Friday Night Lights: A Town, a Team, and a Dream (37 page)

There were stories of competition in the oil patch turning
into a Mafia turf war. Companies arranged kickbacks for buying certain products, and a black market in stolen equipment
thrived. There were stories of men who suddenly realized that
they were born to be oil operators, not the doctors and lawyers
and shoe salesmen they had been before their conversion, men
who, as independent oilman Ken Hankins put it, "wouldn't
know a drilling rig if they walked up on one."

There were the usual hair-raising statistics, how, over a tenyear period through 1979, total construction in Odessa rose
520 percent and population 31 percent and bank deposits 294
percent and retail sales 276 percent and divorces 28 percent.

They were all nice stories, until you compared them to what
was going on in Midland. Then they seemed like the kind of
stories passed around an Amish quilt circle. (;reed, delusional visions of grandeur, the mercenary mercilessness that made every relationship expendable-Midland perfected all these long
before they became the standard of the eighties around the rest
of the country.

III

Of all the deals that Aaron Giebel had made from his base of
operations in Midland during the boom, the hardest part, by
his own account, was figuring out which one was the worst.

Had the five planes, and the three full-time pilots to fly them,
really been necessary? Should he have bought the Brangus bull
for $1 million? Should he have paid cash for the thousand head
of hybrid cattle? Did he think it through as carefully as he
should have when he took a multi-million-dollar position on a
method of breeding "super cattle" by hormone injection and
embryonic implant? Had it been reason enough to pay $17.5
million for the seven-thousand-acre ranch in El Indio with the
palm trees that had been flown in and the private runway and
the breathtaking view of Mexico when he used it largely for
entertaining and hunting? Should he have planted the twentyeight thousand pecan trees when the only thing he knew about
pecans was that "they're all named after Indians?" Had it been
such a wise thing to go into the home construction business with
his former son-in-law and end up with a loss of $1.2 million?
Had he really needed the trucking business that cost him $4
million to move drilling rigs in and out of the oil field? Had he
been slightly impulsive when he decided to open five additional
offices in San Antonio, Oklahoma City, Denver, Calgary, and
Lafayette, Louisiana? Had the revolving $24 million line of
credit over at the First National Bank of Midland truly been a
good thing after all? Was it possible to have built a new house
that wasn't thirteen thousand square feet?

It was all so hard to know.

By the time you added it up, Aaron Giebel's losses from
boom to bust totaled somewhere around $55 milion.

He had filed for bankruptcy, and by 1988 he was back on his
feet again, in the oil business, although on a far reduced basis.
He still had his wife and he had his health, which was more
than he could say for a lot of his friends, who lost both when
the absence of money for impulse trips to Paris suddenly made
them seem a lot less attractive. He was the first to admit there
was no justification for what he had done, except that he had
gone literally mad in Midland. But he spoke about it with candor, as if he saw a danger in what had happened that needed
to be exposed, materialism and a desire for money and wheeling and dealing that became as impossible to resist as any
addiction.

"There was a euphoria round here that was almost like an
opiate," said Giebel. "It was an opiate. And I succumbed to it.
And I don't know a guy who did not.

"You just get caught up. You get caught up in the euphoria,
like you're sitting down at the gambling table."

For a period of time Giebel had actually resisted it. By nature
he was it careful man. He had a round, soft face with eves that
seemed incapable of anger, and there wasn't anything remotely
swaggering about him. He spoke softly, without the twang that
in some seemed to reverberate from one end of the state to
the other. Born in Fort Worth, he had moved to Midland after
college and ultimately became the chairman and chief executive officer of the MGF Oil Corporation. The company grew
enormously during the boom, and when Giebel resigned in
1979 he did so with millions of' dollars' worth of stock. He
had resolved not to build another oil company, but he did,
A. F. Giebel Petroleum Consultants. With the price of oil skyrocketing, Giebel found himself worth $100 million. He still
restrained himself from other investments, but as he saw friends
everywhere expanding, he wondered if he was not crazy to do
the same. "I felt that I was behind the progress curve. I was demeaned by my peers-'Giebel, you rich dog, what are you
gonna do, eat it?"'

That got to him. In Texas, no man was more of a coward
than the one who was chicken shit with his money.

So he had jumped, thoroughly convinced that all the odds
were in his favor. And how could he lose? Not when the price
kept going up and up, not when just about every banking and
investment institution in the country said oil was going to go to
$65 a barrel, not when Giebel Petroleum had drilled 195 wells
with a fantastic 55 percent success ratio. He had the Midas
touch. The moment was suddenly at hand not only to make
ungodly sums of money but to build an empire, a lasting monument. "I made fast decisions. I just got to wheeling and dealing.... `I'll have a dozen of these and a half dozen of these.' I
got in on so many deals....

"It changed me, because I was one heck of a businessman,"
said Giebel. "I became a fast-moving promoter type." And so it
went, from oil exploration, which he knew a great deal about,
to loyally following the creed of Texas entrepreneurship during the boom: the less a man knew about something, the more
money he was obligated to sink into it.

In 1981, with oil hovering around $40 a barrel, any idiot
could have made money from it. But hitting big off something
you didn't know the first thing about had special meaning.
Brangus hulls, pecan trees, trucking, home construction-they
all became shiny new toys in Aaron Giebel's ever-widening collection. Just hearing him talk about the technique to breed super cattle was enough to make the hairs on the back of the neck
stand up and wonder how this man, with dual degrees in geology and petroleum engineering from Texas A & M, could
have spent vast sums on a scheme that sounded as if it had been
borrowed from one of those comic books about the possibilities
of life in the twenty-first century. Giebel wondered that himself.

He had gotten into it through a "veterinarian friend." The
way it worked was that he bought "super cows" that cost
$17,000 apiece. These super cows were injected with hormones to increase ovulation drastically and cause the production of
multiple embryos. The embryos were removed and placed in
common cows, who would then produce super calves. Every
time his veterinarian friend came back and said he needed just
a little more money before these Frankensteins dominated the
cattle world, Giebel dutifully anted up.

He lost $7 million on the deal.

"We're talking failure to the square root," was the way he
bluntly described it.

Giebel had also got caught in the classic Texas trap of who
could be the most flamboyant and outrageous, flipping a coin
once with a fellow oilman to see who would get the drilling
rights to a tract near San Antonio. Giebel won. Frankly, it was
hard to see how this method of investment differed from how
he approached all the other ones he was making. If anything,
it may have been a little less impulsive. If Giebel had been the
only person acting out of character in the quest for crazy-quilt
expansion, it would have been more difficult to excuse or explain his actions. But he wasn't.

From 1973 through 1981, when the price of oil went up more
than 800 percent, he and thousands of others made the fatal
error of forgetting that every ounce of their success was due to
the geopolitics of the Arab oil embargo and the Carter energy
policy and the Iranian Revolution. They had actually thought
that they themselves had something to do with what was happening and were somehow in control of their own destinies.
Over at the country club, or in enormous corner offices with
picture windows that seemed to deserve something more than
wide-angle views of scrub brush and mesquite, they confused
luck with business acumen. Instead of understanding that they
were the beneficiaries of history, they began to believe they
were the creators of it.

In Odessa, it had been a matter of riding the boom to the hilt
and just trying to keep up with it. In Midland, it had been a
matter of the town's becoming even more improbably tall than
it already was, the Brasilia of' the United States with the linear coldness of Gotham, a town where all human scale was rendered insignificant by the sheer magnificence of achievement.
Of all the places that got caught up in the frenzy of the oil boom
in those days, Midland may well have been the most incredible.

There had been many indications that things were getting
out of hand, but the one that confirmed it was the opening of a
new business east of the airport. If you had something to sell,
odds were you could do it in Midland or Odessa; at the height
of the boom Odessa ranked second in the country in retail
spending per capita and Midland fourth. After all, this was
an area where people had developed an insatiable craving for
boats, big, big boats, even though the nearest water was a hundred miles away. But it was still hard to predict the success or
failure of the new Rolls Royce dealership. The country was in
the midst of a recession in the summer of 1980 and interest
rates were close to 20 percent. But that didn't matter. Even before the dealership opened, it had made about seventeen sales
for its line of cars, which ranged in price from $85,000 to
$200,000.

A year and a half later, the Rolls Royce dealership was barely
noticed. "We're experiencing a transition-from a town to a
city," said I. David Porras, a developer who tooled around in a
Learjet with red leather seats and painted black on the outside.
Porras announced plans for a fifty-four-story office building.
The First National Bank of Midland announced plans for two
forty-story-plus bank towers. MGF Oil Corporation also announced that it was entering into a venture to build a fortystory-plus world-class luxury hotel to be designed by I. M. Pei.

In 1982, according to one report, the value of nonresidential
construction that had been legally permitted in Midland led the
state of 'Texas, even ahead of Dallas and Houston, both of
which were undergoing incredible booms of their own. 'The 3.2
million square feet of office space actually under construction
in Midland was equivalent to the amount in San Antonio, Fort
Worth, and Austin combined. The population of these towns
was twenty-two times that of Midland.

As real estate was booming, so was banking. The First Na tional Bank of Midland, the great financial and moral beacon
of the town for over ninety years, its $1 million corporate art
collection with works by Thomas Moran and Norman Rockwell
the essence of conservative good taste, had suddenly become a
casino ten times grander than anything in Atlantic City or
Vegas. Junior officers were making loans of up to $1 million
without any review. Careful checks of collateral became almost
laughable and utterly contrary to the ultracompetitive, machismo attitude that pervaded the banking industry in Texas.
One of First National's highest-ranking officers wasn't above
taking undisclosed interests in some of the ventures in which
the bank lent money. As it turned out, the reckless, freewheeling ways of the First National Bank of Midland made it a trendsetter in the American banking industry during the eighties.

In 1980 and 1981, the assets of the bank had more than
doubled in size, to $1.6 billion, and loans tripled as well, to $1.1
billion. The hank, the 205th largest in the country in 1976, was
the 115th largest by the middle of 1982 and the largest independent bank in the state of 'T'exas.