Friday Night Lights: Chapters 4–6

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.

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.

As for Billingsley, his debut as a starter had become further mired after that first nervous fumble.

The word poured out in Odessa as easily as the torrents of rain that ran down the streets after an occasional storm, as common a part of the vernacular as “ol' boy” or “bless his ’ittl' biddy heart” or “awl bidness” or “I sure did enjoy visitin’ with you” or “God dang.”

Some also blamed desegregation for irrevocably changing the character of Permian football.

Laurence Hurd, a Church of Christ minister, came to Odessa and galvanized the Southside minority community into demanding a desegregated school system.

With him heading the charge, they now had the courage to say to those white folks who ran Odessa that they were no longer going to accept the crumbs of their paternalism.

He saw a place where the great panacea of school integration had turned into a numbers game in which the blacks and the
Hispanics ended up paying the greater price.

He threw himself headlong into the desegregation effort, his rhetoric and speech unlike anything minorities here had ever been exposed to.

It wasn’t necessary to live in Odessa for long to realize that the Permian football team wasn’t just a high school team but a sacrosanct white institution.

In the endless deliberations over desegregation, the board spent more time worrying about how the high school athletic programs might be affected than how the curriculum might be affected.

After all, who in town could possibly forget the debacle of the 1986 season, Gaines’s first, when the team had gone only seven and two and didn’t even make the playoffs?

The 1987 season, when Permian had gone to the semifinals of the state playoffs, helped to redeem him, but the Marshall loss would inevitably stir up the sparks of dissent that he wasn’t tough enough and didn’t know how to strike the fear of God into his players as his predecessor so effectively had.

The Marshall game was an impetus to work harder than ever before. It was a painful loss, but the season was still only beginning and there were eight games left to determine the team’s fate.

The players were upset over the loss to Marshall. But since it wasn’t a league game, they could live with it. They didn’t need to dwell on it over and over the way the coaches did and flagellate themselves with it.