Pros: Gritty reportage of big-time small-town football in depressed Middle America.
Cons: Narrative style is journalistic, not non-fiction novel. Worth it for some, tough for others.
The Bottom Line: A landmark study through a reporter's eyes of the highs and lows of the sports culture in a depressed Texas town. Controversial journalism that chills, but a choppy read.
NFP's Full Review: H. G. Bissinger - Friday Night Lights
Odessa, Texas, circa 1988:
Closed down movie theaters and boarded up store fronts. Listed by Money Magazine in 1987 as fifth worst community to live in in the United States. Listed by Psychology Today a year later as the seventh most stressful city to live in in the country based on suicide, alcoholism, and divorce rates, and the community’s educational levels. A perennial holder of the title of the nation’s worst crime rate per capita.
Racism, poverty, ignorance. Thirteen years ago, this declining town was the leading edge of the soon-to-be nationwide recession.
In search of a dream…or a nightmare?
When Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist H. G. Bissinger went looking for an American archetype, he had no idea he would eventually land in Odessa, Texas. Since he was 13 years old he had pondered the idea of high school sports holding a town together. A generation later, in 1988, in his 30s and at the pinnacle of his journalistic career at The Philadelphia Inquirer newspaper, “Buzzy” (as he was known to us in the Philadelphia journalism community) decided to do some independent writing and reportage. And he scratched his old itch:
“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.”
THE BOOK: Friday Night Lights: A Town, a Team, and a Dream is more reportage than non-fiction novel, and hence is of most interest to the millions of Americans for whom sports at the local level is a religion. Because religion it is, all across America. As Bissinger noted:
“Odessa is the setting for this book, but it could be anyplace in this vast land where, on a Friday night, a set of spindly stadium lights rises to the heavens to so powerfully, and so briefly, ignite the darkness.”
But there's a desolation to Bissinger's Odessa that sets it apart from most other small towns -- an undercurrent of anxiety so palpable it must have made it hard for a lot of folks to take a close look in the mirror. And in this Odessa populated by very few hopes and by frustration by the barrel full, where the average income in 1988 was $15,000, the religion of high school football was at cult levels.
As an outsider looking in Bissinger obviously felt the darkness was not just the color of the night, but the color of the soul. Against the backdrop of what he perceived as the town’s struggle to survive, the Panthers of Odessa’s Permian High School maintained God-like status. They were among the most powerful football teams in the state year after year. The civic pride in Permian's "Mojo" mystique was rightfully tangible. And anything less than a championship was simply unacceptable.
Besides a chronological account of a wrenching and chaotic season, the book is also a devastating sociological document that to this day is resented in Odessa. Bissinger – intentionally or not – showed in page after page how shocked he is by what he found. Ten years after the 1988 football season that Bissinger chronicled, the local newspaper, the Odessa American, ran a series of articles largely debunking his book and its accuracy. (For another example of reaction, please read epinonator MojoGirl's angry retort to Bissinger on this site at http://www.epinions.com/book-review-758B-420DD60-39B041EE-prod1/tk_~CB008.1.5).
In Bissinger’s 1988 Odessa racism, sexism, cheating and unfairness stand shoulder-to-shoulder with pride, hard work, dedication and glory. Black players are subjected to a double standard, especially when injured, and end up taking huge risks just to maintain their status as active players:
“ [Boobie] was damaged goods, like a crate of Florida oranges that had gone rotten in delivery, and the big boys were not going to deal with him unless they had positive proof some sweet juice could still be squeezed out of him, not some mess of pulp and seeds.”
Teachers who should have tenure are intentionally underpaid so coaches can get higher salaries, the football team medical room can have an excess of supplies, and a chartered jet can fly the team to play Marshall High School at a cost of $20,000. The coach knows from experience -- a 7-2 season in 1986 when Permian didn’t make the playoffs -- that any defeat will bring harassment to his family and vandalism to his home. The coach’s wife, whose own daughter once told her that “if Daddy dies you are nothing,” says to Bissinger:
“I don’t think [people here] realize these are sixteen, seventeen, eighteen year old kids. I don’t think they realize these are coaches. They are men, they are not gods. They don’t realize it’s a game and they look at them like they’re professional football players. They are kids, high school kids, the sons of somebody, and they expect them to be perfect.”
The female cheerleaders and the spirit squad – known as the “Pepettes” – are assigned to individual players and are subject to their whims:
“It’s very revered to be a Pepette or cheerleader,” said Julie Gardner, who had come to Odessa from a small college town in Montana as a sophomore. “It’s the closest they can get to being a football player….It was very important to have a boyfriend and look a certain way. You couldn’t be too smart. You had to act silly or they out you in a category right away. It was the end of your social life if you were an intelligent girl.”
Bissinger follows the travails of individuals through a suspenseful and gripping season full of twists, turns and irony, culminating in a gripping climax. We get to know people like Boobie Miles, a black player of great promise whose uncle “L. V.”sees his future stardom as the ticket out of town until a knee injury pops the bubble. There’s Mike Winchell, the starting quarterback who wants to win a championship for his father who died when Mike was 13. There’s the coach, Gary Gaines, who found “For Sale” signs posted on his lawn after a loss.
And there’s Brian Chavez, star receiver and – against type – the school’s top student. He gets accepted at Harvard University where he ends up playing club rugby instead because the university’s football program is penny-ante compared to Permian’s.
IN CONTEXT:
To a degree, Bissinger’s angry expose tells as much about him and the nation’s right and left coast sensibilities as it does about Odessa. On the other hand, there was clearly something at work at that time that pushed the envelope of the role of sports in a small town. I live in a small town whose high school football program is revered, and where abuses do occur more often than they should. But nothing that has ever happened compares to this.
Part of the value of this book is in reminding us of the risks inherent in deifying sports and sports figures at the expense of core societal values. We can see similar problems at the college and professional levels.
But the book also looks deep into the character of the ugly side of that part of small town America where what most of us consider "quality of life" is an oxymoron. Even those of us who may resent the widespread and illegitimate use of the word "trailer trash" (because, after all, some people have little choice, and regardless, who's to judge?) will consider the Odessa of 1988 to be a psychological and physical wasteland. Some local feelings notwithstanding, for the most part it sounds like a pretty bleak life to most of us.
Nonetheless, this isn't a Jerry Springer set full of freaks; it's a real town with real people trying to get by, and at the time Bissinger visited Odessa, he felt Permian High football was about the only place they felt they could find any self-respect, however they defined it.
By finding the heart of that dismal part of Middle America’s darkness in the vast expanse of the West Texas plains, Bissinger has shown how illusory the Friday night lights can be. Are they bright like the hope-filled stars above the desert, or are they symbols of a glaring deficiency? I think the answer is self-evident.
Can it be a coincidence that the pop tune “Don’t’ Worry, Be Happy” was one of the top tunes in Odessa in that tumultuous year of the season of 1988?
As to Odessa’s rejoinder ten years later, methinks they protesteth too much.
The classic, best-selling story of life in the football-driven town of Odessa, Texas, with a new afterword that looks at the players and the town ten ...More at Buy.com Marketplaces
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