Friday Night Lights: A Town, a Team, and a Dream (4 page)

"Hell, Brown, that might as well have been in India" was the
way he put it. He had read about the Ivy League in the sports
pages and seen a few of those games on ESPN where the caliber
of play wasn't too bad but it sure as heck wasn't football the way
he had grown up to understand football. He also got a nibble
of interest from Yale, but when he tried to imagine what these
schools were like, all lie could think of was people standing
around in goofy sweaters with little Y's on the fronts yelling,
"Go Yale, beat Brown."

A series of meetings was held in the field house, the five
Permian coaches trying to pound in the game plan against Lee
one more time. Afterward, as part of a long-standing tradition,
all the lights were turned off. Some of the players lay on the
floor or slumped against concrete posts. Some listened to music, the tinny sound from their headphones like violent whis pering in a serious domestic spat. Winchell, who had gone over
the audible calls in his mind yet again, agonized over the wait.
It was the worst part of all, the very worst. After several minutes the lights came back on and he and his teammates boarded
the yellow school buses waiting outside.

With the flashers of a police escort leading the way so there
wouldn't be any wait at the traffic lights, the caravan made its
way to Ratliff Stadium like a presidential motorcade.

The sound of vomiting echoed through the dressing room of
the stadium, the retching, the physical embodiment of the ambivalence Ivory Christian felt about what he was doing and why
he was there. Droplets of sweat trickled down his face as he lay
in front of the porcelain. None of the other players paid much
notice. They had heard it before and gave little half-smiles. It
was just Ivory.

There was so much about football he hated-the practices,
the conditioning, the expectations that because he was a captain
he had to be Joe Rah-Rah. He wasn't sure if he cared about
beating Midland Lee. He wasn't sure if he cared about winning
the district championship and getting into the playoffs. Let
other players dream their foolish dreams about getting recruited by a big-time school. It wasn't going to happen to him
and he figured that after the year was over he would enlist in
the Marines or something, maybe buy a Winnebago so he could
get out of this place and drive around the country without a
care in the world, where no one could get to him.

But the game had a funny hold on him. The elemental savagery of it appealed to him and he was good at it, damn good,
strong, fast, quick, a gifted middle linebacker with a future potential he didn't begin to fathom. Severing from it, letting it go,
was not going to be as easy as he thought it would be, particularly in Odessa, where if you were big and strong and fast and
black it was difficult not to feel as if the whole world expected
you to do one thing and one thing only and that was play football. And despite the grim detachment with which he seemed to approach almost everything, he seemed scared to death at
the thought of failing at it. He loved it and he hated it and he
hated it and he loved it.

After lie had finished vomiting, he reappeared in the dressing room with it relieved smile on his face. He had gone
through the catharsis. He had gotten it out of his system, the
ambivalence, the fear.

Now he was ready to play.

Every sound in the dressing room in the final minutes seemed
amplified a thousand times-the jagged, repeated rips of athletic tape, the clip of cleats on the concrete floor like that of tap
shoes, the tumble of aspirin and Tylenol spilling from plastic
bottles like the shaking of bones to ward off evil spirits. The
faces of the players were young, but the perfection of their
equipment, the gleaming shoes and helmets and the immaculate pants and jersies, the solemn ritual that was attached to
almost everything, made them seem like boys going off to fight
a war for the benefit of someone else, unwitting sacrifices to a
strange and powerful god.

In the far corner of the dressing room Boobie Miles sat on a
bench with his eyes closed, his face a mixture of seriousness and
sadness, showing no trace of what this pivotal night would hold
for him. Jerrod McDougal, pacing back and forth, went to the
bathroom to wipe his face with paper towels. Staring into the
mirror, he checked to make sure his shirt was tucked in and
the sleeves were taped. He straightened his neck roll and then
put on his gloves to protect his hands, the last touches of gladiatorial splendor. It looked good. It looked damn good. In the
distance he could hear the Midland Lee band playing "Dixie,"
and it enraged hint. He hated that song and the way those
cocky bastards from Lee swaggered to it. His face became like
that of an impulse killer, slitty-eyed, filled with anger. Mike
Winchell lay on the floor, seduced by its coldness and how good
it felt. His eyes closed, but the eyelids still fluttered and you
could feel the nervousness churning inside him.

In the silence of that locker room it was hard not to admire
these boys as well as fear for them, hard not to get caught up
in the intoxicating craziness of it, hard not to whisper "My
God!" at how important the game had become, not only to
them, but to a town whose spirits crested and fell with each win
and each loss. You wished for something to break that tension,
a joke, a sigh, a burst of laughter, a simple phrase to convince
them that if they lost to the Rebels tonight it wasn't the end of
the world, that life would go on as it always had.

Gary Gaines, the coach of Permian, called the team to gather
around hint. He was a strikingly handsome man with a soft
smile and rows of pearly white teeth somehow unstained, as if
by divine intervention, from the toxic-looking thumbfuls of tobacco snuff that he snuck between front lip and gum when his
wife wasn't around to catch him. He had beautiful eyes, not
quite gray, not quite blue, filled with softness and reassurance.
His message was short and sincere.

"Nobody rest a play, men. Don't coast on any play. You're on
that field, you give it everything you got."

Across the field, in the visitor's dressing room, Earl Miller,
the coach of the Rebels, gave similar advice in his thick Texas
twang that made every syllable seem as long as a sentence.

"First time you step out on that field, you go down there as
hard as you can and bust somebody."

Brian Chavez's eyes bulged as he made his way to the coin toss
with the other captains. On one side was Ivory Christian, belching and hiccuping and trying to stop himself from retching
again. On the other was Mike Winchell, lost in a trance of intensity. The three of them held hands as they walked down a ramp
and then turned it corner to catch the first glimpse of a sheet of
fans dressed in black that seemed to stretch forever into the
desert night. The farther they moved into the stadium held,
the more it felt as if they were entering a fantastic world, a
world unlike any other.

The metamorphosis began to take hold of Chavez. When the game began and he took the field, his body would be vibrating
and his heart would be beating fast and every muscle in his
body would become taut. He knew he would try to hit his opponent as hard as he possibly could from his tight end position,
to hurt him, to scare him with his 215-pound frame that was
the strongest on the team, to make him think twice about getting back up again.

It was the whole reason he played football, for those hits, for
those acts of physical violence that made him tingle and feel
wonderful, for those quintessential shots that made him smile
from ear to ear and earned him claps on the back from his
teammates when he drove some defensive lineman to the sidelines and pinned him right on his butt. He knew he was an
asshole when he played, but he figured it was better to be, as he
saw it, an "asshole playin' football rather than in real life."

He had no other expectations beyond the physical thrill of it.
He didn't have to rely on it or draw all his identity from it. "I
played because I like it," he once said. "Others played because
it was Permian football. It was their ticket to popularity. It was
just a game to me, a high school game."

As the number-one student in his class, his aspirations extended far beyond the glimmer of expectation that a Texas
school, any Texas school, might be willing to give him a football
scholarship. He had set his sights differently, zeroing in on a
target that seemed incomprehensible to his family, his friends,
just about everyone. He wanted to go to Harvard.

When he tried to imagine it, he thought it would be like stepping into a different world, a world that was steeped in history
and breathtaking and so utterly different from the finite world
of Odessa, which spread over the endless horizon like the unshaven stubble of a beard. When he visited it his senior year, he
sat by the window of his hotel and watched the rowers along
the Charles with their seemingly effortless grace, the strokes of
their oars so delicate and perfectly timed as they skimmed
along the water past the white domes and the red brick buildings and all those beautiful trees. It didn't seem real to him when he gazed out that window, but more like a painting, beautiful, unfathomable, unattainable.

But now he wasn't thinking about Harvard. Every bone in his
body was focused on beating Midland Lee, and he felt so absolutely confident that he had already ordered a DISTRICT CHAMPS
patch for his letter jacket. As the coin was being thrown into
the air by one of the officials he stared across at Quincy White,
Lee's bruising fullback. At that moment Brian felt hatred toward the Rebels, absolute hatred, and he wanted to prove he
was the best there was on the damn field, the very best.

The team left the dressing room and gathered behind a huge
banner that had been painstakingly made by the cheerleaders.
It took up almost half the end zone and was fortified by the
Pepettes with pieces of rope like in some scene of war from the
Middle Ages. It became a curtain. The players congregated behind it in the liquid, fading light, yelling, screaming, pounding
each other on the shoulder pads and the helmets, furious to be
finally set loose onto the field, to revel in the thrilling roar of
the crowd.

The fans couldn't see the players yet, but they could hear
them bellowing behind that banner and they could see their
arms and knees and helmets push against it and make it stretch.
The buildup was infectious, making one's heart beat faster and
faster. Suddenly, like a fantastic present coming unwrapped,
the players burst through the sign, ripping it to shreds, little
pieces of it floating into the air. They poured out in a steady
stream, and the crowd rose to its feet.

The stillness was ruptured by a thousand different sounds
smashing into each other in wonderful chaos-deep-throated
yells, violent exhortations, giddy screams, hoarse whoops. The
people in the stands lost all sight of who they were and what
they were supposed to be like, all dignity and restraint thrown
aside because of these high school boys in front of them, their
boys, their heroes, upon whom they rested all their vicarious thrills, all their dreams. No connection in all of sports was more
intimate than this one, the one between town and high school.

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

Chants of the Permian monicker, which was taken from the
title of an old Wilson Pickett song and stuck to the team after a
bunch of drunken alumni had yelled the word for no apparent
reason during a game in the late sixties, passed through the
home side. The visitor's side answered back with equal ferocity:

"REB-ELS! REB-ELS! REB-ELS!"

Each wave of a Confederate flag by a Lee fan was answered
by the waving of a white handkerchief by a Permian fan. Each
rousing stanza of "Dixie" by the Lee band was answered by an
equally rousing stanza of "Grandioso" by the Permian band,
each cheer from the Rebelettes matched by one from the Pepettes. Nothing in the world made a difference on this October
night except this game illuminating the plains like a three-hour
Broadway finale.

Permian took the opening kickoff and moved down the
field with the methodical precision that had made it a legend
throughout the state of Texas. An easy touchdown, a quick and
bloodless 7-0 lead. But Lee, a twenty-one-point underdog,
came hack with a touchdown of its own to tie the game. Early
in the second quarter, a field goal gave the Rebels a 10-7 lead.

Permian responded with a seventy-seven-yard drive to make
it 14-10. Chris Corner, the new great black hope who had replaced Boobie Miles in the backfield, carried the ball seven of
nine plays and went over a thousand yards for the season.

Earlier in the season, Boobie had cheered on Comer's accomplishments with a proud smile. As the season progressed
and Comer became a star while Boobie languished, the cheers
stopped.

He made no acknowledgment of Comer's score. He sat on
the bench, his eyes staring straight ahead, burning with a mixture of misery and anger as it became clear to him that the
coaches had no intention of playing him tonight, that they were willing to test his knee out in meaningless runaways but not in
games that counted. His helmet was off and he wore a black
stocking cap over his head. The arm pads he liked still dangled
from his jersey. The towel bearing the legend "TERMINATOR X"
from the name of one of the members of the rap group Public
Enemy, hung from his waist, spotless and unsullied. The stadium was lit up like a dance floor, its green surface shimmering
and shining in the lights, and his uniform appeared like a glittering tuxedo loaded clown with every conceivable extra. But it
made him look silly, like one of those kids dressed to the nines
to conceal the fact that they were unpopular and couldn't dance
a lick. He sat on the bench and felt a coldness swirl through
him, as if something sacred inside him was dying, as if every
dream in his life was fleeing from him and all he could do was
sit there and watch it disappear amid all those roars that had
once been for him.