Friday Night Lights

  “How much better would it be if they concentrated that into school?” he asked. “How much better would it be if they concentrated it into a job?”

  A graduate of the University of Iowa, he had been a student trainer there on a wrestling team that won the national championship. Iowa was a wrestling-mad school, but the intensity was nowhere near what it was in Odessa over football, the relationship nowhere near as intertwined.

  Trapper loved Friday nights as much as anyone, he got caught up in the game as much as anyone. But he always had another season to look forward to if this one didn’t happen to work out.

  He knew these kids had no soft cushion. The second the season was over they became vague, fuzzy shapes, as indistinguishable as the thick clouds that skimmed across the sky into the horizon. They might come back to the locker room after a big game. Their favorite coach would give them a big, sincere hello and then quickly drift off because of more pressing needs, and they would paw around the edges of the joyous pandemonium and it would become clear that it wasn’t theirs anymore—it belonged to others who had exactly the same swagger of invincibility that once upon a time had been their exclusive right.

  Trapper knew he would get paid for what he did no matter what happened during the course of a season. If this particular one ended Saturday in the quarterfinals of the Class AAAAA Texas playoffs against the Lamar Vikings, there might be some hurt, some disappointment at what could have happened, because this team clearly had the talent to go to State. But before long the delicious anticipation of another season would come again. A new set of kids, a new set of faces, a new set of hopes, a new set of heroes would be paraded atop the shoulders of the town as gloriously as the Greeks honored their gods.

  “That’s my salvation,” he said. “What’s their salvation?”

  But he also knew it was too powerful, too intoxicating to ever get away from, for those who played and also for those who sat in the stands cheering week after week, month after month, year after year.

  “It’s the Friday night addiction,” said Trapper.

  III

  “This needle gonna hurt?” asked Ivory Christian as he lay on a table in the trainer’s room. “I hate needles.”

  “I know,” said team doctor Weldon Butler.

  “Don’t look,” said Trapper.

  “It will give you some strength the second half,” said Butler.

  “I hate needles, Doc,” Ivory said again, his voice quavering, scared.

  “I know, I do, too.”

  “I’m afraid of needles.”

  “Don’t jump, Ivory. Make a fist and hold it.”

  He had come off the field at halftime against the Lamar Vikings exhausted and complained to Butler that he didn’t know if he was going to make it. He was quickly ushered into the trainer’s room next to the dressing room and the door was closed.

  Ivory, dressed in his uniform and smelling of sour sweat, groaned as the needle attached to the IV bag slipped into his vein. One of his feet hanging over the edge of the table began to shake, and it was clear he was terrified. The IV bag contained a solution of lactose; such a procedure was a common method of replenishing depleted body fluids. It also had the psychological effect of making Ivory think that some magical, power-packed supply of energy was coursing through his veins, a miracle potion to get him through the second half of a game in which a loss would mean the end of the season.

  “Don’t move,” Butler said again. “You’ll play the best second half you’ve played all year.”

  “I hate it,” said Ivory.

  “How long is the halftime?” asked Butler.

  “Twenty minutes,” said Trapper.

  “Long enough to get one in there,” said Butler.

  “I hate needles, man,” Ivory said again. “They scare me.”

  But it didn’t matter. The Lamar Vikings hadn’t wilted at all under the hot sun of Odessa. The Permian lead at halftime was only 7-0, and the team could not afford to have an exhausted Ivory Christian at middle linebacker. If an IV solution normally used in hospitals and at the scene of accidents was now being used during the halftime of a high school football game to ease complaints of exhaustion, so be it.

  Only a month earlier, the atmosphere surrounding Ivory had been so different. Sitting on the bench in the middle of the last regular season game against San Angelo, he had said he could care less if he played anymore. During halftime, one of the coaches had criticized him for failing to play the trap correctly with the score 28-0 in Permian’s favor, and he was seething over it. He was tired of studying the play sheets that filled a thick notebook, tired of being picked at and probed and poked for every detail. He was also upset when a fellow teammate at linebacker, David Fierro, suddenly got benched after starting all year.

  “I do not like the Permian football program,” he had said. “I don’t want to play six more games. I’m ready to go home.

  “They think you’re a super athlete just because you’re black,” he blurted out angrily. “They expect me to make the tackle. . . .” When asked if he wanted the team to win the coin toss or not, he said nothing.

  Later in the week, anger had given way to the familiar feelings of ambivalence. The playoffs were coming up, and he knew from the year before how exciting that could be. But there was also a part of him that truly wished the season was over. He questioned his own commitment to the game, wondering if he hit as hard as he had in the past.

  “If someone held me, or cheap-shotted me, or called me something, I went off on ’em. No mercy. No prisoners. That’s how I got my reputation as a brute.” But he wasn’t sure if the same instinct was still there.

  “Mojo used to be serious to me, before I got up here,” said Ivory. “It’s just another football team to me now. It’s got a winning tradition. It’s got good players. But I got other things to do besides football and getting people psyched up. . . .”

  His interest in preaching seemed as strong as ever; it was the only area, as he saw it, that he could freely express himself. Just as there was a part of Ivory that didn’t think he hit people hard enough on the football field, there was a part of Ivory that felt he hadn’t dedicated enough of himself to the church. He said he looked forward to the moment football ended and he could spend all his free time “working with Jesus, working with Christ.” He dreamed of someday becoming the pastor of the largest Baptist church in California, with a congregation of a thousand and a four-hundred-strong choir behind him. He dreamed of how he would get a bachelor’s degree in communications or business management and then a doctorate in theology. He dreamed of the day people would respectfully address him as “Dr. Christian.”

  And then, with a phone call from a college football recruiter, all those dreams began to fade away.

  Around the time the playoffs started, Texas Christian University, a Southwest Conference school, spoke to Ivory. A recruiter told him they were interested and that a good showing in the playoffs might cement a scholarship, and it was hard to think about anything else after that.

  Once the team got caught up in the playoffs, Ivory never preached again. His aspirations in life also changed. He saw a new light now, a new path, and it didn’t come to him in some fantastic, surreal dream, as the call to preach had.

  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 bit 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 times 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.

  (15)

  THE ALGEBRAIC EQUATION

  I

  If you were a football player playing 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 a 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 team. 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.”