Friday Night Lights: A Town, a Team, and a Dream (49 page)

He wanted to be a major-college football player. The thought
of playing for another six weeks in the playoffs no longer filled
him with questions. Like everyone else, he wanted the season
to go on forever. In the past he had had the reputation of being
recalcitrant, stubborn, a player who marched to his own beat and always seemed to fight off the brainwashing aspects of the
Mojo mystique.

But it was hard to see any evidence of that behind the closed
door of the trainer's room, silent except for the dripping of a
spilled cup of Coke into a drain like the sound of rain falling
against a windowpane in the dark of the night, where a student
trainer stood above him squeezing on the IV bag to send that
clear fluid through Ivory's veins as fast as it could possibly go.

He played a wonderful second half against the Lamar Vikings. The heat, which had turned him laggard in the first half,
no longer seemed to affect him. Lamar scored a touchdown
early in the third quarter to tie the game 7-7, but Winchell
threw a twenty-eight-yard touchdown pass to Hill to once again
take the lead. The crowd of fourteen thousand five hundred,
sensing the kill, rose to its feet on almost every play, the cries of
"Mojo! Mojo! Mojo!" louder than they ever had been, almost
scary.

J. J. Joe, the highly touted Viking quarterback with an arm
that was even better than his name, became rattled by the deafening, frenzied sounds enveloping the stadium. And Ivory was
everywhere, lunging to make an arm tackle, speeding past
blockers to break up a pass and push the receiver to the ground
as if he were a little kid. He was truly inspired, and so was the
rest of the team.

Permian beat the Lamar Vikings 21-7, and with the win the
team was on its way to the final four, the semifinals of the Texas
high school playoffs, a breath away from the promised land that
some of the players had dreamed about since they were old
enough to walk. What Belew had talked about the week before,
how there was nothing else like winning a state championship,
wasn't something abstract now, but something they could feel.
After all that work they were so close, so magically close.

But an enormous obstacle lay in the way. Their opponent the
coming Saturday was a school from Dallas that had the most
talent of any team in the state of Texas, perhaps the most talent
of any team in the country.

The Carter Cowboys had the best high school linebacker in
the country and maybe the best defensive back, along with ten
other players who were sure to be recruited by major colleges.
They valued football every hit as much as Permian did, perhaps
even more if that was possible, and they had become imbued
with a power every bit as special as the Mojo mystique. Most
teams felt intimidated playing Permian because of all the tradition and its history of winning. But this team was different,
very different. The Carter Cowboys were scared of no one, absolutely no one, and just as the Permian players walked around
with a shield of invincibility, so did they, a shield ten tunes
stronger. "We don't care about Mojo. They can have their
Mojo," said Derric Evans, the All-American defensive back.
"We've got mo' of everything else."

They were fast and strong and they talked with relish of
knocking opposing players to the ground and making them
bleed. They had been undefeated during the course of the season, and their performance on the field was truly remarkable.

The only thing more remarkable was their performance
off it.

I

IF YOU WERE A FOOTBALL PLAYER AT DAVID W. CARTER HIGH
School in Dallas, you didn't have much to worry about, and
since Gary Edwards was a football player, he didn't have much
to worry about. He and his teammates were the Princes of the City,
only they were high school kids instead of New York City narcotics detectives, their domain not the drug-infested streets of
Manhattan and Brooklyn and the Bronx but a nondescript
building on the southern fringe of Dallas that was nestled in
the midst of a pleasant residential neighborhood with street
names like Algebra Drive and Indian Ridge Trail. But they had
the swagger, the feelings of immunity and invincibility, the
giddy laughter that came from riding on clouds and knowing
that no one could ever touch them, ever get to them no matter
what they did.

"It was paradise," said Gary Edwards of the life he and some
of the other Carter Cowboys led at school. "You walk around,
you break all the rules. The teachers and administrators, they
see you, they just don't say anything to you. It was just like we
owned it. Everybody looked up to us, it was just a great life."

If Gary Edwards and his friends felt like missing class and
going to the lunchroom, they went to the lunchroom. If they
were bored and felt like leaving class early before the bell, they
just got up and walked out before the bell. If they felt like walking around the halls without the required hall pass, they walked around the halls without the required pass. If they felt like leaving school, even though it was a closed campus, to go out for
lunch or go home, they left school.

A few teachers did try to stop them and put some reins on
their behavior. One even wrote Gary Edwards up once and
sent him to the principal's office with a referral, but it had no
impact and Gary marched right back into class as if nothing had
happened.

He was no fool about any of this. He knew he didn't get
treated this way because he had any special intellect, because he
was a merit scholar, because he had the chance of an academic
scholarship to Stanford or Rice, because he was poet or a painter
or a musician. His endowments were of a purely physical order-a 4.4 speed in the forty, a skillful ability to play both defensive back and running back, a reputation for hard, tireless
work on the field. It was football that gave Gary Edwards a halo
and made his whole life there like a ride in the backseat of a
limo, and he wasn't about to pass on it.

In the classroom, the road for Gary Edwards and his friends
also seemed paved with gold, their life as free, as effortlessly
easy as the Bobby McFerrin tune that had become the rage during the school year-"Don't Worry, Be Happy."

There was a controversial policy in Texas called the no-pass,
no-play rule. If a student didn't have a passing grade of 70 or
better in each class at the end of each six-week grading period
during the semester, he was not allowed to participate in any
extracurricular activity for the next six weeks. The rule, which
had been signed into law in 1984, was designed primarily to
force football players to have some accountability in the classroom as well as the athletic field and rekindle the notion that
the purpose of going to high school was to learn something
besides the intricacies of defending against the option offense.
Football coaches hated the rule. They thought it was unfair and
would ruin their programs. But they accepted it because they
had no choice, and it took its toll. Smack in the middle of the
season, star linebackers and star quarterbacks were suddenly lost to the team because of a grade below 70 in algebra or English or biology.

But Gary Edwards and some of his friends on the Carter
Cowboys didn't seem likely to have that problem. Gary had
found that out during test day in one course. The class started
out routinely enough. The teacher passed the tests around the
room, and Gary of course got one just like everyone else. But
then he got something else that no one else got: the answer
sheet.

The teacher realized the situation might be confusing for
Gary, since exams usually came only with the questions. So he
took him out into the hallway just to make sure Gary recognized what it was that had been thrown on his desk. At first
Gary thought it was a setup, but the instructor assured him that
it wasn't, just a little extra teaching aid. Gary went back into
class, and as it turned out he really didn't need the answer sheet
anyway, looking at it once or twice.

That had been the only time Gary got an answer sheet during
the football season, but there were several other occasions on
which he went to a classroom to take a test, only to have the
teacher tell him that there was no reason for him to do so. This
happened three times in two different courses during senior
year. "They just really excluded me from it," was the way he
described it. "I wouldn't ask any questions about it." It would
have been wrong to say that Gary Edwards abused the rules,
because by his own account and those of others there were no
rules for football players. It would have been wrong to say that
the players' behavior posed a constant challenge to authorities,
because by their account authorities made no effort to stop
them and in many cases protected them.

Gary Edwards certainly wasn't the only one who had benefited by being a Carter Cowboy. His best friend, Derric Evans,
was an even better football player than Gary was. He was six
three and weighed 190 pounds and had once been clocked in
the forty in 4.37 seconds, an astounding time for someone of
his size. He was also something of an assassin on the football field, one of those players who loved to hit a quarterback on a
full-speed blitz and then tower over him as the quarterback lay
crumpled on the ground and tried to figure out who he was
and where he was. One college scouting service rated him the
second best defensive back prospect in the country, and after
the season was over Evans became one of three defensive backs
named to the Parade All-American tearn. It was because of attributes such as these that over a hundred schools wrote to
Derric telling him that they would be privileged to have him on
their college campuses the next year.

If the rules didn't apply to Gary Edwards, they certainly
didn't apply to Derric Evans. Derric wasn't a violent kid in
school, but he wasn't above sassing off in class, or getting others
into trouble because of his verbal antics. Some teachers thought
he was a troublemaker, but among his fellow students he was a
hero, the kind of kid that everyone wanted to be, and when the
school year was over he was named Most Popular.

As it was for Gary Edwards, the notion of rules, of restraint,
seemed ridiculous to Derric. One time during the year Gary
and Derric and a third football player left school, not to go to
lunch, not to go home, but to have sex with a sophomore girl.
So honored was she by the presence of these three stud football players, according to Derric and Gary, that she insisted on
Polaroid pictures being taken to commemorate the occasion.
Later she passed them around school to prove that she had
done it, she had made it with three of the baddest Carter Cowboys on the very same glorious afternoon. Gary and Derric
never saw the pictures, but they knew they were out there.
When asked about the incident they said it had happened, both
of them giving embarrassed smiles as if they had been caught
with their hands in the cookie jar.

Derric also didn't have much to worry about at Carter High
School. There was homework, but whether or not he did any
seemed to be up to him and not the teacher. Given the option,
Derric thought his life would be better by not doing it. "I never
did homework," said Derric. "The kids in the classroom, they knew it. Each day a teacher would assign a certain student to
go around and pick up the homework and they'd go right
around me and keep on going. They knew I wasn't going to
have mine."