Friday Night Lights: A Town, a Team, and a Dream (29 page)

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 hall 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 it pitch
and outran everyone down the left sideline for it 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 it
35-14 will over Amarillo High, he had had the best performance of his life, gaining 14 1 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.

"1 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 ofl' 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 it 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 ~~lrcy 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 blackclad 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, the 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 razorlike 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 re mained 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.