Friday Night Lights: A Town, a Team, and a Dream (55 page)

There was a minute and fifteen seconds left.

It had stopped raining and the field glistened under the
flood of the lights, looking like an empty skating pond. For
a moment everything seemed stopped in time. There was a
strange sense of detachment in the air, as if no one was there at
all, just these two teams having it out with such relentless bitterness, and the rain and the cold temperatures made everything
seem fuzzy and out of place. There was no glory here, no
pomp, just the raw-boned sound of bodies crashing into bodies.

The Permian fans were on their feet, yelling with an urgent
poignancy. The season was slipping away, the fabled cry of
"State in eighty-eight!" that had been etched on the backs of
cars and scribbled in yearbooks a minute away from becom ing a failed dream. The rain-soaked hair of the cheerleaders
looked lifeless. The band, sitting in an upper corner of the stadium to escape the rain, played its familiar marches, but the
music seemed muffled and miles away. And yet there was still
the chant.

"MO JO! MO-JO! MO JO! MO Jo!"

Fingers were crossed. Eyes were raised to the dull gray sky.
In the cavernous stadium, the cheers seemed distant, tinny. But
still there was hope, because there had to be.

That was the very point of it all.

Dale McDougal couldn't bear the thought of it ending.

Soaked through, wearing a black jacket with a pin that had a
photograph of Jerrod on it in his uniform, she had been on her
feet most of the game, cheering, yelling. Mojo magic. Mojo
pride. Mojo tradition. It could not fail her now. She couldn't
imagine what she would do if the season was over now. She had
built a life around it, a whole routine-the lasagna dinners, the
booster club meetings, the practices in the dappled afternoon
light with that sweet breeze blowing across, and of course, those
wonderful games, so glorious, so exciting, the power of a million stars shining down on Odessa on a Friday night. She knew
it had to end sometime, but she wasn't ready yet, not in this final
minute, not for her, not for her son, not for her town.

"This is the last minute of your life," said offensive lineman
Ronnie Bevers in the huddle. McDougal talked about how hard
they had worked. Winchell said little. He refused to look at the
clock. He just knew the seconds were ticking away and to look
at it would only make the tension worse. Normally the Permian
team held hands in the huddle, but Winchell resisted. "Don't
touch me," he snapped nervously, because he didn't want to get
his own hands any more wet than they already were.

The first play, a sideline pass to Hill, went for four yards.
It was the first pass Winchell had completed the second half,
and it eased the pressure a little. The next play, a pitch to
Comer, went for seven yards and a first down to the Carter 41. They were in a rhythm now. They could move the ball. They
could sense a change in the momentum. It was about to happen
like something out of a storybook, like something out of a
Greek myth.

Shawn Crow stood in the rain, wishing he could be out there.

The year before all these same people dressed in black in the
stands had been focused on him, his play in the quarterfinals of
the playoffs against Arlington so magical it drew sobs of joy. No
one had ever seen anything like it and he would always be remembered because of it, have a tiny place in their hearts and a
picture up on the Wall of Fame. But with the herniated disc he
had subsequently suffered, he still wasn't in college yet, and it
wasn't just the herniated disc that football had given him, but
the broken leg, the broken arm, the smashed-up thumb.

He wasn't sure he had wanted to come to Austin to watch
Permian play. It wasn't his season anymore, it was someone
else's, but he decided to go to the game at the last second. He
cheered as hard as anyone and now, in the final minute, he
thought about the Arlington game, how Permian had come
back from 28-7 to win it when everyone thought the game was
over, how he and several others had drawn from deep inside
themselves a strength and endurance they never knew they
had. And as he watched, he would have given anything to return to that high school field again, to take that ball and lower
his helmet and show the remarkable balance that had once
made him so invincible.

The front four of Carter was exhausted and barely charging.
Winchell took a quick drop back and hit Hill on the sideline.
Hill eluded defensive back Gary Edwards and went out of
bounds after a nine-yard gain. Permian had a second and one
at the Carter 32 with fifty-six seconds left.

Gene Ater had been yelling so hard he had already driven away
a couple of fans sitting in front of him.

He was a state district judge when he wasn't rooting for Permian, and it was he who started every booster club meeting
with the hoglike call of "Mojo!" that came out of him like a great
spiritual release from all the problems of the world.

He had come to Odessa from Dallas twenty-seven years before, so he had been in the town long enough to know exactly
what it was like, tight-clenched, blue-collar, conservative. He
didn't expect any miracles as a result, but even so, it was hard
sometimes not to get discouraged. When the bond issue to
renovate the dilapidated civic center failed not once but twice
he could not help but wonder if there could ever be any real
progress in a place like that.

But Ater, like thousands of others, found something to fall
hopelessly in love with in Odessa, something to keep him going.
Maybe it was his playing days as a 135-pound linebacker and
guard at Pecos that did it, or maybe it was just a tendency to
cling to what was there, butjudge Ater loved these boys playing
for Permian as if they were his own children. He knew about
their backgrounds. He knew about their grades. He beamed
when he saw them and he cherished the fantastic myth of them,
how they never gave up, how size meant nothing to them, how
beautifully they played together. Wearing a black sweater, a
PERMIAN BOOSTER CLUB jacket, and a Moto cap, he hadn't given
up in the final minute. He had seen these boys do it before and
he knew they could do it now. He tried to ignore the cheers
across the way from the Carter fans, cheers that sounded to
him "like a bunch of African natives," and instead yelled as
loud as he possibly could.

"Let's go, Mojo! . . . Get your blocks, let's go!"

Winchell threw incomplete on the second down, the ball slipping off his hands and landing out of bounds. Permian had a
third and one at the Carter 32.

Ken Scates huddled by the radio at his home in Odessa, trying
to keep calm.

He actually had two radios going, one in the bedroom and
one in the den so he could walk around and settle himself down
and not give his heart any more trouble than it already had. In
thirty years, he had never missed one of Permian's sixty-nine
playoff games. But his ride had fallen through that morning
and by the time he tried to find another one, everyone had
already gone. He was heartbroken over it, but he rooted for the
team as if he was there.

He had moved to West Texas in 1949 from California when
the Snyder boom was on and had settled two years later in
Odessa. He had hated it when he first got here. He thought it
was at the very end of nowhere, filled with honkytonks and
little better than the cesspool of Snyder. But it grew on him.
There was something about it that touched him, or as his wife
Mary put it, "They say when you get the sand in your craw, you
never want to leave." No, it wasn't very pretty. Yes, it was still
pretty much at the end of nowhere, but it had the things he
wanted in a hometown-it was simple, friendly, God-fearing,
patriotic.

He had built his own oil field service company. It did wonderfully during the boom, but then he got trapped in the bust.
The bank had called in a note he held, and it had been one
horrible, humiliating headache after another. He had already
developed an ulcer, and then he needed heart bypass surgery.
He came to realize that any business in the oil patch was an
enormous gamble, even when prices were sky high, and he
really wasn't much of a gambler. He didn't have the stomach for
the constant ups and downs that never let a man truly know
where he stood.

But through it all, he had always had something to fall back
on, ever since 1959 when he had gone to that first practice. "I
get out to the football field, everything wipes clear in my mind,"
he said. He kept all the booster club programs and the newspaper clippings from Dallas. He was a familiar sight on the
practice field, sometimes standing by himself, watching in si lence as the boys silently shadow-danced across the field, and
sometimes in little groups with men as devoted as he was, where
the reminiscences came out sweetly and proudly. "You know,
there's not a lot to do in West Texas," he said. "I've made more
friends and acquaintances through football than anything."

Despite his best attempts to remain calm, he was still as jittery
as he could be in the final minute. Over the radio, with the
pauses and the strains of the crowd noise, it was hard to tell
exactly what was happening. It wasn't like being there. Yet he
knew the Carter Cowboys were about to join the list of those
who should have beaten Permian, but like every other team,
would succumb to the magic he and ten thousand others had
created.

Comer dove forward for four yards and a first and ten at the
Carter 28-yard line. Winchell backpedaled on the next play.
He had good protection and saw Chavez break free down the
middle of the field from his tight end position. There was no
one within three yards of him. Winchell threw the ball with
more authority than he had all day. Chavez ran to grab it. It
was a perfect call, and up in the press box Belew thought they
had a sure six points. And then he saw a hand shoot up out of
nowhere. It belonged to Jessie Armstead, and it showed why he
was the best high school football player in the country. Covering the field with his fantastic quickness, he swatted the ball
down. A run by Comer went nowhere. Permian had a third and
eight at the Carter 26 with thirty seconds left.

Boobie Miles could feel himself getting nervous.

Living with friends, he hadn't seen L.V. in a month, and he
had also lost all contact with the football team. He was still going to school, but he had missed over a week of classes because
of the knee surgery. With the close scrutiny that football players' grades received because of the no-pass, no-play rule, he
had always passed his courses. Now that he wasn't playing any more, he found himself flunking three classes at the end of the
second six-week grading period. When the coaches saw his
name on the failure report, they quietly snickered.

Boobie himself tried to take it all in stride. Sitting in the
empty bleachers of the gym one day watching basketball practice, he said he enjoyed his newfound life-going home early
in the afternoon, "chillin' out" with his girlfriend, not worrying
anymore about his knee.

But when asked if he regretted his decision to quit, he became morose and silent, the glassy-eyed look on his face the
same as it had been in Lubbock when he sat on the bench with
a knee that had just been torn to shreds, the same as it had been
during that Friday night against the Rebels when everything in
the world stirred so brightly without him.

"I don't think people sympathized with him," said Callie
Tave, the college counselor for the senior class at Permian. "I
don't think they understood what he was experiencing. This
was going to be his year. He was really going to be the star, and
it just devastated him. I regretted so much what happened to
him. I was hoping for nothing but good for him."

But her soft voice was in the minority. Many fans still remembered that image of Boobie in the Lee game, but they didn't see
an eighteen-year-old kid doubled over in pain on that bench.
They saw someone who was selfish, who openly moped during
the game and didn't show the slightest concern for his fellow
players. Among the team members he was almost never mentioned anymore, as if all record of him had been expunged;
there was no trace of who he was, and what he had done unless
you had witnessed it.

He had no link to Permian football anymore, but he felt the
familiar anxiousness during that final minute. He still wanted
his teammates to score and win the game. And there was a part
of him that could never leave the field, no matter where he
was. He could feel the vestiges of the invincible fire, the urge
to be out there on the field to take on Jessie Armstead and Der ric Evans and let them know there was one player in the state
of Texas who could match them size for size, strength for
strength, who wasn't scared of them at all.

"I wish I was out there with 'em," he thought to himself.

But too much had happened for Boobie to be anyplace other
than where he was, listening to the final minute on a car radio
340 miles away back in Odessa, cut off from L.V., cut off from
a season that instead of bringing him the cheers of thousands,
had only brought him silence.

Hill took the hand-off from Winchell on an apparent reverse,
then stopped and looked to the far sideline to throw. No one
was open, so he took off, and made it all the way to the ten
before getting pushed out of bounds. Permian had a first down
at the Carter ten with twenty-two seconds left.

Sharon Gaines paced up and down on the sidelines.

All football seasons were hard and took their toll on her. It
had been a condition of life ever since she had married Gary
Gaines. But it was difficult to remember any season more emotionally wearing than this one. The letter to the editor crucifying her husband had hurt her terribly. Then came another
letter, this one to school officials from an irate fan who ripped
into her for standing up too much during games and blocking
his view. She knew she stood up a lot during games, but it wasn't
through selfishness. She just felt the tension and the pressure
every bit as much as her husband did-she had been through
the nightmare of the 1986 season when the team didn't make
the playoffs-and she felt humiliated having to defend herself
over something like this. "I don't think people realize how
much that team is a part of my life," she said. But she also knew
that most people could have cared less anyway, even if they did
know. They weren't interested in her feelings, or her husband's.
They were interested in winning.