Friday Night Lights: A Town, a Team, and a Dream Read Online Free PDF

the left sideline after his defender fell down,
but the ball was thrown way out of bounds.
    "Fuck! Winchell!" screamed starting linebacker Chad Payne
from the sidelines as the ball fluttered helplessly beyond Brown's
grasp. With a fourth and ten, another pass fell incomplete.
    It wasn't even close.
    Jerrod McDougal watched as the Lee players fell all over each
other on the field like kittens. He watched as they spit contemptuously on the field, his field, goddammit, his fucking field, defiling it, disgracing it, and never in his life had he felt such
humiliation. Some gladiator he was, some heroic gladiator. In
the dressing room he started to cry, his right hand draped tenderly around the bowed head of linebacker Greg Sweatt, who
was sobbing also. With his other hand he punched a wall.
Chavez and Winchell sat in silence, and Ivory Christian felt that creeping numbness. With a three-way tie for first and only one
game left in the regular season, now Permian might not get into
the state playoffs. But that wasn't potentially devastating to
Ivory. There had to be something else in life, if only he could
figure out what it was.

    Boobie officially quit the team two days later. But no one paid
much attention. There were a lot more important things to
worry about than that pain-in-the-ass prima donna with a bad
knee who couldn't cut worth a crap anymore anyway. There
were plenty more on the Southside where he came from.
    The loss to Lee sent Odessa into a tailspin, so unthinkable, so
catastrophic was it. As in a civil war, goodwill and love disintegrated and members of the town turned on each other.
    Gaines himself was distraught, a year's worth of work wasted,
the chorus against him only growing stronger that he was a very
nice man who wasn't a very good coach when it counted. When
he got back to the field house he stayed in the coaches' office
long past midnight, still mulling over what had happened and
why the eighteen-hour days he had spent preparing for the
Rebels had not paid off. The idea of a team with this kind of
talent not making the playoffs seemed impossible, but now it
might happen. And if it did, he had to wonder if he would be
in the same job next year.
    When he went home late that night, several FOR SALE signs
had been punched into his lawn, a not-so-subtle hint that maybe
it would be best for everyone if he just got the hell out of town.
He took them and dumped them in the garage along with
the other ones he had already collected. He wasn't surprised
by them.
    After all, he was a high school football coach, and after all,
this was Odessa, where Bob Rutherford, an affable realtor in
town, might as well have been speaking for thousands when he
casually said one day as if talking about the need for a rainstorm to settle the dust, "Life really wouldn't be worth livin' if
you didn't have a high school football team to support."

     

PRESEASON

     

CHAPTER I

Odessa
    IN THE BEGINNING, ON A DOG-DAY MONDAY IN THE MIDDLE OF
August when the West Texas heat congealed in the sky, there
were only the stirrings of dreams. It was the very first official
day of practice and it marked the start of a new team, a new
year, a new season, with a new rallying cry scribbled madly in
the backs of yearbooks and on the rear windows of cars: COIN'
TO STATE IN EIGHTY-EIGHT!
    It was a little after six in the morning when the coaches
started trickling into the Permian High School field house. The
streets of Odessa were empty, with no signs of life except the
perpetual glare of the convenience store lights on one corner
after another. The K mart was closed, of course, and so was the
Wal-Mart. But inside the field house, a squat structure behind
the main school building, there was only the delicious anticipation of starting anew. On each of the coaches' desks lay caps
with bills that were still stiff and sweat bands that didn't contain
the hot stain of sweat, with the word PERMIAN emblazoned