Friday Night Lights: A Town, a Team, and a Dream [Paperback]

Friday Night Lights is about the Permian High School Panthers football team in the 1988 season. In Odessa, TX, they only "have two things - football and oil, and there ain't no more oil." Carried on the adolescent shoulders of the black-clad Panthers are the hopes, dreams, aspirations, and societal well-being of an entire community. The book focuses on the intense scrutiny and pressure placed on the players, coaches, and even families associated with the program. After a tough loss, the head coach can expect to have his house vandalized, his family verbally assaulted, and calls made for his firing. The student population of Permian is predominantly white, but the few black players imported from Odessa's poor, mostly black, south side are some of the team's most successful players. The book highlights the contrast in the white, wealthy suburban area Permian is located in against the older section of Odessa, populated mostly by blacks and Hispanics.

The book also profiles several of the team's star players. Some live for every single moment they can wear the Panthers uniform, while others are conflicted at having to play in such a pressure-cooker environment. Some are the lucky sons of Odessa's richest residents, bound for Ivy-League schools, while others come from painful poverty and broken homes. Odessa is portrayed as an entire city of broken dreams, devastated by the downturn in the oil industry where unemployment is high and crime higher. What holds the community together is the Friday Night Lights at Ratliff Stadium, where the Panthers do battle not only for team and school pride, but for the pride of an entire community and people. I cannot recommend this book more highly.

Of course, football afficianados were saddened by the sentence. What had happened? How did he suddenly fall? It must have been overnight because he was such a wonderful running back.

How does it happen that we lose sight of our heroes, are deaf to their problems, ignorant of the huge crash when the stands empty forever?

It starts with the Permian Panthers, a High School football team in Odessa, Texas in the late '80's.

Bissinger's book remains the quintesential 'not-feel-good-story' about high school sports. Nothing bad happens, there are no pregnancies, DUI's, deaths or shootings, but there are worse things. There is the false society that these young (for the most part) men live. The adulation. The absence of no other alternative other than what they have been taught as the only way out of poverty, boredom, and the greatest punishment of all, anonimity. We are all enablers. While Bissinger aims at the coaches we would have to include school officials, town leaders, fans, ourselves.

Extremely well written I picked it up again as in this year, as we closed in on the College Football Championships with all the controversy of "who is the real winner?"

Of course the whispered answer may be, do we really need one? Is there any point before professional sports that the joy of the game remains the joy of the game?

The parents of all high school children, ex-athletes, sports lovers, kids, and couch potatoes should read Bissinger. It's a great read.