Friday Night Lights: A Town, a Team, and a Dream by H. G. Bissinger Read Free Book Online

under the poker table. By the time
Odessa police detective Jerry Smith got there the place looked
like something out of the Wild West, an old-fashioned shoot-out
at the La Casita apartment complex with poker chips and cards
and bullet holes all over the dining room. Two men were dead
and two wounded when Price made his escape. His fatal error
came when he tried to break into a house across the street. The
startled owner, hearing the commotion, did what he thought
was only appropriate: he took out his gun and shot Price dead.
    It was incidents such as these that gave Odessa its legacy.
    In 1987, Money magazine ranked it as the fifth worst city to
live in in the country out of three hundred. A year later Psychology Today, in a ranking of the most stressful cities in the
country based on rates of alcoholism, crime, suicide, and divorce, placed Odessa seventh out of 286 metropolitan areas,
worse than New York and Detroit and Philadelphia and Houston. Molly Ivins, a columnist for the Dallas Times Herald, described Odessa as an "armpit," which, as the Odessa American
pointed out, was actually quite a few rungs up from its usual anatomical comparison with a rectum. And there was the description in Larry McMurtry's Texasville, which simply called
Odessa the "worst town on earth."

    But none of that seemed to matter. Oil promised money
through work on drilling rigs and frac crews and acidizing
units, and it meant people were willing to live here whatever
the deprivation. What pride they had in Odessa came from
their very survival in a place they openly admitted was physically wretched.
    Whether it was true or not, most people said they had first
come out here during a sandstorm, meaning their first taste of
Odessa had literally been a mouthful of gritty sand. They carried that mouthful with them forever, rolling it around with
their tongues every now and then, never forgetting the dry grit
of it. It reminded them of what they had been through to forge
a life and a community and that they had a right to be proud
of their accomplishments.
    It was still a place that seemed on the edge of the frontier, a
paradoxical mixture of the Old South and the Wild West,
friendly to a fault but fiercely independent, God-fearing and
propped up by the Baptist beliefs in family and flag but hellraising, spiced with the edge of violence but naive and thoroughly unpretentious.
    It was a place where neighbor loved helping neighbor, based
on a long-standing tradition that ranchers always left their
homes unlocked because you never knew who might need to
borrow something or cook a meal. But it was a place also based
on the principle that no one should ever be told what to do by
anyone, that the best government of all was no government at
all, which is why most citizens hated welfare, thought Michael
Dukakis, beyond having the irreversible character flaw of being
a Democrat, was the biggest damn fool ever to enter politics,
considered Lyndon Johnson an egocentric buffoon responsible
for the boondoggle of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and saw the
federal government's effort to integrate the Odessa schools in the fifties and sixties and seventies and eighties not as social
progress but as outrageous harassment.

    At times Odessa had the feel of lingering sadness that many
isolated places have, a sense of the world orbiting around it at
dizzying speed while it stood stuck in time-350 miles from
Dallas to the east, 300 miles from El Paso to the west, 300 miles
from the rest of the world-still fixed in an era in which it was
inappropriate for high school girls to be smarter than their boyfriends, in which kids spent their Saturday nights making the
endless circles of the drag in their cars along the wide swathes
of Forty-second Street and Andrews Highway, in which teenage
honor was measured not by how much cocaine you snorted, but
by how much beer you drank.
    But Odessa also evoked the kind of America that Ronald
Reagan