Friday Night Lights: A Town, A Team, And A Dream by H.G. Bissinger

Author:H.G. Bissinger [Bissinger, H.G.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2011-01-27T00:11:23.023293+00:00

All around them the world seemed to be caving in; the way of life that had existed in Odessa for sixty years was badly shaken. Wherever you looked the economic news for this already hard-strapped area was dismal. Echoes persisted of the 1986 crash, when the area had become a scavenger hunt for repossessed Lear jets, Mercedeses, mobile homes, oil rigs, ranches, and two-bedroomn houses with walls so thin they seemed translucent. The very day of the game, oil prices, the bread-and-butter benchmark of everyone who lived here, had skidded to $13.25 a barrel, their lowest level since August 1986 and far from that of the halcyon days of' 1981 when $35 a barrel oil had made this part of the country a combination of Plato's Retreat and the Barnum and Bailey Circus.

The same day, federal regulators announced they were spending $2.49 billion to rescue six Texas savings and loan institutions that had finally fallen under the weight of the crash in oil prices, and everyone knew that that was just the tip of the iceberg. On the immediate local front, reports showed that rental rates for apartments in Odessa had dropped 10 percent and occupancy rates 8 percent, boding disaster for a market that was woefully overbuilt from the boom. In addition, a news report showed that over the past six years the number of em ployed workers in Odessa had dropped by 22,400, from 65,200 to 42,800.

But here in Memorial Stadium in Midland, where a nearsellout crowd had gathered to watch a high school football game, none of that seemed to matter. The joyous swells of the band, with no note ever too loud or too off-key, the unflagging faith of the cheerleaders and all those high-octave cheers served up without a trace of self-consciousness, the frenzied screams of grown men and women as the boys on the field rose to dizzying, unheard-of heights-little was different now from how it had been almost forty years ago when a young businessman had sat in this very stadium.

It was the most feverish Friday night of the season: Odessa against Midland, the grudge game to settle bragging rights between the two towns for the next twelve months. There was an ove7flow crowd of twelve thousand-plus fans in the stadium, rattling the stands from the opening kickoff. Our guest put his hands to his ears, then shook his head. [We] could empathize ... it would take us several seasons, living in both Odessa and Midland, before we understood the game, not as we knew it back east but West Texas-style as a quasi-religious experience.

The man who wrote those words never forgot that moment in the stands. It gave him a valuable insight, one that he would find useful at another point in his life. By conjuring up an image of America as simple and pure as the scene of pomp in Memorial Stadium, by telling people that he was no different from any of them sitting in those packed stands and rooting

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