Friday Night Lights: A Town, a Team, and a Dream (53 page)

AS A CHILD MIKE WINCHELL HAD DREAMED OF IT, RIGHT DOWN
to the shoelaces that he wore. And now he was here in that
mystical place, the huge oval of Memorial Stadium at the University of Texas, with those smooth flanks of concrete curving
to the sky.

During their road trips across Texas together, his brother Joe
Bill had always made a point of showing Mike the great football
baronies of Texas-Texas A & M, the University of Texas, Baylor. "Hey, if you work hard, you can go here," Joe Bill told him.
Of all those trips, and all those schools, it was the University of
Texas that had made the greatest impression. He wore shoelaces with little orange Longhorns on them. He fought for its
honor when other kids dared to sully it.

Joe Bill had first taken him to Memorial Stadium in 1981.
They had gone there other times since then, and Joe Bill remembered the time Mike got to try on the helmet of one of the
Longhorn players. When Mike was a junior at Permian, his
brother took him to meet David McWilliams, the Texas head
coach, and an assistant later took Mike into the field house and
showed him the weight room.

"That's all he wanted to do," said Joe Bill, "was go to Texas."

And now he was in that field house again, not as some gawking, starry-eyed kid, but as a football player, preparing for the
semifinal game against the Carter Cowboys.

Since the beginning of December, college recruiters had
been coming to Permian to see who might be worth running
after. They were interested in Ivory Christian, and they were
particularly interested in two other black players who were only
juniors, Hill and Comer, because it was never too early to start
laying the foundations. When Gaines spoke to them, he also
tried to steer them in Winchell's direction.

There was no doubt that Winchell had exceeded all expectations. As a senior he had come into his own. After fourteen games, he had completed 97 of 203 passes for 1,881
yards, twenty-four touchdowns, and only five interceptions.
And there were moments when he had thrown the ball so exquisitely, with such a soft, intangible touch, that it was hard to
believe he couldn't make a contribution somewhere.

Beyond the statistics, Gaines also thought they would never
find a player who was more dedicated or disciplined. He was a
one-in-a-thousand kid who would work tirelessly on the football field and then go back to the dorm to work tirelessly on his
homework, a kid who actually believed that the purpose of an
athletic scholarship was not only to play football but also to get
an education.

But football games were not won with noble role models and
the cotton candy that college presidents liked to spin out for
the media. They were won with kids who had rockets for arms
and hydraulic pistons for legs and biceps and triceps and quadriceps that could carry refrigerators home from Sears and
cross-eyed looks suggesting that to maim someone was sublime.
Mike Winchell wasn't at all what the college recruiters were
looking for, and the fears that had always haunted him were
probably right: he wasn't fast enough, or tall enough. He didn't
possess a good enough arm, and no amount of work was going
to make up for that.

"I gave everybody his name," said Gaines in his office one
day, obviously discouraged. "Nobody has stepped forward and
said they're real interested."

But Mike was in the place of his childhood dreams, and he was at a time in his life when dreams still did come true, when
David whipped Goliath, when unexpected pleasures fell from
the clouds, when surprises rained down daily, when every feeling seemed like the most important on earth. He was still in
high school.

And who knew what night happen if he had a great game,
riddled the nation's finest high school defense, threw his passes
true and straight and on a bead, made the right audibles at the
line of scrimmage, didn't wince once under the blitz that had
knocked many a quarterback into terrified submission?

Maybe the college recruiters in attendance, maybe even one
from the University of Texas, would take their eyes off the
Carter Cowboys and say silently to themselves that there was
something about this Winchell kid, something indescribable,
something that was worth taking a shot on....

The morning of the game, the weather in Austin was cold
and rainy. As the starting time drew nearer and nearer, as he
walked along the field where the Longhorns played and now
he would play, his head became filled by a nagging feeling that
he couldn't get rid of, couldn't let go of. He grew silent, as he
always did on game day, and the familiar strains of agony began
to show, the face so tight, the eyes filled not with the glitter of
the challenge but the pressure of it, and he imagined a likely
scenario for what would happen:

It was too wet. He would never be able to throw the ball,
never be able to get a grip on it. It wouldn't be a field of dreams
at all, but one of nightmares.

II

The locker room, laid out the night before by the student
trainers and managers, was stunning.

Each of the uniforms hung from the fourth mesh hole at the
top of the locker. Each was turned the same way, with the
names of the players across the back in black letters, just like in college, just like in the pros, but better, those uniforms symbolizing something richer, something deeper, because if they lost
they would never wear them again.

Winchell, Christian, Chavez, Billingsley, McDougal, Payne, Sweatt,
Dean, Wilkins, Brown, Johnson ...

There was a stool in front of each of the lockers. The shoes
were propped up against one of the rungs like Cinderella's slippers. The pants and socks had been placed on top of the stool,
each laid out the exact same way. On top of the pants and socks
was the helmet, each turned the same way.

Jerrod McDougal picked up his helmet and gently thumbed
it. It wasn't a corny gesture, but a gesture of awareness.

"Damn," he said in a whisper. "It's here.

"Win this one and we're there, where we want to be."

Everything followed in the same sequence, as it always did, the
ritual sounds of getting dressed that now seemed so automatic,
so reflexive. The quick, bloodless tears of' tape on the trainer's
table. The rustling sound of pants being pulled to the waist like
the fitting of a wedding dress. The clapping sound of shoulder
pads transforming a scrawny kid into a larger-than-life football
player. The scratchy sounds of the psych-up music from the
Walkmans, Bon Jovi for the whites and Public Enemy for the
blacks. The fixed, familiar looks of the players, Winchell furtive
and nervous; Billingsley tapping his legs up and down, those
beautiful eyes alive and electric and darting; McDougal biting
down on his lip, wanting to get it on so badly, bring those Carter
Cowboy motherfuckers on; Christian trying to remain calm as
his stomach boiled and churned, seething like a cauldron;
Chavez stony and silently receding into his special, momentary
world of violence.

Outside on the soggy, spongy field, the Carter Cowboys conducted their pre-game warm-ups. They wore bright red uniforms that were the color of blood, and it was obvious just by
the physical look of them that Permian hadn't faced a team like this all year. Their best defensive player, linebacker Jessie Armstead, six two and 205 pounds, would be named national high
school player of the year by SuperPrep magazine after the season and would sign a football scholarship with the University
of Miami. Six other players on the defense would sign scholarships, with Oklahoma State, Tennessee, Houston, Baylor, and
two with North Texas State. On the offense, the Carter line
averaged six one and 243 pounds, and two players would sign
scholarships, with SMU and Houston.

With Boobie lost to the team, Permian, if it was blessed,
might have one player sign a scholarship with a Division I
school. Maybe Winchell. Maybe Ivory Christian. Or it might not
have any at all.

As the Carter Cowboys went through their warm-ups, the
Pepettes arrived. They had traveled to Austin in a caravan of
buses along with the band. A patrol car had followed them the
entire 340-mile trip after the school received a series of phone
calls threatening to sabotage the buses.

The Pepettes arrived in their short skirts and letter jackets,
their hair, usually so buoyant, falling in damp strings because
of the rain. About five thousand Permian fans were already in
the stands even though the game was an hour off, and at the
sight of the Pepettes they started yelling their familiar chant.

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

The Carter team, for no apparent reason, edged over to the
Permian sideline en masse. They started making low, guttural
sounds that sounded like dogs barking or the arfing of seals,
then started clapping in unison. Several of them wore dark
green visors over their helmets, a new equipment feature that
served no obvious purpose other than to make football players
look more menacing and killerlike than they already did. They
started chanting something, and it was hard to make out what
they were saying. Some said it was "Oreo! Oreo!" directed at a
Permian teacher who was black. Then they started chanting
something else, something that sounded like "Fuck 0! Fuck
O!"-perhaps a version of "Fuck Mojo! Fuck Mojo!" The Pep ettes looked intimidated, scared, as the Carter Cowboys moved
closer and closer in their bloodred uniforms, the claps getting
louder and louder, the chant rhythmic and taunting. When
some of the Carter players were asked what they were saying,
they just smirked contemptuously through their green death
masks and walked away.

The Permian band came in and began to make its traditional
march around the stadium. It played "Grandioso," with those
stirring, rising notes. It moved to the very edge of the Permian
side, as if it was a demilitarized zone, and then stopped and
came back the other way. The band always went all the way
around the stadium-that was a Permian trademark-but a decision had been made not to go over to the Carter side, presumably because of fears of trouble.

The Carter band came in led by a drum major, the music
sweet and jazzy. The Carter crowd, far smaller than the Permian crowd even though they had a much shorter distance to
travel, broke into exuberant cries.

"CAR-TER! CAR-TER! CAR-TER! CAR-TER!"

The Carter band moved into the stands and members of the
crowd started swaying dreamily back and forth as if they were
dancing.

The stadium filled up with more fans. Some came in through
portal 17, right smack in the middle. Occasionally they went in
the wrong direction, but they were quickly able to right themselves. In the waning minutes before game time there was a
small stream of black passing white to get to the Carter side,
and white passing black to get to the Permian side.

The coaches gave their pre-game speeches in the locker room.

From Gaines with Winchell, methodically going over the
checks and the three-play packages. From Mayes with the linebackers, filling up an entire blackboard with defenses and read
responsibilities that looked like an equation for nuclear fusion.
From Belew with the running backs and the defensive ends. From Currie with the linemen. From Hollingshead with the receivers and defensive backs.

"We're one game away from playing a state football championship game. We deserve it, because we've worked our ass off
in off-season, worked hard in August, had two-a-days, came up
to practice in the morning. You got to have it in your heart that
you want it worse than Carter does. It is a team sport, football
is a team sport, the team that wants it the worst is gonna will
this football game."

There was no other moment like it, and anyone who had ever
played high school football could still recall it with perfect
clarity, that emotional peak, that time in life when all energy
was concentrated on a single point and everything was crystal
clear. Whatever happened afterward, whatever success, or failure, or happiness, or horror, it could not be forgotten.