Friday Night Lights Read online

  Table of Contents

  Praise

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  PREFACE

  PROLOGUE

  PRE-SEASON

  (1) - ODESSA

  (2) - THE WATERMELON FEED

  (3) - BOOBIE

  I

  II

  III

  THE SEASON

  (4) - DREAMING OF HEROES

  I

  II

  III

  (5) - BLACK AND WHITE

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  (6) - THE AMBIVALENCE OF IVORY

  I

  II

  (7) - SCHOOL DAYS

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  (8) - EAST VERSUS WEST

  I

  II

  III

  (9) - FRIDAY NIGHT POLITICS

  I

  II

  (10) - BOOBIE WHO?

  I

  II

  PUSH FOR THE PLAYOFFS

  (11) - SISTERS

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  (12) - CIVIL WAR

  I

  II

  (13) - HEADS OR TAILS

  I

  II

  POST-SEASON

  (14) - FRIDAY NIGHT ADDICTION

  I

  II

  III

  (15) - THE ALGEBRAIC EQUATION

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  (16) - FIELD OF DREAMS

  I

  II

  III

  EPILOGUE

  AFTERWORD

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright Page

  NATIONWIDE ACCLAIM FOR FRIDAY NIGHT LIGHTS

  “Superb and disturbing. . . . More than a sports book, it’s a search for the America of ordinary people.”

  —Newsday

  “Bears comparison to the brightly illuminating fictional works of Ring Lardner and Jack London. . . . FRIDAY NIGHT LIGHTS is a book about lust and longing, aspiration and education, sex roles, race relations, economic uncertainty and national identity.”

  —Philadelphia Inquirer

  “A pressure-cooker of a book, it scalds . . . Bissinger touches the real boy in American manhood when he writes about game-time Friday night.”

  —Christian Science Monitor

  “Not only one of the best sports books in recent years, but one of the most revealing looks at America’s small-town values—good and bad—you are likely to read.”

  —Denver Post

  “A clear and chilling depiction. . . . An athletic Common Ground.”

  —Boston Herald

  “Bissinger’s book moves far beyond sport, in a telling, damning sociological sketch.”

  —Miami Herald

  “Penetrating and evocative. . . . A story that is bigger than Odessa, bigger than Texas for that matter. The undercurrents that shape society are all at play here.”

  —Milwaukee Journal

  “Moving and troubling. . . . Engrossing.”

  —Pittsburgh Press

  “A great job of capturing Odessa as it really is. . . . Readers who can read the book without applying their own emotions will find times when they want to cry.”

  —Odessa American

  “Fascinating and colorfully written.”

  —Boston Globe

  “Riveting. . . . Reads like a suspense story, a page-turner.”

  —Oakland Tribune

  To Howard, whom I miss. To Sarah, Gerry and Zachary, whom I love.

  In the Shreve High football stadium,

  I think of Polacks nursing long beers in Tiltonsville,

  And gray faces of Negroes in the blast furnace at

  Benwood,

  And the ruptured night watchman of Wheeling

  Steel,

  Dreaming of heroes.

  —FROM “Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio,” by James Wright

  PREFACE

  Maybe it was a suddenly acute awareness of being “thirtysomething.” Maybe it was where I lived, in a suburb of Philadelphia, in a house that looked like all the other ones on the block. Or maybe it was my own past as an addicted sports fan who had spent a shamelessly large part of life watching football and basketball and baseball. I just felt something pulling at me, nagging at me, a soft voice telling me to do it, to see for myself what was out there and make the journey before self-satisfaction crept in for good.

  The idea had been rattling in my head since I was thirteen years old, the idea of high school sports keeping a town together, keeping it alive. So I went in search of the Friday night lights, to find a town where they brightly blazed that lay beyond the East Coast and the grip of the big cities, a place that people had to pull out an atlas to find and had seen better times, a real America.

  A variety of names came up, but all roads led to West Texas, to a town called Odessa.

  It was in the severely depressed belly of the Texas oil patch, with a team in town called the Permian Panthers that played to as many as twenty thousand fans on a Friday night.

  Twenty thousand . . .

  I knew I had to go there.

  You drive into Odessa the first time and become immersed in a land so vast, so relentless, that something swells up inside, something that makes you feel powerless and insignificant. Pulling onto Highway 80, there is row after row of oil field machinery that no one has use for anymore. Farther on down comes a series of grimy motels that don’t have a single car parked in front of them.

  You come to the downtown, and even though it is the middle of the afternoon there isn’t another soul around. So you just walk in silence, past a couple of big buildings belonging to the banks, past a closed-down movie theater with the words THE END in crooked letters on the marquee, past a beige brick building where the old lettering saying JCPENNEY is still there, past a few restaurants and a lot of pawnshops.

  Farther east, past the gas stations and fast-food joints and the old civic center that looks like a brooding frown, there is a different Odessa. It is almost suburban, with a shiny mall and comfortable ranch houses, many of which have FOR SALE signs planted in the front lawns. Driving back south there is still another Odessa, called the Southside. It is across the tracks, and it is an area of town predominantly for minorities.

  Turning around again, heading north on Grandview back into those plains, there is a feeling of driving into the fathomless end of the earth. And then it rises out of nowhere, two enormous flanks of concrete with a sunken field in between. Gazing into that stadium, looking up into those rows that can seat twenty thousand, you wonder what it must be like on a Friday night, when the lights are on and the heart and soul of the town pours out over that field, across those endless plains.

  I visited Odessa in March of 1988. I met the coach of the Permian Panthers and relayed to him the intent of my journey, to live in Odessa for a year and spend a season with his football team. I talked to others, but mostly I just drove and looked.

  It became apparent that this was a town where high school football went to the very core of life. From the glimpses of the Southside and the FOR SALE signs and the unwanted machinery filling up the yards of Highway 80, it also became apparent that this was a town with many other currents running through it as well.

  There seemed to be an opportunity in Odessa to observe not simply the enormous effect of sports on American life, but other notions, for the values of Odessa were ones that firmly belonged to a certain kind of America, an America that existed beyond the borders of the Steinberg cartoon, an America of factory towns and farm towns and steel towns and sin
gle-economy towns all trying to survive.

  What were the attitudes toward race? What were the politics, and as the 1988 election approached, what did people want from their president? In a country that was having more and more difficulty teaching its young, what was the educational system like? What did people hold on to as they watched their economic lifeblood slip from them? What did they hold on to as they watched their country slip from them? What had happened to their America?

  My heart told me that I would find the answers to all these questions in Odessa, not because it was a Texas town, but an American one.

  I left my job as a newspaper editor for the Philadelphia Inquirer in July 1988 and moved to Odessa two weeks later. The following month I met the members of the 1988 Permian Panther football team, and for the next four months I was with them through every practice, every meeting, every game, to chronicle the highs and lows of being a high school football player in a town such as this. I went to school with them, and home with them, and rattlesnake hunting with them, and to church with them, because I was interested in portraying them as more than just football players, and also because I liked them.

  I talked with hundreds of people to try to capture the other aspects of the town that I had come to explore, the values about race and education and politics and the economy. Much of what I learned about the town came from these interviews, but some of it naturally came from the personal experience of living there, with a wife and five-year-old twin boys. Odessa very much became home for a year, a place where our kids went to school and we worked and voted and forged lasting friendships.

  It was in Odessa that I found those Friday night lights, and they burned with more intensity than I had ever imagined. Like thousands of others, I got caught up in them. So did my wife. So did my children. As someone later described it, those lights become an addiction if you live in a place like Odessa, the Friday night fix.

  But I also found myself haunted by something else, the words of a father with a son who had gone to Permian and had later become a world-class sprinter in track.

  He saw the irresistible allure of high school sports, but he also saw an inevitable danger in adults’ living vicariously through their young. And he knew of no candle that burned out more quickly than that of the high school athlete.

  “Athletics lasts for such a short period of time. It ends for people. But while it lasts, it creates this make-believe world where normal rules don’t apply. We build this false atmosphere. When it’s over and the harsh reality sets in, that’s the real joke we play on people. . . . Everybody wants to experience that superlative moment, and being an athlete can give you that. It’s Camelot for them. But there’s even life after it.”

  With the kind of glory and adulation these kids received for a season of their lives, I am not sure if they were ever encouraged to understand that. As I stood in that beautiful stadium on the plains week after week, it became obvious that these kids held the town on their shoulders.

  Odessa is the setting for this book, but it could be anyplace in this vast land where, on a Friday night, a set of spindly stadium lights rises to the heavens to so powerfully, and so briefly, ignite the darkness.

  PROLOGUE

  If the season could ever have any salvation, if it could ever make sense again, it would have to come tonight under a flood of stars on the flatiron plains, before thousands of fans who had once anointed him the chosen son but now mostly thought of him as just another nigger.

  He felt good when he woke up in the little room that was his, with the poster of Michael Jordan taped to the wall. He felt good as he ate breakfast and talked to his uncle, L. V., who had rescued him from a foster home when he had been a little boy, who had been the one to teach him the game and had shown him how to cut for the corner and swivel his hips and use the stiff arm.

  L. V. still had inescapable visions of his nephew—Boobie Miles as the best running back in the history of Permian High School, Boobie as the best high school running back in the whole damn state of Texas, Boobie as belle of the ball at Nebraska or Texas A & M or one of those other fantastic college casinos, Boobie as winner of the Heisman. He couldn’t get those dreams out of his head, couldn’t let go of them. And neither, of course, could Boobie.

  There were still some questions about the knee, about how ready Boobie was after the injury two months earlier that had required arthroscopic surgery (they had a tape of it that L. V., who was out of work because of the slump in the oil field, sometimes watched in the afternoon darkness of the living room, just as he sometimes watched other pivotal moments of his nephew’s football career).

  The Cooper Cougars had thrashed Boobie pretty badly the previous week down in Abilene, headhunting for him to the point that he had to be restrained from getting into a fistfight. But he had held up under the physical punishment, two or three or four tacklers driving into him on many of the plays, the risk always there that they would take a sweet shot at his knee, smash into that still-tender mass of cartilage and ligament with all their might and see how tough the great Boobie Miles really was, see how quickly he got up off the ground after a jolting thwack that sounded like a head-on car collision, see how much he liked the game of football now as fear laced through him and the knee began to feel as tender to the touch as the cheek of a baby, see how the future winner of the Heisman felt as he lay there on the clumpy sod with those Cooper Cougars taunting through the slits in their helmets:Com’on, Boobie, you tough motherfucker, com’on, let’s see how tough you are!

  Com’on, get up, get up!

  You ain’t nothin’ but a pussy, a goddamn pussy!

  He had made it through, he had survived, although it was clear to everyone that he wasn’t the same runner of the year before, the instinct and the streak of meanness replaced by an almost sad tentativeness, a groping for feeling and moments and movements that before had always come as naturally as the muscles that rippled through his upper torso.

  But there was a fire in his belly this morning, an intensity and sense of purpose. This game wasn’t against a bunch of goody-two-shoes hacks from Abilene, the buckle of the West Texas Bible Belt. It was against Midland Lee—Permian’s arch-rivals—the Rebels, those no-good son-of-a-bitch bastard Rebels—under the Friday night lights for the district championship before a crowd of fifteen thousand. If Permian won, it was guaranteed a trip to the most exciting sporting event in the entire world, the Texas high school football playoffs, and a chance to make it all the way, to go to State. Anybody who had ever been there knew what a magic feeling that was, how it forever ranked up there with the handful of other magic feelings you might be lucky enough to have in your life, like getting married or having your first child.

  After tonight, Boobie knew the fans would be back in his corner extolling him once again, the young kids who were counting off the years until their own sun-kissed moment excitedly whispering to one another as he walked down the street or through the mall. There he is! That’s Boobie! There he is! The big-time college recruiters would come charging back as well, the boys from Nebraska and Texas A & M and Arkansas and all the others who before the injury had come on to him as shamelessly as a street whore supporting a drug habit, telling him in letter after letter what a fine-looking thing he was with that six-foot, two-hundred-pound frame of his and that 4.6 speed in the forty and how sweet he would look in a uniform in Norman or College Station or Fayetteville and how he should just stick with me, sugar, I’ll take good care of you. They would all be there pleading for him, just as they had before the knee injury, before his dreams had so horribly unraveled.

  He felt good when he left the little white house that he lived in, where a green pickup truck sat in the bare, litter-strewn yard like a wrecked boat washed up on the shore. He felt good as he made his way out of the Southside part of town, the place where the low-income blacks and Mexicans lived, and crossed the railroad tracks as he headed for Permian over on the northeast side of town, the fancy side of town, the white side of town.
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  He felt good as he walked into the locker room of the Permian field house that morning and pulled on his jersey with the number 35 on it. He felt good at the pep rally as he and his teammates sat at the front of the gym in little metal chairs that were adorned with dozens of black and white balloons, the decorations making them look like little boys attending a gigantic birthday party. The wild cheering of the entire student body, two thousand strong, above him in the bleachers, the sweet hiss of the pom-poms from the cheerleaders, the sexy preening of the majorettes in their glittery black costumes with hair as intricately laced as frozen drizzles of ice and their tender Marilyn Monroe smiles, the way the lights dimmed during the playing of the alma mater, the little gifts of cookies and candy and cakes from the Pepettes, the pandemonium that broke loose when defensive back Coddi Dean gave the last lines of his verse—The moral is obvious, it’s plain to see

  Tonight at Ratliff Stadium, we’re gonna stomp on Lee!

  —all these things only energized Boobie Miles even more. The feeling came back to him now, the cockiness, the “attitude” as his teammates liked to call it, the self-confidence that had caused him to gain 1,385 yards the previous season and knock vaunted linebackers semi-unconscious. As he sat there, surrounded by all that pulsating frenzy, he could envision sitting in this very same spot a week from now, acknowledging the cheers of the crowd as he picked up the Superstar of the Week award from one of the local television stations for his outstanding performance against the Rebels.

  “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,