FRIDAY NIGHT LIGHTS
A Town, a Team, and a Dream
H.G. Bissinger
Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1990
355 pp., $ 19.95
Friday Night Lights is a wonderful book about, of all things, high school football in, of all places, Odessa, Texas, one of the most singularly undistinguished spots on earth.
High school football is the state religion of Texas, not a game but a matter of blood, death, and immortality. I used to think the emotional investment Texans can put into a football team would have to be witnessed to be believed, but it is now available in a less wearing form in this dead- accurate but sympathetic account of a single season with the Permian High Panthers. H.G. Bissinger is a Philadelphia newspaper editor who left his job in 1988 to live in Odessa for a year, an unlikely quest on its face.
The result is a superb portrait of a busted, blue-collar oil town, flat on its economic back and living only for football. Odessa is where they first printed the bumper sticker that says, "O Lord, just give me one more oil boom - this time I promise not to piss it away." One's first fear - "O God, another snotty Yankee come to Texas to sneer at the ignorant rednecks" - is put to rest at once. Bissinger loved the kids, he loved the people of Odessa, and he has a remarkable gift of empathy. He also has the eye of a great reporter for close observation and detail.
It seemed odd, at first, to me that someone would write about Texas high school football without humor. The Dan Jenkins (and Bud Shrake and Gary Cartwright and Larry L. King) approach to schoolboy football has been to linger lovingly over the sheer lunacy of it. But then, that's the whole point of Texas high school football, isn't it? That people take it so seriously.
In 1984, the state government made a serious effort to reform the public schools so that they would no longer be of football, by football, and for football. The news from Odessa is that it didn't work. The Panthers' starting fullback struggles with the intellectual challenge of a course called Food Science - 165 fill in the blanks on the uses of a microwave. In menu preparation, should one put the shrimp cocktail ahead of the Jell-O salad? It seems almost miraculous that any decent and dedicated teachers remain in a system that requires them to dress in Panther black on Fridays (game day). But there are some, and they have their triumphs - one of the '88 Panthers made it to Harvard.
Here's a school where more money ($6,750) is spent on medical supplies like athletic tape for the football team than on supplies for the English department ($5,040). This is not to mention the $70,000 spent that year on chartered jets for the football team.
Bissinger would have been less than human had be not occasionally thanked the Great Scriptwriter in the Sky for the twists and turns provided for his plot by the Panthers' five-and-one regular season. By the time they make it into the play-offs on a coin toss, you can tell Bissinger thinks he has an amazing story. And then he is hopelessly boggled by the ensuing events. I
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