Friday Night Lights

  Throughout the spring and summer and early fall recruiters were in contact with Boobie by letter, urging him to give consideration to their schools. L.V. carefully kept the letters for him in a large envelope, as if they were the family jewels. They came from all over the country, from Notre Dame, Nebraska, the University of Houston, Texas A & M, Clemson, Texas Tech, Oklahoma, Oklahoma State, LSU, SMU, UCLA, and Arkansas.

  Some of them were more personal than others. Some tried harder than others (Texas A & M led the way with twenty-three pieces of correspondence, which included a handwritten postcard when it played in the Kickoff Classic at the Meadowlands). Some sent glossy football programs; some, personalized mail-grams. But all of them gushed and fawned over Boobie, and it was impossible not to be blinded by them. They bragged about their facilities and their winning traditions and none of them, of course, made any mention of the academic difficulties he would face in college. All they knew about him was that he was big and strong and fearless, and that was enough reason to cram his head with dreams.

  Boobie had been classified as a learning disabled student. Up until he went to Permian, he had been placed mostly in self-contained classes. When he went to Permian in the tenth grade, he was mainstreamed into regular classes but could get extra help when he needed it. His status made him exempt from the state-mandated competency tests that were a requirement for a high school diploma, and he had never taken college boards.

  His schedule for the fall semester of his senior year at Permian included algebra I, a course that many Permian students took as freshmen and some took in eighth grade; biology I, a course that most Permian students took as sophomores; and correlated language arts IV, a course for students at least two years behind their grade level in reading and writing skills.

  Boobie was on a schedule that would give him the required course credits to graduate from Permian. But there was no way he could fulfill the requirements of the NCAA for the number of courses needed to qualify for a nonrestrictive scholarship. Instead, Boobie was an automatic Proposition 48 case, meaning he could be awarded a scholarship but would have to sit out his freshman year, presumably to improve his academic skills. Because of the loss of a year’s eligibility, most major colleges didn’t like Prop 48 cases and tried to avoid them, with rare exceptions.

  L.V. was aware of Boobie’s status, but he didn’t think it would stop Boobie from getting a major-college scholarship if he was healthy. When it came to the classroom, he said that Boobie was diligent, studying for tests when he had to and doing homework. But both he and Ruby sometimes wondered what Boobie’s grades would be like if he weren’t playing football, and they also wondered how hard he was being pushed in the classroom. “Boobie being an athlete, it’s hard to tell,” said Ruby.

  Some teachers worked diligently and patiently with Boobie, aware of how hard it was for him to concentrate. Others just seemed to let him go, doing little more than babysitting this kid who, as one acknowledged, was destined to become the next Great Black Hope of the Permian football team.

  On the football field, Boobie was frequently reassured and coddled. He had been kicked off the team sophomore year for missing workouts. But he had been allowed to rejoin after the coaches concluded that the same demands made of other players could not be made of him if he was to stay on the team. It wasn’t a selfless decision, because they realized that Boobie had the potential to be a franchise player for Permian.

  They tried to induce him to do things in much the same way a parent would coax a recalcitrant child to do something—hoping, for example, to get him to play a little defense by bringing him a poster of Lawrence Taylor. “He’s got a man’s body, but you’re dealing with the mentality of a twelve-year-old child” was the way Permian running back coach Mike Belew put it, remembering the time he had criticized Boobie for something and he “laid down just like a mule.”

  The preferential treatment Boobie received sometimes caused resentment among the other players. The coaches were aware of the gripes, but the bottom line was that Boobie had the talent and they did not. With his size and his speed and his ability, he was worth the special status at whatever cost and whatever effect it had on the dynamics of the team or his own development. Like it or not he was the franchise, unless, for some reason, they did not need him anymore.

  Most who met Boobie agreed that he was one of those kids for whom the game of football had become as important, as indispensable, as a part of their bodies. Taking it away would be like amputating a leg. Some in town, most of them black, worried about what might happen to him if it somehow didn’t work out, what the incredible effect of that absence might be. They saw something potentially dangerous in it all. And some in town, all of them white, gleefully suggested that Boobie Miles, without the ability to carry a football in his hand, might as well get a broom and start preparing for his other destiny in life—learning how to sweep the corners of storerooms.

  On other occasions, some whites offered another suggestion for Boobie’s life if he no longer had football: just do to him what a trainer did to a horse that had pulled up lame at the track, just take out a gun and shoot him to put him out of the misery of a life that no longer had any value.

  “What would Boobie be without football?” echoed a Permian coach when asked the question one day. The answer was obvious, as clear as night and day, black and white in Odessa, Texas, and he responded without the slightest hesitation.

  “A big ol’ dumb nigger.”

  III

  The scrimmage ended. Under the glow of the stadium lights, Ivory Christian helped Boobie adjust to a pair of crutches that was too small for him. It was a beautiful night in Lubbock, windless, in the seventies. Jones Stadium, home of Texas Tech University, was virtually empty, and there was a mood of serenity and peace. The light, falling on the field accentuated the colors—the green of the artificial turf, the red of the seats like a luscious flowerbed. Everything looked wonderfully vivid and clean as Boobie struggled with the crutches to get off the field.

  “Take care of yourself, man, so me and you go to the same college,” said Clifton Monroe, a running back from the opposing team.

  Boobie smiled that wonderful, glowing smile. He liked hearing that, but an instant later came the fear of not being able to go to college at all.

  “That’s what I’m afraid of,” he said.

  Gaines huddled the team around him. He tried to be stoic, giving the familiar speech that no team was ever built around one player. But the thought of a serious injury to Boobie gnawed at him. He had been preparing for this season the moment the last one had ended eight months earlier. He was methodical and meticulous about everything, the kind of coach, the kind of man, who prepared for every possible situation through tireless work. And now came something he had no control over.

  Boobie’s loss was just the kind of news he did not want to hear, an omen that the season was tailspinning out of control, somehow jinxed. If the knee was wrecked, there went the team’s star before a single down had even been played. And who could possibly take his place? Who could match the physical skill of Boobie? On the bus ride home he hardly said a word to anyone, the gray shadows of Brownfield and Seagraves and Seminole and Andrews falling across his face like a fine mist. Instead he leaned against a railing right behind the bus driver, gazing at the highway through the bug-splattered windshield, lost in thought, the tension of a season that hadn’t even started yet reducing him to silence.

  The next day, Boobie came to the field house with a huge smile creasing his face. A doctor’s exam had showed it was more a sprained ligament than anything else. The doctor told him he could play again in ten to fourteen days. Boobie might only miss two or three games of the season.

  But then, almost as abruptly, the dream changed again. A second examination by another doctor did reveal damage to the knee. Boobie needed arthroscopic surgery. He would be out at least a month before he could come back, and there were some, like Trapper, who believed the road back might take much lo
nger than that.

  “It’s not an impossibility that Boobie can come back. Can he mentally overcome the injury to come back? Can he be full speed? You have surgery on your knee, they cut it open, and then they say, ‘Fuck, you’re okay, go back out there.’ It’s kind of a gut check. Do you really want to play football? Can you really come back from it?”

  It meant adjusting to a knee brace. It meant not flinching an inch when the knee was hit full-speed by a helmet, not succumbing to the perpetual fear of pain, not running with the slightest tentativeness, which was the edge between a great player and a mediocre one. And it meant doing all these things at the age of eighteen.

  In the aftermath of that meaningless scrimmage in the summer twilight in Lubbock, Trapper envisioned a definite fate for the Boobie Miles who had been the dazzling jewel of the Watermelon Feed.

  “I think he’s just gonna drift away.”

  With the season opener a week away, the pressure now intensified on everyone else, on Brian Chavez with his metamorphic ruthlessness and Ivory Christian with his love-hate ambivalence and Jerrod McDougal with his religious zeal. If Permian was to go to State, they would have to perform in ways that no one had ever imagined, rise to heights beyond even the expectations of the fans. But no one would have to have a greater year, be more superb, than Mike Winchell at quarterback.

  Now, more than ever, it was up to him.

  THE SEASON

  (4)

  DREAMING OF HEROES

  I

  When his father gazed at him from the hospital bed with those sad eyes that had drawn so narrow from the drinking and the smoking and the endless heartache, Mike Winchell had been thirteen years old. He knew something was wrong because of the way his father acted with him, peaceful in the knowledge he didn’t have to put up a fight anymore. Mike tried to joke with him as he always had, but Billy Winchell didn’t have time for playful banter. He was serious now, and he wanted Mike to listen.

  He brought up Little League and warned Mike that the pitchers were going to get better now and the home runs wouldn’t come as easily as they once had. He told him he had to go to college, there could be no two ways about it. He let him know it was okay to have a little beer every now and then because the Winchells were, after all, German, and Germans loved their beer, but he admonished him to never, ever try drugs. And he told his son he loved him.

  He didn’t say much more after that, the arthritis eating into his hips and the agony of the oil field accident that had cost him his leg too much for him now. In the early morning silence of that hospital room in Odessa, he let go.

  Mike ran out of the room when it happened, wanting to be by himself, to get as far away as he possibly could, and his older brother, Joe Bill, made no attempt to stop him. He knew Mike would be back because he had always been that kind of kid, quiet, loyal, unfailingly steady. Mike didn’t go very far. He stopped in front of the fountain at the hospital entrance and sat by himself. It was one in the morning and hardly anything stirred in those wide downtown streets. He cried a little but he knew he would be all right because, ever since the split-up of his parents when he was five, he had pretty much raised himself. Typically, he didn’t worry about himself. He worried about his grandmother.

  But he didn’t want to stay in Odessa anymore. It was too ugly for him and the land itself bore no secrets nor ever inspired the imagination, so damn flat, as he later put it, that a car ran down the highway and never disappeared. He longed for lakes and trees and hills, for serene places where he could take walks by himself.

  Mike came back to the hospital after about half an hour. “You were the most special thing in his life,” his brother told him. “It’s a hard pill to swallow, but you’re gonna have to make him proud of you.” As for leaving Odessa to come live with him, Joe Bill gently talked Mike out of it. He used the most powerful pull there was for a thirteen-year-old boy living in Odessa, really the only one that gave a kid something to dream about—the power of Permian football.

  He talked about how Mike had always wanted to wear the black and white and how much he would regret it if he didn’t because there were so few places that could offer the same sense of allegiance and tradition. Mike knew that Joe Bill was right. He had already carried that dream for a long time, and despite what he thought of Odessa, it was impossible to let it go.

  He stayed in Odessa and sometimes, when he went over to his grandmother’s house and talked about his father, it helped him through the pain of knowing that Billy was gone forever. “His daddy worshiped him,” said Julia Winchell. “He sure loved that little boy.” And Mike returned that love.

  “When he died, I just thought that the best person in the world had just died.”

  Billy and Mike.

  There was Mike, smiling, curly-haired, looking into his dad’s face at Christmastime. And there was Billy, thin and wizened and slightly hunched, like a walking stick that had warped in the rain. There was Mike at the flea markets they went to together on Saturdays and Sundays over on University, helping his father lift the boxes from the car and set them in the little booth. There was Billy following him to a chair so he could sit and rest. There they were together on those hot afternoons that Mike hated so much but never complained about, selling the cheap tools and knives and toys and Spanish Bibles that had been found in catalogues or on trips to Mexico.

  There was Mike playing Little League baseball with that go-to-hell stance of his—feet close together, up on the toes, taking as big a stride as he could possibly muster into the ball—jacking one homer after another. And there was Billy, the proud master, watching his gifted disciple from the car, unable to get out because of the pain in his leg and the arthritis.

  Under the demanding tutelage of his father, Mike could do no wrong in Little League. He became the stuff of legend, with twenty-seven pitches in a row thrown for strikes, a single season in which he hit thirty home runs. And then somewhere around the time his father started slipping, Mike lost that innate confidence in himself. The gift was always there, but he began to question it, doubt it, brood over it. When he hit three homers in a game once, he didn’t go back to the bench feeling exalted. “Why in the hell can I hit these home runs?” he asked himself. “Why could I do it when other kids couldn’t?”

  There had always been something inward and painfully shy about Mike, but the death of his father forced him to grow up even faster than he already had. He knew Billy was in pain and he also knew that only death could stop it. “It was hurtin’ ’im and there was nothin’ they could do,” he said. “You don’t want nobody to die, but you don’t want him hurtin’ all the time either.”

  After Billy died, Mike’s life didn’t get any easier. He had a brother who was sent to prison for stealing. At home he lived with his mother, who worked at a service station convenience store as a clerk. They didn’t have much money. His mother was enormously quiet and reserved, almost like a phantom. Coach Gaines, who spent almost as much time dealing with parents as he did with the players, had never met her.

  Mike himself almost never talked of his mother, and he was reluctant to let people into his home, apparently because of its condition. “He never wants me to come in,” said his girlfriend, DeAnn. “He never wants me to be inside, ever.” When they got together it was over at his grandmother’s, and that’s where his yard sign was, announcing to the world that he was a Permian football player.

  “Me and him talked about not havin’ a nice home or a nice car and how those things were not important,” said Joe Bill. “I told him, you make your grades and stay in sports, you’ll one day have those things.”

  Mike persevered, a coach’s dream who worked hard and became a gifted student of the game of football, just as he had in baseball with his father. The one ceaseless complaint was that he thought too much, and he knew that was true, that whenever he threw the ball he didn’t just wing it, go with his instincts, but sometimes seemed to agonize over it, a checklist racing through his mind even as he backpedaled—b
e careful . . . get the right touch now . . . watch the wrist, watch the wrist! . . . don’t overthrow it now, don’t throw an interception. . . .

  He started at quarterback his junior year at Permian, but his own obvious lack of confidence caused some of his teammates to lose faith in him in a tight game. When the pressure was off and the score wasn’t close, it was hard to find a better quarterback. When the pressure was on, though, something seemed to unravel inside him. But now he was a senior and had had a whole year to process the incredible feeling of walking into a stadium and seeing twenty thousand fans expecting the world from him. He seemed ready, ready for something truly wonderful to happen to him.

  He didn’t dwell much on his father’s death anymore. It had been four years since it happened and Mike had moved on since then. But he still thought about him from time to time, and he said he had never met anyone more honest, or more clever, or more dependable. He smiled as he talked about what a good “horse trader” Billy was, and how he loved animals, and how he had bought him every piece of sports equipment that had ever been invented. When he had had trouble with his baseball swing, he knew that Billy would have been able to fix it in a second, standing with him, showing him where to place his hands, jiggering his stance just a tad here and a tad there, doing all the things only a dad could do to make a swing level again and keep a baseball flying forever.

  And Mike also knew how much Billy Winchell would have cherished seeing him on this September night, dressed in the immaculate black and white of the Permian Panthers, moments away from playing out the dream that had kept him in Odessa. The two-a-days in the August heat were over now. The Watermelon Feed had come and gone, and so had the pre-season scrimmage. Now came the Friday night lights. Now it was showtime and the first game of the season.