Friday Night Lights

  Winchell threw the ball.

  Duncan waited and listened.

  And he was exactly right, the sound of the crowd did tell him who had won and who had lost, a sudden, joyful eruption that came from one of the sides like a blast of bullets to hail a surrender. As Clint Duncan later related it, he could also tell from something else.

  “I saw a bunch of cocky niggers jumping up and down.”

  Dale McDougal ran to find her son. They both started sobbing and walked off the field clutching each other. Near the door of the field house a Carter fan started gleefully chanting.

  “NO MO’ MOJO, MOJO NO MO! NO MO’ MOJO, MOJO NO MO! NO MO’ MOJO, MOJO NO MO!”

  The taunts felt like daggers, and several players went toward the fan to lash back. But they were herded back and entered the field house in silence, where the bright lights and shiny equipment made the interior seem like a hospital. Television and newspaper reporters from Dallas and Midland and Odessa milled about, ready to interview them.

  In the place of his dreams, Mike Winchell had just had the worst performance of his Permian career, four for twenty-four passing for fifty-seven yards and one interception. Reporters came up to him and he answered their questions dutifully, quick to heap blame on himself and acknowledge that he couldn’t put a tight spiral on the ball because it kept slipping off his hands in the rain. He showed little outward emotion, but according to his brother, who later spoke with him, he was distraught over what had happened, for there was no place he wanted to reach the heights in as much as this one. But there wasn’t anything he could do now, except look back. It was over.

  “You make some bonds for life,” he told a television interviewer of his career as a high school football player. “The real sad thing is, we’ll probably go our own separate ways.”

  Chavez, weary and tired, sat in the locker room in silence. He was upset and melancholy, but life, instead of ending at this moment, was just beginning for him. McDougal and Billingsley were in tears, and Ivory had a strange smile on his face, not because he was glad it was over, but because it was hard to imagine that after all the personal agony and angst it actually was over.

  For the last time, Gaines gathered the players into a circle. All around him, bent on one knee, there were teenage boys in tears, their great, compelling belief in themselves punctured.

  “I’m very proud of you as a person, I’m proud of you as a team,” said Gaines, his soft voice barely rising over the sobs. “To be one of the final four teams left in the state of Texas playing football at this December date is quite an accomplishment. We fell one game short of where we wanted to be, to be playin’ for it all, and it hurts, it hurts all of us.” Then he led the team in prayer.

  “Heavenly Father, we pray that you be proud of the effort we’ve given, that you be proud of the way we played. Father, it hurts so much because we did so many things good and came up short. We pray that you would help each one of us to overcome this setback, that you lessen the hurt, that you give all of us strength and comfort that only you can give us. We thank you for these young men that it’s been our pleasure to coach. We pray that you be with these seniors and go with them. Thank you for the leadership that they have displayed, the leadership that they have given this team. We love each and every one of them, dear God.”

  Later that night, when the team returned to Odessa, emotions were more in control. There were no more tears, just dejected silence, except from Jerrod McDougal. He lingered by his locker and started to sob again. “That’s why it hurts so much, to lose to someone you know hasn’t worked as hard as you,” he said as he closed his eyes and tried to fight back the tears.

  He thought back to the time he had been a sophomore and had walked into the locker room for the first time, how nervous he was, how excited he was, how much time he thought he had until he became a senior and had a chance to drink in the glory. And then, just like that it seemed, it was over, the time moving so fast it was hard to hold on to it. “These sophomores think it’s a long road,” he said as the tears trickled down his face, “but it ain’t.” And suddenly he wasn’t a high school football player at all, but a high school kid with absolutely no idea of what he was going to do with his life.

  The locker room was empty and polished, the black carpet free of the tape and the tobacco spit and the shoes and the shoulder pads. During the season, there had been a ceaseless cacophony in that room of songs and stories and pleas for fifty cents to buy a soda. There had been laughter and occasional fights. There had been the wonderful gyrations of Boobie, in better times, when he would imitate a striptease dancer. There had been the killer’s grin of Billingsley and the little-boy grin of Winchell and the stoicism of Ivory Christian and the admiring laughter for Chavez when he got up during the captains’ speeches and swore profusely. There had been the serious faces staring intently at Gaines as he tried to inspire them with Herculean stories of Civil War heroes and Olympic swimmers. There had been Belew telling them that everything could be taken away from you in life, your house, your car, everything except a state championship. There had been the solemnity of the pre-game ritual, when all the players lay on the floor as if they were soldiers in the hull of a ship. And there had been the effusion of the post-game ritual, screams and cat-calls followed by eager plans for the glorious remainder of Friday night. Now there wasn’t a sound, and the carefully cleaned room looked as if it had never been inhabited.

  Jerrod clearly didn’t want to go. He stood in front of his locker, fumbling with the lock. But he had no choice. He put on his coat and walked into the soggy cold. After he left, only a few of the coaches remained. They ruminated a little over the game and how close they had come. But already their focus was somewhere else.

  On the far wall of their office was a depth chart. It had the names of each of the players on little magnets that could be constantly juggled, from first string to second string, from tackle to guard, from fullback to tailback, from offense to defense, or removed altogether.

  They went to work immediately, because there was no time for sentiment, no reason to postpone it.

  Boobie’s name had been taken off long ago. But now the others joined him as well. WINCHELL . . . MCDOUGAL ... BILLINGSLEY ... CHAVEZ ... CHRISTIAN.... They and all the other seniors were placed in a neat little pile at the bottom, and suddenly there was no sign of them at all on the board, just black, empty spaces that would soon be filled by other magnets at quarterback and tailback and middle linebacker and all the other positions. The season had ended, but another one had begun.

  People everywhere, young and old, were already dreaming of heroes.

  EPILOGUE

  The Carter Cowboys won the state championship a week after defeating Permian in the semifinals.

  As expected, a dozen players on the team, including Derric Evans and Gary Edwards, were heavily courted by college recruiters. If life at Carter High School was like an endless amusement ride because of their stature as football stars, getting recruited was like taking a roller coaster to the moon.

  “I was promised money, credit cards, apartments, come home on weekends when I wanted to,” said Derric, one of the finest high school defensive backs in the country. “Everybody was promisin’ something. It was just who was promisin’ the most.”

  Over a hundred schools had beckoned to Derric, and when it came time for him to decide which ones to visit personally, some coaches tried to lure him to their campuses by asking what type of woman he wanted when he got there. “The coaches would tell us, they would ask us, what color do you want, black, white, Mexican,” said Derric.

  He decided to visit four schools, the University of Tennessee, Michigan State, Baylor, and Arkansas. For the Tennessee visit he was picked up at his home in a limousine and sat in the backseat talking to his girlfriend over the phone as he was taken to the airport. “I was back there all by myself, looking at the TV, talkin’ on the telephone,” said Derric. “It was like I was on top of the world.”

  At
Michigan State, he and some other recruits were taken by their player hosts to a strip joint. Once there, they paid for Derric to have the educational experience of a so-called couch ride, where he went into a back room and sat on a couch while one of the women at the club stood over him and made various enticements.

  At Baylor, he went to a party where a woman he had never met before came up to him and said, “I know who you are. You’re Derric Evans.” She seemed eager to sleep with him, which struck him as slightly unusual because she was white, but he eagerly accepted since it seemed part of the package.

  At all three of these schools, he said he was taken to one of the local stores to pick out tennis shoes or sweaters or jerseys or running suits, not only for him, but for his mother, his girlfriend, whomever he wanted. He finally settled on Tennessee, a fairly easy choice because, he said, coaches there offered the best deal by promising him an off-campus apartment and telling him he would never have to worry about money.

  Gary Edwards, fully recovered from the controversy over his algebra grade, made trips to Nebraska, Tulsa, Arkansas, and Houston.

  The promises of what he would reap were not as bold as they were to Derric because he was not the physical specimen that Derric was, but there were obvious hints—an assistant coach at Nebraska telling Gary to look at what this player and that one had, a player at Tulsa openly discussing what the coaches could do for you if you were good enough. Gary himself saw players at some of the schools driving Cadillacs and BMWs, and he was savvy enough to know that these cars did not come from a college player’s salary, which presumably was nothing.

  Gary accepted a scholarship from Houston. The whole recruiting experience had been something he could never have possibly imagined. The phone had rung constantly with recruiters, all begging for a piece of him. “I don’t know anyone who would have the same hat size after that,” said his father.

  But it didn’t stop there. Because Derric and Gary had been on a state championship team, the first from Dallas in thirty-eight years and also one that had become a gigantic cause célèbre in the black community, their star status only intensified.

  Kids asked them for autographs. When they went out to eat in the neighborhood, restaurant managers ripped up the check. Once when they were pulled over for speeding, the Dallas policeman who stopped them recognized them. After giving them a lecture about not letting the state championship go to their heads, he sent them on their way. At school, as usual, they came and went as they pleased. Neither of them drank. Neither of them took drugs. Instead they lived on a better high, the high of invincibility at the age of eighteen.

  “We was on top of the world,” said Derric. “We had [all these] recruiters and a state championship and we thought there ain’t nothing can happen to us.”

  They committed their first armed robbery together on May 18, 1989.

  The idea came from another Carter Cowboy, who had already committed several armed robberies of his own and bragged in the school lunchroom about how easy it was. Gary and Derric did not wear masks and their getaway car was Derric’s mother’s white BMW. They got around a hundred bucks apiece and it took them several weeks to spend the money because they were both from comfortable, middle-class homes and did not want for anything.

  They did a total of seven armed robberies in the space of a month until they were arrested by police. Their motive, as far as anyone could tell, was that they had done it sheerly for kicks; something to do before it was time to play big-time college football. Nor did they give any thought to the consequences.

  “Me and Gary, we were sittin’ in the police car and we weren’t even worried,” said Derric. “We thought we’re gonna go to jail for a little while and our mothers would come bail us out and we’d go back home and it would be over with.”

  Besides Derric and Gary, three other members of the Carter Cowboy state championship team were charged with armed robberies. These five, and ten other black teenagers, committed a total of twenty-one robberies in a loosely organized ring.

  Just like the grade controversy, public opinion over the case broke almost strictly along racial lines. Whites, finding the robberies perfect justification for their original feelings that the Carter Cowboys had cheated their way into the playoffs, had no sympathy for the defendants at all. They were thugs and criminals who deserved to be put away. Blacks, hurt and humiliated at what had happened, prayed that some mercy would be shown for these kids who had made a colossal, inexplicable mistake.

  Walking into the courtroom for his sentencing on September 22, 1989, Derric Evans thought the very worst he would get was ten years, and he still had hope for probation. Gary Edwards, convinced that he would get probation, had already made plans to watch a friend play high school football that night.

  “I believe much of the media attention on these trials is because some of you were on a state championship football team, and a few of you have scholarships and great potential,” began state district judge Joe Kendall.

  “I can think of, but will not name, off the top of my head three former Dallas Cowboys and one former Miami Dolphin who have two striking things in common. They all four have Super Bowl rings and they all four have been to the penitentiary.

  “Although it sometimes may not seem so, the criminal justice system really doesn’t care who you are. The typical American male lives vicariously on Sunday afternoons in the fall and winter through the lives of football heroes. However, when it comes to violating the law, at the courthouse it simply doesn’t matter that you can run the football.”

  Derric Evans was sentenced to twenty years in prison.

  Gary Edwards was sentenced to sixteen years.

  The three other defendants who had been members of the 1988 Carter Cowboy state championship team received sentences of thirteen years, fourteen years, and twenty-five years.

  Marshall Gandy, the prosecutor on the case, was generally reluctant to blame outside factors for any crime. No single, pat explanation could explain what caused these kids, the children of good, hardworking parents from middle class homes, to go out and rob fast-food places and video stores just for fun. But he didn’t believe Derric Evans and Gary Edwards exhibited typical patterns of criminal behavior, and he wondered what favor had been done these kids by placing them on a golden pedestal. He found it remarkable that Derric Evans had signed his letter of intent to Tennessee in a hot tub with a passel of gold chains around his neck. The only aspect more remarkable was the presence of Dallas television and newspaper reporters to cover the signing because of Derric’s stature as a high school football star.

  “You look at how we treat them in high school, and how we treat them in college, and everyone asks why they act like children,” said Gandy.

  “How would you expect them to act any other way?”

  Brian Chavez applied to Harvard after the season ended.

  He ranked at the top of his class and had scored a 700 on the math portion of the SAT. He also hoped that his football career at Permian would enhance his chances of admission. The coaching staff at Permian did not contact the Harvard football program on his behalf. When asked by a Harvard coach to supply a game film of Brian, Gaines sent film of the first game of the season. It certainly wasn’t Brian’s best game of the season; he hadn’t even played in it because he was injured.

  The problem was discovered when a Harvard coach called Brian’s father and said he was having trouble figuring out what number Brian wore.

  Gaines said he sent the wrong film by accident. His father accepted that but was still upset. “How could you make a mistake with something as important as that?” Tony Chavez asked, and he worried that his son’s chances for admission to Harvard would be diminished.

  Brian himself was deeply hurt, considering the sacrifices that he had made to play for Permian, like the time in the playoffs junior year when he had played an entire game with a broken ankle. He had injured it the previous week, but it was purposely never x-rayed because the discovery that it was bro
ken would have kept him from playing. To get through the game, the ankle was tightly taped, an air cast was put around it, and he said he was given painkillers right before the game and also during halftime. About a week later, a doctor who examined Brian told him the ankle had in fact been broken.

  On April 14, 1989, he was admitted to Harvard.

  Brian went out for the freshman football team in September, but quit after one day after coming to the conclusion that the program was on a par with the junior high one in Odessa. He also found it hard to adjust to the idea of playing games in front of a handful of people when he had played in front of twenty-five thousand at Texas Stadium.

  Permian still exerted a hold on his life. During the annual football banquet to commemorate the 1988 season, a video of highlights of the season had been shown. A song by Billy Joel called “This Is the Time” was used for part of the soundtrack. When one of Brian’s roommates at Harvard played it one day, chills shot down Brian’s spine and he could almost feel tears welling in his eyes. It all came roaring back, the wins and losses, the glories and pains shared with his teammates.

  When he went out for the team at Harvard, it no longer felt right. It wasn’t the purpose of his being there, and for the first time in his life he was in an environment where football had no special cachet. When he was at Permian, Winchell and Ivory Christian and he had once received a standing ovation at an elementary school assembly, with all those gaping nine- and ten-year-olds wanting so desperately to be just like them someday. But when he stepped out onto the playing fields of Harvard in the fall of 1989, he knew such moments were over. He felt no magic or history in those fields, just an awareness that there were more important goals that he wanted to accomplish. He didn’t rule out playing as a sophomore, but not when a new phase of his life was starting.