Friday Night Lights

  Most everyone thought that Billy Winchell had given up on himself by the time he died. But they also knew that if there was anything making him hold on, it was Mike.

  Billy and Mike.

  “He would have liked to have lived for Mike’s sake,” said Julia Winchell. “He sure would have been proud of him.”

  “Some of you haven’t played before, been in the spotlight,” said assistant coach Tam Hollingshead in those waning hours before Permian would take the field against El Paso Austin. He knew what the jitters of the season opener could do, how the most talented kid could come unglued in the sea of all those lights and those thousands of fans. He offered some succinct advice.

  “Have some fun, hustle your ass, and stick the hell out of ’em.”

  “It’s not a party we’re goin’ to, it’s a business trip,” Mike Belew told the running backs. “If you get hurt, that’s fine, you’re hurt. But if you get a lick, and you’re gonna lay there and whine about it, you don’t belong on the field anyway.”

  The team left the field house and made its way to the stadium in a caravan of yellow school buses. They went through their pre-game warmups with methodical, meticulous determination. Then they went to the dressing room and sat in silence before Gaines called the team to huddle around him. He didn’t say much. He didn’t have to.

  Everyone knew what was at stake, that if all went without a hitch, this game would be the beginning of a glorious stretch that would not end until the afternoon of December 17 with a state championship trophy. It would be a sixteen-game season, longer than that of any college team in America and as long as most of the pro teams’ seasons. Three and a half months of pure devotion to football where nothing else mattered, nothing else made a difference.

  “That 1988 season is four and a half minutes away,” Gaines said quietly with a little smile still on his lips. “Let’s have a great one.”

  At the very sight of the team at the edge of the stadium, hundreds of elementary school kids started squealing in delight. They wore imitation cheerleading costumes and sweatshirts that said PERMIAN PANTHERS #1. They began yelling the war cry of “MO-JO! MO-JO! MO-JO!” in frantic unison, rocking their arms back and forth. A little girl in glasses put her hand to her mouth, as if she had seen something incredible, and it made her momentarily speechless between screams. As the black wave of the Permian players moved out into the middle of the field, eight thousand other souls who had filled the home side rose to give a standing ovation. This moment, and not January first, was New Year’s day.

  Brian Johnson opened the season with a fifteen-yard run off the right side through a gaping hole to the Permian 47, lurching forward for every possible extra inch. Two quick passes from Winchell to split end Lloyd Hill gave Permian a first down at the El Paso Austin ten. Winchell looked good, setting up with poise in the pocket, throwing nicely, no rushed throws skittering off the hand.

  Then Don Billingsley, the starting tailback for the Permian Panthers, got the ball on a pitch. He was a senior, and it was his debut as a starter.

  The roars of the crowd got louder and louder as Don took the ball and headed for the goal line. A touchdown on the first drive of the season seemed destined, to the delight of the thousands who were there. And no one wanted it more, no one felt it more, than Charlie Billingsley.

  It was his son Don down there on that field with the ball. But it was more than the natural swell of parental pride that stirred inside him.

  Twenty years earlier, Charlie Billingsley himself had worn the black and white of Permian, not as some two-bit supporter but as a star, a legend. He still had powerful memories of those days, and as he sat in the stands on this balmy and beautiful night where the last wisps of clouds ran across the sky like a residue of ash from a once-brilliant fire, it seemed impossible not to look down on the field and see his own reflection.

  II

  There were some kids who came out of Odessa ornery in the same way that a rodeo bull with a rope wrapped tight around his balls is ornery, kids who went through life as if they were perpetually trying to buck someone off their backs to get that damn rope off their nuts, kids whose idea of a good time was to look for fights with townies from Andrews or Crane, or do a little bashing at the local gay bar, or bite into the steaming flesh of a fresh-killed rabbit, or down a cockroach or two in the locker room, or go rattlesnake hunting by shining a little mirror into the crevice of some limestone pit where the only sign of human life was the shards of broken beer bottles that had been used for target practice.

  They were kids for whom the story of David and Goliath wasn’t some religious parable but the true story of their own lives, kids who were lean and mean and weighed maybe 170 pounds dripping wet but were built like steel beams and had a kind of fearlessness that was admirable and irrational and liked nothing better than to knock some slow, fat-assed lineman up in the air and watch him come falling down like a tire bouncing along the highway.

  Charlie Billingsley may not have been the meanest kid ever at Permian, but he was somewhere near the top, and it was hard to forget how that tough son-of-a-bitch had played the game in the late sixties.

  His sense of right and wrong had been mounted on a hair trigger. If he thought you were jacking with him, he didn’t go grumbling back to the huddle making empty threats about revenge. He just put up his fists right there and if that didn’t work, then what the hell, he’d just rear back and kick you smack in the face.

  And it wasn’t like he left all that anger on the field or anything. He wasn’t one of these chameleons, one of these split-personality types. He was as memorable off the field as he was on it, hanging out at Cue Balls or Nicky’s or the old A & W over on Eighth Street or wherever he happened to be night after night. He won a lot and lost a few and the coach of Permian then, Gene Mayfield, finally told him that he’d be off the team if there was one more fight. But Charlie Billingsley wasn’t about to change his ways. The minute the season was over, he got into a fight and someone broke his jaw. They had to wire it shut and he dropped to 130 pounds but that was okay because Charlie Billingsley got an opportunity for a rematch, which is all he really wanted, and taught the kid who had messed up his jaw a very serious lesson.

  If all he had been was a hell-raiser, Charlie Billingsley might have been in some trouble. But he also had the numbers, the kinds of numbers that everyone in Odessa understood and admired: 890 yards rushing to lead the team as a junior, when it went all the way to the state finals before losing to Austin Reagan; 913 yards to lead the team as a senior.

  Those were great days back then, great days, and it was safe to say that life was never quite the same afterward. In the succeeding years he had traveled a lot of miles, too many to tell the truth, loaded down with the baggage of too much booze (“I’ve spilt more whiskey than most people have drunk”) and too many wives (“I wouldn’t have married a couple of girls I married”), still casting around for the proper fit twenty years out of high school, still trying to find the way home.

  He had been recruited by Texas A & M, and as he recalled all the false promises that were cooed into his ear he couldn’t help but give a little chuckle. He played for a few years, but one thing led to another, and Charlie Billingsley found out that life in college was a whole lot different from what it was in high school when it came to football: you were a whole lot more expendable in college, a hero one day and a broken-down nobody the next, and if you didn’t like it no one really gave a crap because there was always a bunch of guys ready to replace you in a second. He transferred to a small school in Durant, Oklahoma.

  “It was the worst mistake I made in my life,” said Charlie Billingsley, looking back on it. “Those inbred Okies, they didn’t take kindly to the pros from Dover.” A friend got shot in a bar one night, and he and some others beat up the assailant.

  Charlie Billingsley left school after that. He floated from one job to another, some of them good, some of them not so good. He was in the floor-covering business in Houston,
but high interest rates kind of put a damper on that. And then he sold casing pipe during the boom, and that worked out pretty great for a while. He made $40,000 the first year out when Houston back in those days “was blowin’ gold.” But then the bust set in after a couple of years and Charlie moved back to Odessa. He helped start up a new bar in town that featured bull riding on Sunday afternoons—there was a ring in back—and kick-ass rock ’n’ roll acts, but a falling-out with one of the partners put an end to Charlie’s involvement in that. He started running another bar-restaurant in town where, as he gently put it, “it was hard to deal with drunks sober.” He had also been through two marriages at that point, one to a girl from Odessa, the other to a girl from Houston, and then an unexpected element entered his life: his son Don.

  Don had been living up in Blanchard in Oklahoma with his mother. It was a quiet, sedate kind of place and he was a star there, a starter on the varsity football team as a freshman. But Don, who spent part of every summer with Charlie, knew of Permian and of his dad’s exploits there. He knew that every year the team had a chance of going to State and had won the whole shooting match four times since 1964. The more he heard, the more he realized how badly he wanted a piece of it.

  Right before his sophomore year, he informed his mother that he wasn’t coming back to Blanchard; he was going to stay with his father in Odessa so he could play for Permian, even though he had little chance of starting there until his senior year. He didn’t want her to take his decision personally because it had nothing to do with his loving one parent more than the other, it just had to do with playing football for Permian High School. Don remembered his mother’s being “kind of pissed off ” about his decision. But since she herself had been a Permian Pepette during Charlie’s senior year, she also understood.

  Don had been three when his parents had split up, and his coming back into Charlie’s life on a permanent basis wasn’t the simplest of moves. Living with Charlie was sometimes more like living with an older brother or a roommate than with a father. There were times when Don stayed up almost all night, regaled by his father’s stories of how to live the world and how not to live it. Don treasured those sessions and learned from them. But when Don came home one night with a black eye, Charlie’s idea of advice was to tell him to “stop leading with his face.”

  Charlie’s drinking didn’t go away. He would go on binges, three- or four-day hauls that were tough for everybody to handle. “I’d get pretty hairy at the end of one of ’em. Those three or four days, they were eventful” was how Charlie Billingsley said it, giving a hoarse laugh that made you realize that at the age of thirty-seven he had been through one hell of a lot in his life since his playing days for Permian.

  During the spring of his junior year, Don moved in with one of his grandparents while Charlie Billingsley went to a clinic for alcohol rehabilitation. Don went to visit him a couple of times. It was difficult to watch his dad try to pull himself through, and Don was glad he had football. The locker room became his home, the one place where he always felt he belonged.

  Whether he knew it or not, Don had become the spitting image of his dad, Charlie Billingsley reborn seventeen years later. The physical resemblance they bore to one another was striking—the same thin, power-packed frames coiled and ready to strike if the wrong button got grazed, the insouciant swagger, the same shark’s-tooth smile that could be both charming and threatening, the same friendly way of speaking, the words falling casually out of the side of the mouth like cards being slowly flipped over during a poker game.

  Like his father, Don was a fighter who didn’t think there was anything irrational about mixing it up with kids who were a whole lot bigger than he was. His reputation was established sophomore year when he told Boobie one day after practice to take the stocking cap off his head. Boobie told Don to go ahead and make him, but Don wasn’t intimidated. “Those niggers, they talk a lot,” he later said, describing how he had eagerly taken up Boobie’s challenge. Although he gave up about five inches and forty pounds to Boobie, he took him down easily and earned the admiration of many who had always thought Boobie was too damn cocky for his own good. When Don had a few pops in him, which was frequently, he felt the urge to fight even more.

  He had taken his first drink in fifth grade, and by the time he was a senior had built up quite a reputation for drinking. There was nothing exceptional about that in Odessa, where kids drank freely, often with the tacit blessing of their parents, who saw it as part of the macho mentality of the place. When Don went home from school for lunch, he sometimes raided the liquor cabinet. As a sophomore at Permian he was found wandering around the field house parking lot one day drunk. Customers at the various bars his father worked in were quick to buy him beer.

  Like his father, Don was also the starting tailback for Permian. Charlie Billingsley had been the most valuable offensive player in the district when he had played that position his senior year. He had left his mark on the program, even though it sometimes seemed he used his fists as much as his legs. But he had been one hell of a runner, tough as leather, hard-nosed, and people around town still remembered him for that as if it had happened yesterday. They always would.

  Until he went into the rehabilitation clinic, he admitted, he had been right on the edge, making things tough not only for himself but for Don. Their relationship, he knew, had been at the point of fracturing. But he was more in control now. He had settled down, and he had his son’s football season to look forward to. As Charlie Billingsley said, “I got him to live through, and that’s something pretty special.”

  After all, football was what had brought the two of them together in the first place, and it seemed destined to keep them together. At least for as long as the season lasted.

  III

  With all those eyes focused on him, the ball popped loose from Don’s hands without anyone’s touching him. He went after it on his hands and knees, desperately trying to recover it and redeem himself, but he couldn’t get to it. A groan went up from the crowd as El Paso Austin came up with the ball.

  He came off the field, his eyes downcast and brooding, his eagerness to do well in this first game and live up to the legend of Charlie putting his whole body out of sync. “God Almighty,” he said to no one in particular on the sideline. “I can’t believe that.”

  El Paso Austin was held to six yards in three plays, the hapless Austin running backs suffocating under a pile of five or six raging dogs in black shirts. Swarm the ball! That’s what the coaches had told the Permian players time after time after time. Never let up! Swarm the ball every play!

  Permian took over after a punt. With a first down inside El Paso territory at the 47, Winchell dropped back to pass. He saw flanker Robert Brown open, but the touch was too soft and the ball fluttered, a high fly up for grabs, the kind of pass that had become a Winchell trademark the year before, etched with hesitation. It was destined for an interception, but the El Paso defensive back mistimed. The ball plopped into Brown’s hands, a gift, an absolute gift, and he had a clear path down the left sideline. He scored, and the ice was broken.

  Winchell, coming back to the sideline, almost, but not quite, looked pleased with himself, a tiny look of relief, perhaps even the glimmer of a smile. “What do you think?” he said, motioning to the crowd, to the stadium, to the starry beauty of it all. “You ain’t seen nothin’ yet. Wait till Midland Lee.”

  Permian scored twice more in the first half to go ahead 21-0. Winchell threw a five-yard touchdown pass to Hill and then made it three when he hooked up with Brown for a sixty-one-yard bomb with twenty-four seconds left. In the locker room at halftime he seemed as if he was walking on air. Three touchdown passes in the first half. Three! Last season it had taken him his first four games to get three touchdown passes, and he only had eleven the entire season in fifteen games.

  As for Billingsley, his debut as a starter had become further mired after that first nervous fumble. Regaining his composure, he had peeled off a nice t
hirty-four-yard run on a sweep. But then, with time running out in the half, he had fumbled again, as if the ghost of Charlie caused the football to go bouncing along the turf like a basketball. The mixture of excitement and anticipation had him in knots, his legs working so hard he looked like a cartoon character going at fast-forward speed.

  The coaches, who had always harbored concerns about Billingsley because of his life-style, were not terribly surprised. They knew of his drinking and partying and the fact that he and his father moved around a lot. “I think we got a big-assed choke dog on our hands,” said one at halftime.

  Gaines called Billingsley into the little coaches’ room and threw him a football. “Hold on to it,” he said.

  Then Belew took him aside. “Just put that behind you. If you worry about it, it’s gonna screw you up. It’s history.”

  The locker room was hot and steamy, and Gaines and his four assistants were hardly euphoric. The Panthers were dominating every facet of the game, but fumbles and penalties had kept Permian from leading 35-0 at the half.

  “We should have had two more [touchdowns],” said defensive coordinator Hollingshead. “Don laid it on the ground.”

  Billingsley continued to drown deeper and deeper the second half. After Permian took over on downs on its 41, he took the hand-off and had clear sailing on the right flank. But his feet were still moving too fast for him and he slipped, adding to the rumbles that Charlie Billingsley’s boy sure as hell wasn’t going to follow in his father’s footsteps, at least not on the football field.

  “God damn!” said Hollingshead derisively.

  If Billingsley could do nothing right, Winchell could do nothing wrong. Three plays later he threw his fourth touchdown pass of the night, tying a Permian record for most touchdown passes in a game.