wanted revenge. They wanted to feel the superiority and invincibility that had once been theirs, to stake a claim once again to Friday night. “It’s kind of scary that it can have that sort of an impact,” Superintendent Hayes acknowledged of the rivalry.