H. G. Bissinger - Friday Night Lights Mass Market TV Tie-in

H. G. BISSINGER

To Howard, whom I miss.

To Sarah, Gerry and Zachary, whom I love.

In the Shreve High football stadium, I think of Polacks nursing long beers in Tiltonsville, And gray faces of Negroes in the blast furnace at Benwood, Arid the ruptured night watchman of Wheeling Steel, Dreaming of heroes.

-FROM "Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio," by James Wright

PHOTOGRAPHS By ROB CLARK JR.

xi

PRE-SEASON

THE SEASON

FRIDAY NIGHT LIGHTS

PUSH FOR THE PLAYOFFS

POST-SEASON

MAYBE IT WAS A SUDDENLY ACUTE AWARENESS OF BEING "thirtysomething." Maybe it was where I lived, in a suburb of Philadelphia, in a house that looked like all the other ones on the block. Or maybe it was my own past as an addicted sports fan who had spent a shamelessly large part of life watching football and basketball and baseball. I just felt something pulling at me, nagging at me, a soft voice telling me to do it, to see for myself what was out there and make the journey before self-satisfaction crept in for good.

The idea had been rattling in my head since I was thirteen years old, the idea of high school sports keeping a town together, keeping it alive. So I went in search of the Friday night lights, to find a town where they brightly blazed that lay beyond the East Coast and the grip of the big cities, a place that people had to pull out an atlas to find and had seen better times, a real America.

A variety of names came up, but all roads led to West Texas, to a town called Odessa.

It was in the severely depressed belly of the Texas oil patch, with a team in town called the Permian Panthers that played to as many as twenty thousand fans on a Friday night.

Twenty thousand ...

I knew I had to go there.

You drive into Odessa the first time and become immersed in a land so vast, so relentless, that something swells up inside, something that makes you feel powerless and insignificant. Pulling onto Highway 80, there is row after row of oil field machinery that no one has use for anymore. Farther on down comes a series of grimy motels that don't have a single car parked in front of them.

You come to the downtown, and even though it is the middle of the afternoon there isn't another soul around. So you just walk in silence, past a couple of big buildings belonging to the banks, past a closed-down movie theater with the words THE END in crooked letters on the marquee, past a beige brick building where the old lettering saying JCPENNEY is still there, past a few restaurants and a lot of pawnshops.

Farther east, past the gas stations and fast-food joints and the old civic center that looks like a brooding frown, there is a different Odessa. It is almost suburban, with a shiny mall and comfortable ranch houses, many of which have FOR SALE signs planted in the front lawns. Driving back south there is still another Odessa, called the Southside. It is across the tracks, and it is an area of town predominantly for minorities.

Turning around again, heading north on Grandview back into those plains, there is a feeling of driving into the fathomless end of the earth. And then it rises out of nowhere, two enormous flanks of concrete with a sunken field in between. Gazing into that stadium, looking up into those rows that can seat twenty thousand, you wonder what it must be like on a Friday night, when the lights are on and the heart and soul of the town pours out over that field, across those endless plains.

I visited Odessa in March of 1988. 1 met the coach of the Permian Panthers and relayed to him the intent of my journey, to live in Odessa for a year and spend a season with his football team. I talked to others, but mostly I just drove and looked.

It became apparent that this was a town where high school football went to the very core of life. From the glimpses of the Southside and the FOR SALE signs and the unwanted machinery filling up the yards of Highway 80, it also became apparent that this was a town with many other currents running through it as well.

There seemed to be an opportunity in Odessa to observe not simply the enormous effect of sports on American life, but other notions, for the values of Odessa were ones that firmly belonged to a certain kind of America, an America that existed beyond the borders of the Steinberg cartoon, an America of factory towns and farm towns and steel towns and singleeconomy towns all trying to survive.

What were the attitudes toward race? What were the politics, and as the 1988 election approached, what did people want from their president? In a country that was having more and more difficulty teaching its young, what was the educational system like? What did people hold on to as they watched their economic lifeblood slip from them? What did they hold on to as they watched their country slip from them? What had happened to their America?