Friday Night Lights: A Town, a Team, and a Dream (39 page)

There may not have been a more awesome graveyard in the
country than the old MGF lot off Highway 80-thirty acres
filled with equipment that had cost $200 million and in the fall
of 1988 might have fetched $10 million-with three hundred
thousand feet of new and used drill pipe up on metal stilts like
pixie sticks, four hundred drill collars, and the guts of nineteen rigs.

In its heyday MGF Drilling had had about twelve hundred
people working for it and about fifty-five rigs. Then the bust
came and MGF, bloated with $121 million in loans from the
First National Bank, was finished. It had filed for bankruptcy
and was bought out by another company, Parker & Parsley, for
virtually nothing.

The man in charge of the yard, Don Phillips, pointed to Rig
79, a twenty-five-thousand-foot beauty that was built for $9.5
million in 1982 and had never been used. It seemed like a steal
at $2.5 million, but with the glut of rigs on the domestic market
there weren't any takers.

"We're asking two and a half and we ain't sold it," Phillips
said.

He drove through the yard pointing here and gesturing
there, giving the history of this one and that one, as if the gigantic metal shapes in front of him were ancient artifacts that
had come from a fantastic archaeological dig and were waiting
to go off to a museum somewhere, the symbols of a fallen
empire.

"That one right there is a fourteen-thousand-foot rig.

"The brown one right there, that's a twenty-four- to twentyfive-thousand-foot rig.

"That rig right there was a seventeen-thousand-foot rig. It
did one well. Cost $3.5 million brand-new. If I was gonna sell
it, I'd try to get $400,000."

On and on the lot went, with gigantic pieces of equipment
lying in the gravel as far as the eye could see, as forlorn as
bloodied elephant tusks: Rig 201 with its 144-foot pyramid and
five-hundred-ton hook; Rig 202, powered by three GE Custom 8000 generators that kicked in at seven-hundred kilowatts
apiece; Rig 10, Rig 11, Rig 23, Rig 203; even Rig 1, which had
first been used in the fifties. It was appraised for over $400,000,
but Phillips knew he would be lucky to get $40,000 for it.

Phillips drove to the last rig MGF Drilling had had running
before it crashed, HCW no. 2. He climbed up the metal steps
to the top of the substructure, an elevated base upon which sat
the draw works and the doghouse for the roustabouts and the
tool pushers. The rig was perfectly assembled, but sitting in the
middle of a warehouse yard, it looked as if someone had put it
together to use as a toy.

The view from the substructure was stagnant-the drab
warehouses along Highway 80 with parking lots that were el- ther empty or filled with jaunty-colored trucks that never went
into the oil field anymore, the pockets of brick houses on crescent-shaped streets in half-finished subdivisions, the clump of
rust-colored freight cars sitting along the railroad tracks, the
ribbon of the interstate with the tiny silhouettes of trucks making their way across the country in the shimmer of the heat.

"There's days I sit here and look and I wish all of these rigs
were working," said Phillips. "You can stand up here and see a
lot of equipment. The worst part about it is, you look at good
equipment.

"When I was in business, it was a dream to have a yard like
this and equipment like this. Now it's a nightmare."

As for the boom, it had become a faraway blur, a kind
of confused, powerful, contradictory dream that made some
people chuckle and others wince in the retelling of it. Many said
they were glad the boom was over, that it had been too wild and
both Midland and Odessa had suffered for it. But others were
more honest.

Leaning back in the soft chairs of their offices with plenty of
time on their hands to talk and reflect, they said they had come
to grips with the hard reality of the world. They loved their
President Reagan and they would no doubt love their President
Bush, but they knew these men didn't make a damn bit of difference anymore. They knew their economic livelihoods were
completely at the mercy of OPEC and that it was all but impossible to have much say in the matter when the average American well produced 13 barrels of oil a day while the average one
in Saudi Arabia produced 6,881 barrels a day and the average
one in Iran 27,233 barrels. The Saudis, the Iranians, the Iraqis,
they called the shots, they were the ones with the vast stockpiles
of oil, not the Americans, where the holes were running dry.
They set the price of oil, and that felt funny as hell. But things
could always happen over there-it wasn't the most stable place
in the world, after all-and then a little devilish smile came to
their lips. You could see the light go on as they visualized the
days when all those beautiful rigs crippled on their sides over at MGF would be up and running once again and the whole
place would be gloriously, sweetly mad and out of the lips of
everyone would come that beautiful rallying cry: The boom i.s on!

It could happen. Anything could happen in America.

"After all," one oilman reasoned, "we're just another Middle
East war away from another boom."

About the only thing in the two towns that had maintained
its frenzied tempo was the rivalry between Permian and Midland Lee. In 1983, when the two teams met each other in the
quarterfinals of the state playoffs in Lubbock, thirty-two thousand five hundred people were in the stands. In 1985, the second game of the National League playoffs between the St.
Louis Cardinals and the Los Angeles Dodgers was preempted
by the local NBC affiliate for a live broadcast of the PermianLee game.

Forty years earlier, playwright and author Larry L. King,
who had grown up in Midland back when each town had only
one high school, had had the misfortune of being a member of
the Midland Bulldogs when it came time to play the Odessa
Bronchos.

"Their savagery was intimidating: we sissybritches Headquarters-City-of-the-Vast-Permian-Basin-Empire boys lost to
Sintown by 20 to 7 and 48 to 0 in my time," wrote King in Texas
Monthly. "Only by joining the Army before my senior season
did I avoid the record 55-0 plastering of 1946. High school
football was, I think, a legitimate cultural and psychological
measuring stick of that time and that place: many of us concluded that Odessa was, indeed, the rawer and tougher community."

Little had changed since then, except in one fundamental
respect.

The sissybritches, maybe because they weren't thinking about
building fifty-story office buildings anymore, had learned how
to play football.

Never in his entire life had Mike Winchell felt more embarrassed than he had his junior year. The Rebels scored more
points against Permian in a 42-21 win than any team had scored against them in twenty-three years, and Winchell's own
performance had been abysmal. With twenty thousand fans filling Ratliff Stadium that night, he had been nervous, almost
scared, and had thrown three interceptions. Boobie, under the
glare of all those screaming, raging, madcap fans, had trouble
holding on to the ball. Jerrod McDougal remembered the
taunting of the Lee players, their gleeful finger-pointing and
gloating, the way they just loved letting Odessa know that its
pride and joy wasn't so fucking tough anymore and that Permian had become the new sissybritches. Even Brian Chavez, who
usually maintained some perspective, had cried after the game.

But this year it would be different. Permian was rated a
twenty-one-point favorite over the Rebels, and now would be
the time for sweet redemption, to drive them, and everything
they stood for, straight into the snot-assed ground from which
they came.

The night before the game at the private team meeting behind locked doors, Gaines told the story of a swimmer named
Steve Center, who had been set to go to the Munich Olympics
in 1972 in the two-hundred-meter freestyle when his lung collapsed. He was cut open to repair the lung and then sewn back
up. Doctors said there was no way Center could swim unless he
took painkillers, the use of which was illegal under Olympic
rules. But Center, who had dreamed of going to the Olympics
since the age of nine, decided to swim anyway-without medication. In the silent locker room, Gaines told what happened
next, for he clearly saw a message in Center's actions.

"His face was ashen-white because the pain was so excruciating. He hits the water, he makes the first lap, does a spin turn
at the other end and pushes off, and comes up for air and lets
out a blood-curdling scream. Because the pain is so intense, the
sound just echoes off the walls of the swimming arena. He
makes a split turn at the end of the second lap, pushes off, and
he breaks his stitches, his stitches split apart and he starts bleeding. They said he lost a pint and a half of blood over the course
of the next two laps.

"I guarantee you, I'd want him in my corner," said Gaines of Genter, who ended up losing the gold medal to Mark Spitz by
the length of a finger. "When the chips were down, I'd want a
guy with that kind of character in my corner, I promise you,
'cause he's a fighter."

Steve Genter had come too far to let it all go, and Gaines saw
an obvious parallel. "You guys are not that much different than
he was, because many of you in this room right now, when you
were eight, nine, ten years old, were dreamin' about sittin' in
this locker room and wearin' the black and white of Permian
High School.

"You guys are fighters and you have proved it. And we're
gonna have another chance to prove it tomorrow night. We're
playin' for somethin' very important, everybody knows what's
at stake. Everybody knows what's ridin' on it."

Gaines and the assistant coaches then left the locker room to
let the captains address the team.

"I don't know about y'all, I've been waiting for this game all
year ever since last year when we lost," said Brian Chavez. "After that loss I just wanted to kill 'em so bad, I was just so pissed
off. Last year they were the bad-asses. They came over to Ratliff
and they kicked the shit out of us. This year we're the bad-asses
and we're gonna kick the shit out of them. I'm not talking five
or ten points, I just want to fuckin' maul 'em, thirty, forty
points.

"Right here, tomorrow night, that's what we've worked for
for a whole year, off-season, all the gassers, all of their bullshit,
everything, man, tomorrow night."

Brian felt supremely confident until right before the game,
when he glanced over at Coach Gaines. In the team meeting
Gaines had told the players to ignore the pressure, to put out
of their minds how much was at stake and how much the game
meant to the people of Odessa. But as Brian stared at Gaines
for those few seconds, he didn't see someone who had blocked
out those enormous pressures at all.

He saw a man who looked as ashen-white as Steve Genter.

I

EVENTUALLY THE SOBS CAME TO AN END. SO DID THE EMBRACES
that under the gray glow of the moonlight seemed as lingering
as a slow dance with someone you suddenly knew you no longer
loved. One by one the members of the crowd, usually so buoyant, so unshakably optimistic, quietly tiptoed into the night.