Friday Night Lights

by H. G. Bissinger

  “I was only out there because it’s football, Brian Chavez is out there because he’s a football player.”

  Jerrod McDougal tried to adjust to a life that no longer included Permian football.

  “A lot of people tell me to let it go, to let it go,” said Jerrod. “You just can’t let somethin’ like that go. It’s like you’re married for thirty years and all of a sudden you get a divorce. You don’t just stop lovin’ somethin’. You just don’t give the better part of your life away and just stop thinkin’ about it. You just don’t do it.

  “I’m only eighteen. I spent six years working for it, and all the time before thinkin’ about it. When I got to the eighth grade, I found out I wasn’t going to be able to play college ball. Shit, high school ball was the best thing for me. And now it’s history.

  “I’ve got no idea what I want to do. I’ve got no idea what school I’m going to go to. If I had a choice. I don’t have a choice. My SAT won’t be worth a shit. And no football school wants me. I’m just average, really. I won’t be valedictorian like Brian. The thing was, grades weren’t that hard for me to make. I wish now I had tried harder in my studies.”

  Jerrod toyed with the idea of going to Australia, but elected to stay in Odessa and in the fall of 1989 was working for his father’s company. During the football season he went to the game against crosstown rival Odessa High.

  “I want to play football bad,” he said on his way to the game, still driving his praying mantis of a pickup and wearing his letter jacket. “There isn’t a day I don’t think about it. There isn’t an hour.”

  The stadium was filled to capacity, with over twenty thousand fans shaking the beautiful night. “Man, it gives me the chills,” said Jerrod as Permian quickly scored to take a 7-0 lead. But as he continued to watch all the sights, the images, he grew quieter and quieter.

  “What hurts so bad about it, I was a part of it for a while. The thing is, it always goes on, it will never stop,” Jerrod said. “Permian will have good teams when you and I are dead and gone.”

  A month later he stood on the sidelines as Permian played the Rebels in Midland, and he sardonically referred to himself and the other former teammates who showed up as part of the “has-been club.” This game too had a capacity crowd. Tears came to his eyes when the Permian band played the old psych-up song, “Hawaii 5-0.” Late in the fourth quarter, with Permian desperately trying to hold on to a 17-13 lead and beat Midland Lee for the first time in four years, he cheered crazily. When Permian staved the Rebels off on the last play of the game at the five-yard line, pandemonium broke out.

  The Lee players were in tears, doubled over in agony. The Permian players were in tears, standing with their helmets held high. And in the middle of it all was Jerrod. The moment the game ended he ran out onto the field and draped his arms around a player. He hugged him as hard as he could, and his eyes closed tight.

  For the briefest of moments, he was back where he wanted to be.

  Don Billingsley split up from his father shortly after the season ended. Their living together had always been a rough road, and without the common bond of football it seemed harder than ever for them to stay together.

  After graduation he returned to Blanchard, Oklahoma, to live with his mother and stepfather. As had been his habit through much of high school in Odessa, he continued to drink heavily. He went through a bottle of whiskey every other day. But one night, after he came home so drunk he did not know where he had been, he decided to quit.

  “I started gettin’ afraid that I was gonna die,” said Don. “I was just tired of drinkin’ and druggin’ and women. I just needed somethin’ else.” He turned to religion. He was saved and then baptized in July 1989.

  Don believed he had been on the verge of becoming an alcoholic. The past three years he had spent in Odessa were wild ones, and he thought it would have been almost impossible to quit drinking there because of the peer pressure and the need to maintain his reputation as the ultimate party animal. A further impetus for his reformation came when a former Permian player he had known killed himself.

  He received no scholarship offers and decided to walk on at East Central University in Ada, Oklahoma. The program there didn’t compare to Permian’s. The weight room was the size of a shower stall. The games attracted three hundred fans instead of the thousands that he was used to. “In high school football there’s a bond,” he said. “Here, it’s just someone you see every day. In the field house it was like a family, more family than I had in three years.”

  Don sometimes wondered what his life would have been like if he had stayed put in Oklahoma instead of moving to Odessa for the sole purpose of playing football for Permian. He had been a starter on the Blanchard team as a freshman. By the time he was a senior he would have been the big star, and that might have put him in a better position to get an athletic scholarship.

  But Don would not have traded his Permian experience for anything. Like many players, he talked about it as if it had been a fantastic dream. He missed all of it, the locker room, the games, the girls who adored him and followed him through the school corridors. And he also talked about how hard it was to go back to the locker room after it was over and realize that you weren’t a part of it anymore. Like Jerrod McDougal, he couldn’t help but feel like a has-been.

  Don made the team at East Central. But in the middle of the 1989 season he had arthroscopic surgery on his knee. Ever since he had injured it while playing for Permian his senior year, it hadn’t been the same.

  Mike Winchell, despite setting career records at Permian for most yards passing, most passes attempted, most passes completed, and most touchdown passes, was not offered a single scholarship.

  “It’s just so frustrating to me that I can’t get anything going. It just bothers me,” said Gaines. But he also wondered if the perspective placed on football in Odessa sometimes created a false reality.

  “We have a unique situation here because football is so important,” said Gaines. “I guess there’s such a thing as just being a good high school football player. And I guess being a high school football player doesn’t mean you’re going to be a good collegiate player.”

  When a recruiter from Yale called to see if Permian might have any potential candidates, Gaines eagerly gave him Winchell’s name. He seemed to possess the football skill, and he had the grades, with a class rank in the top tenth. But his board scores, although significantly above the Permian average, were 1000. He filled out some forms and did some reading on Yale to find out where it was and what it was like.

  When one of the coaches called, Mike answered the phone with a mouthful of doughnut, and he became painfully self-conscious of his West Texas twang. He was convinced the coach thought he was the dumbest hick ever to walk the earth. But, the accent of the coach sounded foreign to Mike as well.

  He heard nothing back from Yale, and it was all for the best anyway. “I’d never been around nothin’ like that,” he said. “It would be too much culture shock. My mind would go berserk and I wouldn’t be able to study. I wouldn’t fit in there, that’s what it was.”

  Mike’s brother, Joe Bill, did what he could. He called the University of Texas coach, David McWilliams, almost a dozen times, but was always told he was in a meeting and couldn’t come to the phone. He called the University of Nevada-Las Vegas, but after a flurry of correspondence no one there was very interested either.

  “I knew I wasn’t a hot commodity,” said Mike, “but I thought there’d be a little interest.” And he felt that most recruiters viewed him as the typical Permian player—disciplined, well trained in the technique of the game, with all talent already drawn from him.

  During the summer, while hammering in nails to build a fence, he thought about himself and his life. He realized that he agonized over everything all the time, and he admitted that part of the problem in the Carter game had been his own lack of belief in his abilities. He knew the reason why he was like this, that it was the price he had p
aid for carefully watching out for himself ever since he had been a little boy. “I’ve never taken a chance in life,” he said. “I need to run in front of traffic buck-naked and get arrested.”

  He went to Baylor and joined the team as a walk-on. He practiced but did not make the traveling squad. There were no miracles at Baylor, just the same haunting inconsistency, which Mike summed up with his own characteristic assessment.

  “One day I throw the ball like Roger Staubach, one day like Roger Rabbit.”

  Ivory Christian was offered a football scholarship by Texas Christian University in February.

  He was the only player on the Permian team recruited by a Division I school. He expected to be red-shirted and not play his freshman year, but because of injuries he saw a great deal of time at middle linebacker for the Horned Frogs. He made nearly a dozen tackles against Southwest Conference rival Texas A & M, and then started against both Southern Mississippi and Southern Methodist. With several games still left in the 1989 season, he was happy with his performance and playing time. But he found it did not match the feeling of playing for Permian. Although he had vacillated between loving Permian football and despising it, he found himself missing it more than he had ever imagined he would, and he said that playing against the Midland Lee Rebels had been more exciting than playing against Texas A & M.

  He was treated well at TCU and lived in a nice dorm along with other athletes and had a nice room. Because of TCU, he had become the first person in his family to go to college. But it was hard not to feel unsettled. When he looked around the campus the only blacks he saw were athletes, and sports seemed to be their only reason for being at the school. And sometimes, it often felt as if he wasn’t playing football so much as working at it, getting up every day at six to make study hall, then going to practices and meetings from two in the afternoon to six-thirty in the evening.

  But Ivory now knew exactly what he wanted to do. He no longer preached. He no longer had the aspiration of becoming the pastor of the biggest Baptist church in California, or getting a doctorate in theology, or being addressed as “Dr. Christian.” He had also dropped the ambition of majoring in business administration—it seemed like too much work considering the demands made on him in football. He had decided instead to major in criminal justice so he could become a policeman if he couldn’t realize his newfound dream of playing pro football. Although he was a superb athlete, the odds of that happening seemed remote because of his relatively small size. At five eleven, he would have to be nothing short of remarkable. But that was his new aspiration.

  At Permian, he had felt a strong sense of comradeship with those he played with. He missed the magic of those Friday nights. The wearing of the black and white, as he looked back on it, had meant something special. At TCU the feelings were different. “Out here,” he said of the life of a major college football player, “it’s who can stand out and can make it to the pros.”

  Boobie Miles moved back home with his uncle a few days before Christmas in 1988.

  Although the big-time schools had stopped calling, several junior colleges in Texas were interested, and L.V. thought maybe that was better anyway for his nephew. “Boobie ain’t no book genius, and the transition [to a four-year institution] might be more than he could handle.”

  Far from becoming soured on football because of what the two of them had been through, L.V. was as positive as ever. “I told him what we’re gonna do now, we’re going to start working towards the Heisman.” Boobie received a scholarship offer from Ranger Junior College in Ranger, Texas, and accepted it. He too tried to be as positive as possible.

  “I think it kind of teaches me a lesson,” he said of the injury that had ruined his senior year. “I had fame and glory and all that and the Lord took it away. I kind of had the big head, and he took it away from me.”

  But it was still impossible sometimes not to wonder what would have happened if he hadn’t gotten hurt. “We could have gone to State. I could have had a better scholarship. But right now, I’m happy with what I’ve got. I’ve got a scholarship I didn’t think I was gonna get. If I do good, I could go somewhere in a year.”

  Most of the Permian coaching staff gave Boobie little chance of playing effectively again. They figured he would get to Ranger and quit in a couple of weeks when he wasn’t coddled.

  After graduating from Permian, he went to Ranger and became the only freshman starter in the backfield.

  On a clear November day in 1989, the Ranger Junior College Rangers took on the Navarro Junior College Bulldogs before a homecoming crowd of five hundred. The fans sat on a pair of rickety bleachers. In the press box the announcer, standing up with a microphone in his hand, gave the players funny nicknames and made up fake scores from the Mexican Hockey League. A sharp wind came in, past the yellowed grass of the field, past a little metal fence, past the barracks-style buildings that comprised the tiny campus.

  Boobie wore number 3 and looked gorgeous and powerful. But he was buried mercilessly by the Bulldogs, the number-one-rated junior college team in the country. He juked and spun and did all the things that L.V. had taught him, but without much success.

  “Com’on!” yelled a teammate from the sideline. “Lower your shoulder and run over his ass! Stop jukin!’”

  L.V. watched silently from the bleachers. He had gotten off the late shift at the Exxon station where he was working and had made the two-hundred-mile trip to Ranger from Odessa with some friends. “Couple of years of this, he’ll be ready,” said L.V. as he watched Boobie get battered by the Navarro defense on the way to a 31-0 loss.

  Navarro was a strong team, but Boobie clearly wasn’t the same runner he had once been. He was as fearless as ever, but his knee was still weak and swelled up easily with fluid. Because of the protective braces that he wore on both knees to prevent further injury, he no longer had the breakaway speed that the big-time college recruiters had once upon a time found so enticing.

  A person like me can’t be stopped. If I put it in my mind, they can’t stop me . . . ain’t gonna stop me.

  See if I can get a first down. Keep pumping my legs up, spin out of it, go for a touchdown, go as far as I can.

  Those words were just a memory now.

  “I’ve never seen that burst of speed,” said the head coach of Ranger, Joe Crousen. “I don’t know how many times he got caught from behind.

  “It’s hard when you have greatness and it’s taken from you and you just can’t get it back in your hands.”

  Boobie seemed frustrated and discouraged after the Navarro game. But L.V., as always, was there to console him and give him support and keep the dream alive. He told him that his offensive line had been just about hopeless and there wasn’t much a running back could do if the people in front of him didn’t know how to block.

  They stood together, talking softly, sometimes not talking at all, but drawing strength from one another in the absence of anyone else. In the fading afternoon light of Ranger, Texas, with that bitter wind blowing across the field, flanked by the malarial yellow of the dormitory where Boobie lived, they looked quite beautiful.

  The city of Odessa moved forward with some signs of economic relief. The price of oil itself hovered around $20 a barrel for much of 1989, an improvement of roughly $5 a barrel over 1988, and there were even predictions that a worldwide shortage might push the price of oil even higher. People in Odessa had been burned so many times by predictions that they tended not to pay much attention to them, but there was a belief that at least things could not get worse.

  Whatever happened, it seemed clear that the fate of Odessa lay in the hands of others. Like the automobile industry, and the steel industry, and the semiconductor industry, the domestic oil industry had become a follower on the world market. The decline in U.S. oil production in 1989, 6.8 percent, was the largest drop ever in any single year. Imports rose to 46 percent, their highest level in twelve years, and OPEC’s noose around the West Texas oil patch was as tight as it had ever be
en.

  Outside of the economic news, there wasn’t much change in other areas. A new quality-of-life study came out in the fall of 1989, and as usual, Odessa distinguished itself. The revised volume of the Places Rated Almanac rated Odessa the second worst place to live in the country out of the 333 that were studied. Odessa, according to the almanac, had the worst health care in the country and ranked in the bottom twenty-five in the categories of transportation, jobs, and recreation. Some folks were upset with the ranking, but after a few outbursts life went on as normal, and people latched on to the same things they always had.

  The speeches were the same, and so were the looks on the faces. It could have been Brian Chavez, or Jerrod McDougal, or Mike Winchell, or Ivory Christian, or Boobie Miles. But it was December of 1989 now instead of December of 1988 and the names were Arvey Villa and Kevin Mannix and Chris Comer and Stony Case and Johnny Celey and Jeff Garrett. Otherwise, everything seemed untouched, a cycle destined to repeat itself forever, an interchangeable set of boys all captive to the same dream. Goin’ to State.

  About an hour before game time, Mike Belew met with the defensive ends.

  “They say they’re gonna shut us out and say they’re gonna beat us like Yates did and all that. That’s hard for me to live with, men. That hurts my pride a little bit. It hurts for myself. It hurts me for you guys, and for everybody from West Texas, everybody from Odessa. They slandered us in the paper, and now, by God, we’re gonna take care of business out there on the field, okay? We’re gonna make it all even on the football field today.

  “This is something that you dream about and I’m sure you’re just like every other little boy that grew up in Odessa, you thought about playin’ for Permian. Golly, men, here you are in the big ’un, in the big house, it’s gonna be on TV, you got all the elements.