Friday Night Lights: A Town, a Team, and a Dream (25 page)

Aware of his image as the best-looking guy at Permian and
fortunate enough not to have school interfere with the responsibilities that came with such a title, much of his day was spent
flirting either silently with his eyes or with his benign naughtiness in the classroom. He might not be learning anything, but
school was a blast and everywhere he looked he was fending off
girls-the one who sat behind him in government and wanted
a relationship (I)on had to explain to her gently but firmly that
he didn't "do" relationships), the one who sat behind him in
food science (he went out with her for a while but it wasn't what
he was looking for), the one who came up to him in the hallway.

Then there was the girl who had been dubbed the "book
bitch." So desperate was she to ingratiate herself with the football players that she bought one of them a brand-new backpack
and then offered him fifty dollars to sleep with her. When that
didn't work, she offered to bring the books of several of them
to class. Dutifully, she waited in the hallway, whereupon Don
and some others loaded her down with books so she could
trudge off to class with them with a slightly chagrined smile on
her face, as if she knew that what she was doing was the price
you paid for trying to gain the acceptance of the football players when you had blemishes on your face and didn't look like
Farrah Fawcett.

Don was clearly not motivated to be a scholar. His class rank
at Permian going into his senior year was the second lowest of
any senior on the football team, 480 out of 720. He reveled in
playing the Sean Penn role in his own version of Fast Times at
Ridgemont High, but beneath all that was a witty, personable kid.
During the fall he was voted Mr. PHS, an honor that delighted
his classmates and stunned the hell out of his teachers and
coaches. The nondemanding, lethargic nature of the classes he
was in made it difficult to fault his attitude about school. Left to his own devices, he did what any high school senior in America
would do: he took advantage of it.

Asked what the purpose of school was at Permian, Don had
a simple answer. "Socializing," he said candidly. "That's all senior year is good for." That, and playing football. If there was
any angst about school, it was over the number of girls who
desired to spend at least some part of their lives with him. They
were everywhere. Girls in short leather skirts. Girls in expensive designer jeans. Girls who spent the last five minutes of class
carefully applying rouge and lipstick to their faces because the
teacher had run out of things to say. The perplexity of it all
gnawed at him a great deal more than the meaning of Macbeth.
Or as he put it in a line probably not inspired by Shakespeare's
play, "There's so much skin around, it's hard to pick out one."

There were other football players who had light schedules.
One of his teammates, Jerrod McDougal, had taken senior English the previous summer so that he wouldn't have to grapple
with it during the football season. There was something wonderfully soulful about Jerrod. He was unusually sensitive and
spoke with pained and poignant sorrow about the confusion of
growing up in a world, in an America, that seemed so utterly
different from the one that had spawned the self-made success
of his father. His class rank was in the top third, but because of
football Jerrod wanted as little challenge as possible his senior
year. With English out of the way, he was taking government
and the electives of sociology, computer math, photography,
and food science.

"That's why I took all my hard courses my sophomore and
junior year, so I wouldn't have to worry about any of that stuff,"
he said one afternoon after food science, where Billingsley and
he had just spent sixty minutes on a worksheet containing 165
fill-in-the-blanks on the uses of a microwave. "Maybe that's a
bad deal, I don't know."

Permian's best and brightest, those ranked in the top ten, reported few demands made of them in the classroom as well.
Eddie Driscoll, who would end up attending Oberlin College, said he had never been pushed at Permian and generally had
half an hour's worth of homework a night. Scott Crutchfield,
another gifted student ranked in the top ten who would end
up going to Duke, said he had two to three hours of homework
a week. "I think I'd probably learn more if I had to do more
work. As it is, I still learn a lot, I guess. In general, I don't
do a lot."

II

In computer science, Brian Chavez wore faded blue jeans
and black Reeboks. The number 85 jersey around his expansive chest nicely matched his earring with the numeral 85 embossed in gold. He had a fleshy face in need of a shave and his
hair looked a little like that of the main character in Eraserhead,
high and square on top like an elevated putting surface. It came
as no surprise that he held the Permian record for the bench
press with 345 pounds.

The way he looked, five eleven and 215 pounds, the way he
loved to hit on a football field, the way the words came so slowly
out of his mouth sometimes as if he had a two-by-four stuck in
there somewhere, it was hard to think he had any chance of
making it past high school unless he got a football scholarship
somewhere.

He fit every stereotype of the dumb jock, all of which went to
show how absolutely meaningless stereotypes can be. He was a
remarkable kid from a remarkable family, inspired by his father, whose own upbringing in the poverty of El Paso couldn't
have been more different.

Ranked number one in his class at Permian, he moved effortlessly between the world of the football and the academic
elite. On the field he was a demon, with a streak of nastiness
that every coach loved to see in a football player. Off the field
he was quiet, serene, and smart as a whip, his passivity neatly
hiding an astounding determination to succeed. "He's two dif ferent people," Winchell said of hinm. "He's got a split personality when he puts on that helmet."

From computer science lie made his way to honors calculus,
where a black balloon from the Friday pep rally floated casually
from his knapsack. On the way there he was handed a note by
Bridgitte that read, "Have fun at lunch and I either will see you
before lunch or after lunch. Okay! Smile! Love you!" In calculus class he casually scribbled his answers in a white notebook,
an exercise that seemed as mentally strenuous to him as trying
to see whether he still remembered the alphabet. While others
strained and fretted he just seemed to glide, and inevitably several classmates gathered around him to watch him produce the
right answer. After calculus it was off to honors physics and
then honors English and then honors chemistry. These courses
came easily to him as well. Part of that had to do with what was
asked of him-with the exception of English, he said he had
almost no homework.

If he wasn't a typical brain filled with anguish and neurosis,
he wasn't a typical Permian football player either. He was lucky,
but he always knew in the back of his mind that if he failed in
football it didn't really matter anyway.

He had become as indoctrinated into the cult of football in
Odessa as anyone. After all, it was something he had lived,
eaten, and breathed since seventh grade. But as he headed into
his senior year he also realized that he wanted something more.
No matter how glorious and exciting the season was, he also
knew it would come to an end.

In his own private way, he found far more inspiration in the
classroom than he did on the football field. And nowhere did
he seem more determined than in English class, under the spell
of a special teacher named LaRue Moore.

She saw in him a metamorphosis his senior year, a fascination
with vocabulary and literature and trying to write essays with
perception and clarity. He was striving for something she
hadn't quite seen before, and when he told her he was inter ested in going to Harvard she joyously encouraged him as
much as she could and agreed to read his application essays.

It was simply part of her style. Whenever she could, she tried
to show students the bountiful world that existed past the corporate limits of Odessa and how they should not be intimidated
by it but eager and confident to become a part of it. On five
different occasions, she and her husband, Jim, the former principal of Ector High School before it closed, had taken students
to Europe to let them see other cultures, other lands. What she
aspired to as a teacher was embodied by a written description
she prepared of her senior honors English class for a group of
observers:

I work not only for the gathering and assimilation of knowledge, but
also to leach the fact that one can be brilliant without being arrogant,
that great intellectual capacity brings great responsibility, that the quest
for knowledge should never supplant the joy of learning, that one with
great capacities must learn to be tolerant and appreciate those with
lesser or different absolutes, and that these students can compete with
any students at any university anyplace in the world.

A teacher such as LaRue Moore should have been considered
a treasure in any town. Her salary, commensurate with her
ability and skill and twenty years' teaching experience, should
have been $50,000 a year. Her department, of which she was
the chairman, should have gotten anything it wanted. She herself should have been given every possible encouragement to
continue what she was doing. But none of that was the case, of
course. After all, she was just the head of the English department, a job that in the scheme of natural selection at Permian
ranked well behind football coach and band director, among
others.

As Moore put it, "The Bible says, where your treasure is,
that's where your heart is also." She maintained that the school
district budgeted more for medical supplies like athletic tape
for athletic programs at Permian than it did for teaching ma terials for the English department, which covered everything
except for required textbooks. Aware of how silly that sounded,
she challenged the visitor to look it up.

She was right. The cost for boys' medical supplies at Permian
was $6,750. The cost for teaching materials for the English department was $5,040, which Moore said included supplies,
maintenance of the copying machine, and any extra books besides the required texts that she thought it might be important
for her students to read. The cost of getting rushed film prints
of the Permian football games to the coaches, $6,400, was
higher as well, not to mention the $20,000 it cost to charter the
jet for the Marshall game. (During the 1988 season, roughly
$70,000 was spent for chartered jets.)

When it came to the budget, Moore did have reason to rejoice this particular year. The English department had gotten
its first computer. It was used by all twenty-five teachers to keep
grade records and also to create a test bank of the various exams they gave to students.

The varsity football program, which had already had a computer, got a new one, an Apple IIGS, to provide even more
exhaustive analyses of Permian's offensive and defensive plays
as well as to keep parents up to date on the progress of the offseason weight-training program. At the end of the year the
computer would be used to help compile a rather remarkable
eighty-two-page document containing a detailed examination
of each of the team's 747 defensive plays. Among other things,
the document would reveal that Permian used sixty-six different defensive formations during the year, and that 25.69 percent of the snaps against it were from the middle hash, 67.74
percent of which were runs and 32.26 percent of which were
passes.

Moore's salary, with twenty years' experience and a master's
degree, was $32,000. By comparison, she noted, the salary
of Gary Gaines, who served as both football coach and athletic director for Permian but did not teach any classes, was $48,000. In addition, he got the free use of a new Taurus sedan
each year.

Moore didn't object to what the football program had, nor
did she object to Gaines's salary. She knew he put in an enormous number of hours during the football season and that he
was under constant pressure to produce a superb football team.
If he didn't, he would be fired. She had grown up in West
Texas, and it was obvious to her that high school football could
galvanize a community and help keep it together. All she
wanted was enough emphasis placed on teaching English so
that she didn't have to go around pleading with the principal,
or someone else, or spend hundreds of dollars out of her own
pocket, to buy works of literature she thought would enlighten
her students.