Friday Night Lights: A Town, a Team, and a Dream (30 page)

But for the moment the town was still very much dominated
by whites-the mayor was white, the head of the school board was white, the chief of police was white, the superintendent of
schools was white-and while Hispanics were accepted as part
of the community, there was little evidence of whites openly
embracing them beyond the widespread opinion that they generally worked harder than blacks did.

The most telling proof of that attitude was the saga of Vickie
Gomez. The first minority candidate ever elected to the board,
her tenure had been as stirring as it was controversial. Uninterested in the good of boy network that had sustained politics
in Odessa for fifty years, every vote seemed to end up six to
one, with the other six members voting for and Gomez voting
against. She refused to equivocate on the issue of school desegregation, and in the Hispanic community she became an important, heroic voice. In 1988, she ran for reelection to the
school board for a third time. In her previous bid she had won
a district seat with a nucleus of support from the Southside minority community. But then she moved to the northeast part of
town and had to run for reelection at-large.

Gomez herself had known what was coming when she handed
out campaign literature one day in the northeast. "I know
who you are," a white woman told her, staring her dead in the
eye. "You might as well get your junk out of here." With the entire community voting, her repudiation was stunning. Despite
twelve years' experience on the school board, she had received
only 24 percent of the vote.

"I knew there was a lot of concern in the majority community
that `the Mexicans' were taking over," said Gomez, and she was
convinced that she had gone down to defeat because whites
viewed her as a threat, an encroachment. "I lost with twelve
years' experience," she said. "That tells you something." If the
east side of town hadn't embraced Vickie Gomez, it was hard to
envision a scenario in which it would embrace a school merger
with its west-side brethren.

As a result, Ken Hankins's suffering in the football stands
seemed destined to continue. When he had taken his customary
seat underneath the press box for the game, he privately be lieved it would take a miracle for Odessa High to win. As that
spellbinding first drive unfolded to give Permian a 7-0 lead,
Hankins knew it was over even though there were more than
three quarters of football left to play. Clearly, tonight was not
the night the Villaboses and the Limons and the Martinezes
would create a deja vu of the Townsends and the Taylors and
the Frys. Those days were over and they weren't coming back.
As his beloved Bronchos sputtered and fluttered against the
endless siege of that black-shirted machine, all he could do was
wait for the debacle to be over. Through his lips came a familiar, helpless mutter.

"God clang, this is just typical."

I

TICKLES FOR THE SHOWDOWN Al MIDLAND HIGH DIDN'T GO ON
sale until 'T'uesday afternoon, which explained why the first
handful of Permian fans started camping outside the gate of
Ratliff Stadium Sunday night.

About fifty came together in the darkness. Once the gate was
opened, others flooded in and began battening down for the
thirty-six-hour vigil. Since many of them had done it before,
there was no particular trick to it. Some spent the night in
elaborate motor homes as long as railroad cars. Others slept in
sleeping bags in the backs of their Suburbans, and others just
caught it few winks in lawn chairs. During the day they used
umbrellas to shield themselves from the West Texas sun. An
Ector County sheriff's deputy was on hand to make sure no
fights broke out over who was where in line.

By Tuesday afternoon the line snaked almost the length of
the parking lot and 366 fans were in it. One Permian booster,
surveying the happy, bleary-eyed skein of people waiting to buy
tickets for what, on the surface at least, was just a high school
football game, looking out over the parking lot filled on a workday afternoon not only with vehicles but with generators to
power television sets and card tables for playing dominoes
during the quiet hours before dawn, came to what seemed to
be an inarguable conclusion: "Aren't Mojo fans crazy sons of
hitches?" o

Maybe they were, but the wait paid off. And when Friday
night cane round on the last day of September, roughly four
thousand of them were crammed into the visitor's side for the
biggest district showdown of the season.

To those who had fretted after the Marshall game, there was
cause to breathe easier now. Mojo was back. The performance
the week before against Odessa High, the methodical, relentless carving of Pernmian's crosstown rival, had proven it. But as
soon as the game ended, the not-so-subtle whispers started that
the Midland High Bulldogs had the stuff to take Permian.

Usually it was the other team in Midland, those bastard Lee
Rebels, that gave Permian fits. But the Bulldogs were undefeated with a four and zero record and had stunned the Rebels
the previous week in a 35-21 win. They were on a high, and
first place in the district was at stake.

At the end of practice during the middle of the week, as the
final shadows of September crossed over the field and a merciful touch of coolness crept into the wind, Gaines gathered his
players around him.

"I guarantee you, men, it will be a sick, sick feeling if we go
over there and play poorly," he told them. "We're not that talented. If we go over there and play poorly and lose, it's somethin' you'll remember for a long, long time. Till the day you put
your body in the ground, you'll remember it."

The Bulldogs were big, with a defensive line that averaged
220 pounds across, including one 263-pound defensive tackle
whom the Permian coaches described as a "big of humper." On
offense they averaged 364 yards a game, and they had the leading rusher in the district in Dwane Roberts.

"I'm pretty scared," said Chavez, and if he was scared, then
the Bulldogs must be for real. "They're pretty quick and pretty
good. They're pretty fucking big."

During Gaines's speech in the locker room minutes before
the game, the obligatory phrases about the kicking game and
field position gave way to something more emotional, the treble
on his West Texas twang turned up high like the fat wail of a guitar string in a country and western tune. The players knelt
before him as willing, eager supplicants, echoing his phrases
with their own uncontrolled snatches in the brightly lit room,
which was decorated in the Bulldog color of passion purple.

"We gotta have that Permian swarming defense!"

"Let's go, guys!"

"Permian swarming defense!"

"Let's go now!"

"We're gonna match 'em physical for physical!"

"Let's go now!"

"We're gonna be more physical!"

"Yes sir!"

"We're gonna hit 'em longer! We're gonna hit 'em harder!"

"Yes sir!"

"Four full quarters. That's our credo!"

"Let's go!"

"Four full quarters and we're gonna be tougher than they
are! They're gonna come out fired up and we're gonna knock
hell from 'em!"

"Let's go! Alright!"

Outside the Midland High band, dressed in its purple and
gold costumes, played the national anthem. An announcer's
voice then came over the public address system, asking the sellout crowd of eleven thousand to rise for the prayer, which everyone eagerly did. At. the kickoff', hundreds of purple and
gold balloons dreamily floated into the sweet, gorgeous night.

The two teams traded punts back and forth to begin the
game. Comer scored from two yards out to cap a fifty-four-yard
drive. Several minutes later Winchell threw a thirty-six-yard
touchdown pass to Hill. It was a nice enough throw. But it was
his second touchdown pass that lit up the night and stirred
wonderful fantasies of what he might be capable of, how the
idea of a scholarship to a Southwest Conference school might
not be so farfetched after all. Rolling to his left, he lofted a pass
forty yards downfield, the spiral true and perfect. The stadium
became absolutely quiet as everyone tried to gauge where the ball was going to land. It sailed on an arc right into Hill's hands.
He never had to break stride and easily shed cornerback Julius
Bowers for a forty-nine-yard score.

Hill and the rest of the Permian offense went off the field
exultant while Bowers lay flat on his face on the turf, abject and
humiliated in the glare of the stadium lights, as if he had just
been run over. Had it been his choice, he probably would have
stayed there forever, but then a teammate went over to hoist
him up. That made the score 21 -0, and the rout was on.

With the score 35-0 by the fourth quarter, the Midland
High Bulldogs, sufficiently humbled, might have expected a
little letup from Permian, but there was none. Just as it had
been at the beginning of the Odessa High game, the team was
in that special fifth gear. As Permian drove for its last touchdown of' the night, Jerrod McDougal, from his tackle position, hit defensive end Jeff Rashall at the knees. Rashall got
up and McDougal hit him again. When he didn't go down,
McDougal hit him again. After the play was over Rashall went
to punch him, and McDougal responded by saying, "Your
mother's a whore." Chavez went at it with one of the Midland
High defensive players as well. Every time he made a good
block, the defender would line up across from him on the following play and simply say, "Fuck you." Chavez didn't say much
in return, just pinned him to his back again with another crushing block and lined up to hear the comforting lilt of another
fuck you.

From the stands Brian's father, Tony, beamed with pride.

Tony didn't profess to know his son very well. At home Brian
was virtually silent, and Tony wasn't sure what had been the
catalyst for his keen intellect, or how and from where he had
acquired it. But he had great admiration for Brian and when
he thought about what his son had done, and what he wanted
to do, it seemed like nothing short of 'a miracle. Not only was
he one of the captains of the Permian team, not only was he
number one in his class, but now he was thinking of applying
to Harvard.

Hanvard?

Never in it thousand years could Tony Chavez have imagined
it turning out this way. Never in a million.

Not back in South El Paso, where he had first lived in a little
apartment above a bar, then in a little adobe house that had a
cesspool instead of 'a sewer. Not when he had grown up with
humble, mismatched parents who had come from Mexico, his
father a door-to-door insurance salesman who was laid-back
and easygoing, his mother a dental assistant who was redhaired and high-strung. Not when he cut class as a sophomore
to cross the border to] uarez to shoot pool and drink. Not when
he finally found a high school, his fourth, that let him graduate
instead of kicking him out for drinking and fighting and
chronic truancy.