Friday Night Lights

by H. G. Bissinger

  But it did, and Coach Belew, who had played in one of those games fifteen years earlier, put it best in the waning moments before game time when he told his defensive ends: “It’s a big game. It’s gonna be a sellout and Odessa High is gonna be higher than a kite. This is their season. This is their Super Bowl.”

  III

  Permian reduced the game that night to a science—every part in perfect sync with all the other parts, no part greater than the other parts, no part, even for a millisecond, ever not fulfilling its role in the great, grand scheme whatever the differences in intellect, background, style, and skill. Every ounce of individuality had been stripped to produce this remarkable feat of football engineering, a machine so marvelously crafted and blended year in and year out that every corporation in America could learn something from the painstaking production.

  There wasn’t a single detail left out, not even the P decals on the helmets. They were peeled off after every game and put in a refrigerator to preserve freshness, then placed back on the night before the next contest.

  Permian ran eighteen plays on that first drive out of ten different formations. Comer touched the ball ten times, Billingsley four, Hill three, and Brown one. The offensive line moved off the snap as if it was shackled together. Winchell, his confidence growing, threw three passes, all of them short, incisive strikes to Hill, all of them complete. They moved down the field with maniacal, relentless precision. If the Japanese had invented football, this is how they would have played it.

  The touchdown came on a perfect pass from Winchell, who, rolling to his right and under pressure, threw off-balance to the middle of the end zone and hit Hill with a bull’s-eye.

  After the excitement of the kickoff, the Bronchos seemed stunned and shell-shocked, helpless to stop this machine that could have gone on forever, whether the field was one hundred yards or ten thousand yards long, whether the drive for a touchdown took eight minutes or eight hundred minutes.

  Odessa High got the ball and immediately fell apart, and the faces of the fans filled with the all-too-familiar looks of glumness and haggard weariness, like the faces of churchgoers listening to a sermon that was just the same old thing again instead of the one announced on the church sign promising the return of Christ. On their very first offensive play the Bronchos were called for offsides. Three subsequent running plays went for four yards and they punted. It turned out to be their most effective offensive weapon: Permian was called for roughing the kicker and Odessa High got a first down.

  The machine got the ball again and scored, this time on a nine-play, seventy-one-yard drive. Billingsley took in the touchdown from nine yards out. He was sprung by a block from Chavez, who hit defenders with such savage impact that he drove them back three or four or five yards and then, as a final humiliation, swatted at them like a bear trying to paw a fish. “Man, that hole, it was five yards wide!” said Billingsley as he came off to the sideline, his eyes ablaze. “That was bad! That was bad, dude!”

  Odessa received the kickoff, moved the ball minus two yards in three plays, and punted again.

  The machine got the ball at the Odessa High 40 and scored, this time in two plays when Billingsley took the ball on a pitch and outran everyone down the left sideline for a forty-yard touchdown.

  It was clear that he was getting better and better with each succeeding game, his fumbling, bumbling performance in the season opener a laughable memory. Like his father Charlie, he was a good, tough football player. The previous week, in a 35-14 win over Amarillo High, he had had the best performance of his life, gaining 141 yards in ten carries and scoring three touchdowns. But it had been difficult for him to enjoy it. During the week he had had acute asthma, and a shot from the doctor the day of the game didn’t make him feel much better.

  “I feel sick as shit,” he had said at one point on the sidelines in the Amarillo game. “I’m out there blowing snot all over myself.” A little later he scored on a fifty-six-yard run, but he hardly seemed elated. “Man, I’m about to die in this fucking snot.” He had pulled off his helmet and his neck roll and sat on the bench exhausted and almost stunned, his eyes puffy and nearly closed, as if someone had pummeled him in a fight.

  With the game obviously in hand and Permian ahead 28-0, he had seen little reason to play in the second half because of the way he felt. But Trapper had thought he wasn’t sick at all, just tired, just trying to wimp out, just trying to pull some typical Billingsley shit and get out of something. At the beginning of the second half he went up to Don and stared him in the face. “Do you want to play in this game?” he screamed. Don, who moments earlier had vomited in the corner of the locker room because of the mucus flooding his throat, nodded slowly that he wanted to.

  “No you don’t!” Trapper had barked. “You sit down!”

  Don had been sufficiently humiliated. He eventually got up from the bench, ready to go back in even though he still felt lousy. “I couldn’t feel my legs on the last touchdown,” he had said. “They felt like shit. I can go in there but I can’t play worth a shit, and why should I go out there and look bad?” But Trapper had already marched down the sidelines by then.

  “I hate it when they’re pussies,” he said. “That makes me mad.”

  But tonight against the Bronchos, it was different. He felt fine and he was euphoric.

  “Hell, I’m beginning to like this,” he said as a sea of black-clad fans cheered wildly behind him. They were getting the kind of superlative performance they had come to expect, and they had come alive.

  Odessa High received the ball on the kickoff, gained five yards in three plays, and punted again.

  The machine this time moved thirty-eight yards in six plays to score, the touchdown coming on a nine-yard pass from Winchell to Hill.

  Odessa High got the ball back on the kickoff with less than a minute left in the half. Patrick Brown, the Bronchos’ best player, went around the left end on a pitch and was hit. He went airborne and Wilkins, coming full speed from his cornerback position, lowered his helmet and hit him in the side with a savage crack like the sound of a shot from a revolver. Wilkins came off the field a hero among his teammates.

  “Way to go, Stan!”

  “Good stick!”

  “He stuck his shit!”

  Brown lay crumpled on the field, the embodiment of this typically nightmarish game for Odessa High. The initial prognosis was that he had broken some ribs, but he got up after several minutes. The half ended. The Permian players ran to the locker room with whoops and hollers, relieved that their ascendancy was safe for another year. Brown, meanwhile, with a person on either side of him, slowly made his way up the steps to the dressing room before being swallowed up in the darkness.

  Permian had scored on all four of its possessions the first half. Odessa High had punted on all of its four. Permian had fifteen first downs, Odessa had the one that had come on a penalty. Permian had 214 total yards, Odessa High eighteen.

  “That’s the kind of intensity I want,” Gaines told the players before the start of the second half. When Permian went ahead 35-0 in the third quarter Gaines started to substitute liberally because he didn’t believe in running up the score. He put in the second-team offense and defense, but their hapless playing gnawed at him. The game was a blowout, but his sense of concentration was still riveted, still totally focused, no time for letup, no time for relaxation. “First offense!” he finally yelled, unable to take the lousy play of the second-team offense any longer. “Piss on the twos!”

  In contrast, some Broncho supporters let their hair down a bit. The Odessa High drum corps marched around the stadium doing rolls with joyous, gyrating turns. Some of them even wore sunglasses, an act that on the Permian band would have been considered as blasphemous as taking out an American flag during the halftime show and burning it. With a minute left in the game and the score 35-7 in favor of Permian, the Odessa High band broke into a hell-bent rendition of “Gee, Officer Krupke” that they played with reckless glee, th
e gold glint on their instruments bouncing off wildly into the night. The Bronchettes, no longer duty-bound to cheer and serve up those reedy, screechy screams, started dancing away with abandon, their faces fresh and unvarnished by lipstick or rouge powder.

  After the game John Wilkins, a former Permian coach who was now the athletic director for the county school system, came into the Permian locker room. He assessed the game with the kind of razor-like bluntness that had earned him the monicker Darth Vader back in the days he coached:

  “Hell, you-all carved ’em up like a butcher knife.”

  He was right. They had, although the glow of victory remained intact for less then twelve hours. On Saturday morning, the Permian players huddled in the coaches’ office for the weekly review of the game on film. To listen to the coaches, it was hard to believe Permian had won the game, much less by a 35-7 score. All their eagle eyes saw on the screen was a hodgepodge of mistakes and inexcusable screw-ups. The coaches were relentless. The season didn’t stop with the win over Odessa High. They were three and one and back on the right track after the Marshall loss, but the following week they would face the undefeated Midland High Bulldogs, and the shadow of the Rebels was getting closer and closer. In the darkness, the players spent Saturday morning as punching bags for the coaches’ derisive comments.

  Sanford, this is so poor. You being a senior and blocking like that.

  Stayin’ on the ground and watching the goddamn play.

  That’s terrible, Davila. No punch at all.

  That’s terrible. How can somebody be so dumb to do that. . . .

  That’s terrible, Chris.

  Heck of a squib kick, David. Come up here for an hour tomorrow and practice!

  That’s so poor, Chris. That’s so disappointing.

  Have you ever seen a tumblebug, you know what they roll in . . . those little turds on the ground.

  You gone blind or what?

  Across town on the west side the mood was different. In subsequent weeks even the diehards wondered whether all the forces they saw working against them—socioeconomics, white flight, the psychological devastation of losing this game year after year after year—weren’t enough to make them finally throw in the towel. In a town where football mattered most, where it defined the mood and the psyche, who wanted to suffer through a drought that seemed destined to continue into the twenty-first century? Instead of having the two schools fight each other in a cause that seemed basically hopeless for Odessa High, why not combine them? One town, one school, and most attractive of all, one football team.

  “Look at how it would pull this community together,” reasoned Ken Hankins. “Look at what it would do to real estate values on the west side.”

  There were some convincing arguments for merging the schools. It would alleviate the perception of Odessa High as the “Mexican school,” which was having the inevitable effect of steering middle-class whites away from the west side. It would prevent a federal judge from coming into Odessa, as was his prerogative under the desegregation order, and changing the boundaries. It would put an end to the continual allegations that Permian recruited players who lived in the Odessa High district. It would also give Odessa High fans something to cheer about again, a football team that would undoubtedly be superb.

  Whatever the merits of the suggestion, unification of the schools was unlikely to happen. The Mojo mystique was a purely east-side creation, and Permian supporters would almost certainly put up a hellacious fight if they were suddenly told they had to share it with people who didn’t act like them or think like them.

  There was little doubt that Hispanics in Odessa, with their swelling population, were making inroads. In 1988, there was a Hispanic city councilman in Odessa, a Hispanic county commissioner, and a Hispanic member of the school board. There was also a visible and identifiable Hispanic professional class. As in many communities across the country, Hispanics in Odessa were considered a “sleeping giant,” with the potential of awesome political power if they ever started to vote in numbers that reflected their proportion of the population. It seemed inevitable that their political power would continue to grow. It was only a matter of time, many felt, before Hispanics comprised over 50 percent of the county’s population, and at least one former elected official predicted that the white professional class would ultimately disappear from Odessa completely and move to Midland.

  But for the moment the town was still very much dominated by whites—the mayor was white, the head of the school board was white, the chief of police was white, the superintendent of schools was white—and while Hispanics were accepted as part of the community, there was little evidence of whites openly embracing them beyond the widespread opinion that they generally worked harder than blacks did.

  The most telling proof of that attitude was the saga of Vickie Gomez. The first minority candidate ever elected to the board, her tenure had been as stirring as it was controversial. Uninterested in the good ol’ boy network that had sustained politics in Odessa for fifty years, every vote seemed to end up six to one, with the other six members voting for and Gomez voting against. She refused to equivocate on the issue of school desegregation, and in the Hispanic community she became an important, heroic voice. In 1988, she ran for reelection to the school board for a third time. In her previous bid she had won a district seat with a nucleus of support from the Southside minority community. But then she moved to the northeast part of town and had to run for reelection at-large.

  Gomez herself had known what was coming when she handed out campaign literature one day in the northeast. “I know who you are,” a white woman told her, staring her dead in the eye. “You might as well get your junk out of here.” With the entire community voting, her repudiation was stunning. Despite twelve years’ experience on the school board, she had received only 24 percent of the vote.

  “I knew there was a lot of concern in the majority community that ‘the Mexicans’ were taking over,” said Gomez, and she was convinced that she had gone down to defeat because whites viewed her as a threat, an encroachment. “I lost with twelve years’ experience,” she said. “That tells you something.” If the east side of town hadn’t embraced Vickie Gomez, it was hard to envision a scenario in which it would embrace a school merger with its west-side brethren.

  As a result, Ken Hankins’s suffering in the football stands seemed destined to continue. When he had taken his customary seat underneath the press box for the game, he privately believed it would take a miracle for Odessa High to win. As that spellbinding first drive unfolded to give Permian a 7-0 lead, Hankins knew it was over even though there were more than three quarters of football left to play. Clearly, tonight was not the night the Villaloboses and the Limons and the Martinezes would create a déjà vu of the Townsends and the Taylors and the Frys. Those days were over and they weren’t coming back. As his beloved Bronchos sputtered and fluttered against the endless siege of that black-shirted machine, all he could do was wait for the debacle to be over. Through his lips came a familiar, helpless mutter.

  “God dang, this is just typical.”

  (9)

  FRIDAY NIGHT POLITICS

  I

  Tickets for the showdown at Midland High didn’t go on sale until Tuesday afternoon, which explained why the first handful of Permian fans started camping outside the gate of Ratliff Stadium Sunday night.

  About fifty came together in the darkness. Once the gate was opened, others flooded in and began battening down for the thirty-six-hour vigil. Since many of them had done it before, there was no particular trick to it. Some spent the night in elaborate motor homes as long as railroad cars. Others slept in sleeping bags in the backs of their Suburbans, and others just caught a few winks in lawn chairs. During the day they used umbrellas to shield themselves from the West Texas sun. An Ector County sheriff’s deputy was on hand to make sure no fights broke out over who was where in line.

  By Tuesday afternoon the line snaked almost the length of the parking lo
t and 366 fans were in it. One Permian booster, surveying the happy, bleary-eyed skein of people waiting to buy tickets for what, on the surface at least, was just a high school football game, looking out over the parking lot filled on a workday afternoon not only with vehicles but with generators to power television sets and card tables for playing dominoes during the quiet hours before dawn, came to what seemed to be an inarguable conclusion: “Aren’t Mojo fans crazy sons of bitches?”

  Maybe they were, but the wait paid off. And when Friday night came round on the last day of September, roughly four thousand of them were crammed into the visitor’s side for the biggest district showdown of the season.

  To those who had fretted after the Marshall game, there was cause to breathe easier now. Mojo was back. The performance the week before against Odessa High, the methodical, relentless carving of Permian’s crosstown rival, had proven it. But as soon as the game ended, the not-so-subtle whispers started that the Midland High Bulldogs had the stuff to take Permian.

  Usually it was the other team in Midland, those bastard Lee Rebels, that gave Permian fits. But the Bulldogs were undefeated with a four and zero record and had stunned the Rebels the previous week in a 35-21 win. They were on a high, and first place in the district was at stake.

  At the end of practice during the middle of the week, as the final shadows of September crossed over the field and a merciful touch of coolness crept into the wind, Gaines gathered his players around him.

  “I guarantee you, men, it will be a sick, sick feeling if we go over there and play poorly,” he told them. “We’re not that talented. If we go over there and play poorly and lose, it’s somethin’ you’ll remember for a long, long time. Till the day you put your body in the ground, you’ll remember it.”