Friday Night Lights

by H. G. Bissinger

  Sharon Gaines met her husband in his office, which was filled with the usual stock-in-trade of a football coach: a helmet mounted on a pedestal, pictures of his two children, several footballs etched with fading script to commemorate wonderful wins, a map with a huge arrow pointing to MO-JOLAND, smiling portraits of him and his assistants in better days before the season had ever started, a little plaque commemorating Permian as the team with the best winning percentage in all of Texas in the decade of the seventies. He had spent so much time in the lousy light of a film projector in that office, watching play after play in the creep of slow motion for a secret, a clue—a raised shoulder, an extra sliver of space between the guard and the tackle—focusing on the seemingly imperceptible details of those grainy images as intently as a scholar pores over a rare manuscript. The time he spent coaching seemed unimaginable. Like a soldier of fortune, he kissed his wife and children goodbye in August and almost literally did not see them again for the next four months, until the conquest of a state championship ended in victory or defeat. And now it all seemed worthless.

  His ear had been throbbing for about two months, and it was just one of several ailments that had come up during the course of the season. He was glassy-eyed and barely able to say a word, his thoughts still fixed on what had happened on the field, on what had gone wrong and whether it was somehow his fault. Sharon handed him the medication for his ear. She hugged him briefly, her eyes closing tight. He didn’t respond and she quickly withdrew, for she knew that he was lost to her, in his own world of shame and defeat. He hated to lose, absolutely hated it, and of all the losses, this may well have been the most devastating one.

  She quietly left the field house and sat outside for a few minutes in the parking lot in her car. Her face peered out from the driver’s window in the darkness and she too looked tired and exhausted, as if she had been out there with him on the field in those waning, helpless moments after the final pass from Winchell had fallen so pathetically incomplete and the ten thousand strong on the Permian side had collapsed into a shocked hush.

  A wealth of feelings bubbled up inside her. She knew firsthand how high the stakes were in Odessa, how “goin’ to State” was not something merely desired but demanded. It made her husband’s job exciting and wonderful and it gave her some glamour as well.

  If you took a poll, few people in town could tell you who the mayor was, or the police chief, or the city manager. Hardly anybody could tell you the name of a city councilman, or a county commissioner, or the head of the public works department, or the planning department, or the fire department. Those were jobs nobody cared about in Odessa unless a house burned down or a sewer line backed up. But just about everybody could tell you who the coach of Permian High School was, and that rubbed off on her.

  Her daughter Nicole had often joked with her, “If Daddy dies, and you would be nothing.” But during the past three years, sitting in the stands week after week had become a nightmare for her as she listened to the fans tear apart her husband and the teenagers who played for him with unrelenting venom, not caring one whit that she, the wife of the coach, was sitting within easy earshot. Sometimes she couldn’t stand it and had to move to one of the portals to get away from it all.

  “I don’t think they realize these are sixteen, seventeen, eighteen-year-old kids,” she once said. “I don’t think they realize these are coaches. They are men, they are not gods. They don’t realize it’s a game and they look at them like they’re professional football players. They are kids, high school kids, the sons of somebody, and they expect them to be perfect.”

  Yes, they did, and they had too much invested in it emotionally to ever change. Permian football had become too much a part of the town and too much a part of their own lives, as intrinsic and sacred a value as religion, as politics, as making money, as raising children. That was the nature of sports in a town like this. Football stood at the very core of what the town was about, not on the outskirts, not on the periphery. It had nothing to do with entertainment and everything to do with how people felt about themselves.

  “They don’t have any idea about the coaches and the time they put in and the dedication,” she said. “They don’t have any idea, and they don’t care. They don’t have any idea of what the families give up.”

  She remembered the cruelty of the 1986 season, her husband’s first, when Odessa was going through the worst economic crisis in its history. Everywhere you looked someone was filing for bankruptcy, or throwing his belongings into a U-Haul to find another job up in the rustbelt or snowbelt or crimebelt from which he thought he had escaped. If there had ever been a time that the city needed a lift it was then, and Permian did not even make the playoffs for the first time in the entire decade. People had savagely ripped into Gaines then, as if the seven and two record the team compiled was the same as not winning a single game.

  She remembered how, after that season, Nicole announced one day that she was too sick to go to school. Later that afternoon she bounded into the garage bubbly and obviously healthy. It then dawned on Sharon that there was nothing physically wrong with her daughter at all, that she simply did not want to go to school because of what other kids might say about her father. She had hated that year. She never wanted to relive it. And now it all seemed to be happening again.

  With the 22-21 loss to Midland Lee there was a three-way tie for first place in the district with one game left. Since only two teams went to the playoffs, there was now the distinct possibility of Permian’s not making it. The repercussions of that made her shudder. Her voice turned reedy and high-pitched as she imagined what might happen if Permian didn’t make the playoffs. “If we don’t, we may be saying goodbye to our sweet little ol’ house,” she said outside the field house, and the intent of her words was obvious: she was afraid that her husband was going to get fired, or simply be forced to leave because of the avalanche of criticism against him.

  It wasn’t an irrational thought, for there was no profession in the state of Texas with worse job security than that of high school football coach. Coaches were fired all the time for poor records. Sometimes it happened with the efficiency of a bloodless coup—one day the coach was there at the office decorated in the school colors and the next day he was gone, as if he had never existed. But sometimes he was paraded before school board meetings to be torn apart by the public in a scene like something out of the Salem witch trials, or had several thousands of dollars’ worth of damage done to his car by rocks thrown by irate fans, or responded to a knock on the door to find someone with a shotgun who wasn’t there to fire him but to complain about his son’s lack of playing time.

  When Gaines himself went home that Friday night at about two in the morning he found seven FOR SALE signs planted in his lawn. The next night, someone had also smashed a pumpkin into his car, causing a dent. It didn’t bother him. He was the coach. He got paid for what he did and he was tough enough to take it. But he did get upset when he heard that several FOR SALE signs had also been punched into Chavez’s lawn. Brian was just a player, a senior in high school, but that didn’t seem to matter. “That’s sick to me,” said Gaines. “I just can’t understand it.”

  The following Tuesday, as he drove downtown to the bus station to pick up some game films of the team’s final opponent, the San Angelo Central Bobcats, he was still grappling with the loss. “It shakes your confidence, it shakes the heck out of it,” he said. “It’s been miserable, just miserable.

  “I’m going to work as hard as I can and do the best job that I possibly can,” he said. “If it doesn’t work and I’m not needed, I’ll move on. I have put everything I’ve got into it and if that’s not enough, the good Lord can guide me in another direction.” He was silent for a few seconds, and then he said something else about what it was like to have the job he had in a place like Odessa.

  “You can’t really describe how high you can be or how low you can be. I think that’s a truism in coaching, but that’s especially true here
.”

  If he was looking for any reprieve from the fans in the succeeding days, he wasn’t going to get it. A few, like Bobby Boyles, rose to his defense. Boyles was a die-hard booster, one of those who set his life each fall to the clock of the season. He and his wife sat there at the booster club meeting every Tuesday night and at the junior varsity game every Thursday night and at the varsity game every Friday night, wearing their black as proudly as a priest wears his collar. He needed Permian football as much as anyone, but he couldn’t stand the attacks on Gaines. He was sitting at the Kettle restaurant over on Andrews when someone came round to the table the Monday after the game to ask him to sign a petition to get Gaines fired, and he bluntly told the person, “Go to hell.”

  “Lose two games by two points and they’re ready to hang ’im,” he said quietly at the booster club meeting that Tuesday night following the loss to the Rebels. “What it is, they’re spoiled. They’ve won too damn many. They need about five years of losing and then they’d think Gary was great.”

  Boyles called Gaines at home to say he was still with him. “Gary,” he told him, “They’re ready to kill you, but I’m still your friend.” But Boyles was clearly in the minority.

  Phones rang off the hook. Ken Scates, who had religiously followed the team since its inception in 1959, couldn’t remember a time when everyone had been so upset. Name the last time a Permian team had been favored by three touchdowns and had lost! You couldn’t do it. It had never happened.

  At the barbershop and on the practice field and in restaurants, fans and parents and even the boys who played for him had trouble looking Gaines in the face. He hadn’t cheated anybody. He hadn’t committed fraud. He hadn’t physically harmed someone. But it seemed as if he had violated some sacred public trust.

  “I got a different opinion of Coach Gaines,” said Clint Duncan, the team’s starting center. “I think he blew that game. I just can’t look at him, because it still makes me mad....”

  How could he have called the plays he did? What had happened to him in the second half, going time and time again with those plodding, thudding sweeps? Didn’t he remember the gorgeous bomb Winchell had thrown in the second quarter, so perfect it was like something in a dream, Hill’s splitting three members of the Lee secondary like an ax to a log, and that ball lingering in those lights as twinkling and gorgeous as a shooting star? Hadn’t he understood the power of that, the beauty?

  The pressure had gotten to him, that’s all Gaines’s detractors could figure. The idea of beating Lee was too much for him, and that cocky son-of-a-bitch of a coach over there, Earl Miller, with that twang of his as thick as a T-bone, had done it to him again, sent him home like a scalded dog. Gaines had now not beaten Lee in any of his three seasons—three seasons! If there was anything more shameful to Permian fans, it was hard to know what it could possibly be.

  In the minds of those against him, the Lee game only proved what they had suspected all along: under the heat of those Friday night lights, lights that many a man had wilted under, Gaines had gone big-time belly up.

  And there were many who thought it was time to do what had to be done, fire his butt and get someone else who could make these kids into winners, restore some discipline to this group that was too busy drinking their six-packs and getting horny on Ecstasy and listening to all that strange rap shit over their Walkmans to perform their job as football players for Permian High School. Where the hell had Mojo pride been in this game? Where had the fire in the belly been, the ability to suck it up and play four quarters, to do whatever it took to get the job done—all those things that had become part of the heritage of the town itself?

  Following the circulation of the petition, a letter to the editor appeared in the Odessa American that said the following:No matter how talented the team, Gary Gaines will never take a Mojo team to the state finals. What he said proves he is incompetent. Quote: “It doesn’t matter if you win or lose if two good teams are playing.” Never in the history of sports has anything been more ludicrously said. He talks like a coach, he acts like a coach, but he is not a football coach. Gaines could take the untied, undefeated 1972 Mojo state champions and play Lee’s worst team, and Gaines would lose. You can bet on it. Around this area, there could have been several jackets with “state champions” on them. I feel so sorry for all the teams that could have had this. The downfall of mighty Mojo is going to be called Gary Gaines.

  There were many letters in the Odessa American, but none made a more personal attack than this one.

  Gaines himself tried to shield his wife from seeing the letter because he knew that she would be hurt by it. They had been living this kind of life for seventeen years now, ever since Gaines had gotten his first coaching job in Fort Stockton, and over time Sharon had built up a certain immunity. The FOR SALE signs in the lawn didn’t really bother her, since the same thing had happened before in Monahans. On that occasion she had left a party over at the bank to get some ice when she drove by the house and saw them. She quickly pulled them up and threw them into the car, scratching it in the process. But that was the price she had to pay for not letting her children see them.

  Her husband still knew that the hardest part of the criticism wasn’t what it did to him but what it did to his family. “That’s what I worry about,” he said, “their ability to fight back at things they don’t have any control over, hearing things you can’t really refute, innuendos. I’m big enough to handle it. Certainly my hide’s a little bit bigger than theirs is.”

  He hid the paper from her that night and put it in the trash, but when she got to her job as an elementary school teacher the next morning there were all these notes of condolences from other teachers as if someone had died. She read the letter and then called her husband. The second she heard his voice she started to sob. She knew the endless hours he put in, getting up at four-thirty every morning and often not getting home until midnight. She knew that he cared about the kids as much as any coach could within a system that demanded winning at virtually any cost. She knew the intolerable pressure he was under during the season. She called the publisher and canceled their subscription. The paper came for a few days after that, and her husband, aware of how upset she was, quietly read it on the porch instead of bringing it into the house.

  Not every attack was so blatantly vitriolic as the letter, but around town came the suggestion that it was time to bring back the man whose initials had been A.G. when he had been here, short for Almost God.

  His real name was John Wilkins, and he was a cold, aloof man with a pair of bottomless eyes that one coach up in the Panhandle said reminded him of Charles Manson’s. Odessans had never paid too much attention to his eyes, or to the fact that many who played for him disliked him and felt little emotional warmth for him. They looked at his record, 148 games won (55 of them by shutout), 16 lost, and two state championships over a thirteen-year period that had ended at the completion of the 1985 season, when he became athletic director for the county.

  Wilkins, when he had been the coach at Permian, had had a very realistic view of his role. He knew that he wasn’t close to the players, and he knew he sometimes rode them harder than he should. But he never believed the role of a coach was to build character or lasting relationships. The role of a coach was to win, because this was high school football and this was Odessa.

  “You don’t keep your job on how many good guys you turn out,” said Wilkins. “In this state, in this community, the bottom line is how many games you win. All the other B.S. aside, a guy can’t stay out there unless he’s really successful.”

  His nickname hadn’t always been A.G. When Permian failed to make the playoffs his second year in Odessa, there were many who thought he had had ample opportunity to prove himself and it was time to smoke his butt out of town. “It’s tough, it’s tough for your wife and children to sit up there and listen to some of the stuff they have to listen to,” he said.

  His pursuit to win a state championship became a
ruthless obsession, say those who worked for him, for he knew that anything less would not be enough. It wasn’t uncommon for players to see him throwing up before a game because not only did he want to win, he had to win.

  “If you’re gonna have a pleasant stay here, you need to win some ball games,” said Wilkins. “You need to win. I don’t think the school system would fire anybody. I don’t think they’d have to. The situation would become intolerable for a man and his family.”

  When Wilkins was coach, fans had been afraid to speak during practice for fear he would shoot them down with those terrifying eyes and that lurched, stunted way he had of speaking, the words coming out in tiny sentences with long pauses in between, as if he was physically straining to stop the coils of his body from bursting open. Wilkins also got absolutely livid when something hadn’t been done right, every now and then taking the little cards that had diagrams of plays on them and throwing them in the air in exasperation. Many of the boosters had felt intimidated by him. Many of the players had felt intimidated by him. After their careers were over they hated how he barely even said hello to them anymore, as if they no longer had value, as if all they had ever been were slabs of steak for the voracious beast of Permian football.