Boom or Bust? #TXHSFB (Reflections on Texas High School Football) 25 years since "Friday Night Lights" book

Boom or Bust:
Reflections Tonight on Texas High School Football #TXHSFB

(Houston) If all politics is local; well then, so is football. Whether it’s pro, college, or high school, the closer you are to the action, the closer the action is to your heart. Under Friday night’s warm, gentle breezes, Texans congregate on either side of a grid-lined field, celebrating a game with deep roots in the our state. It’s a stage not only for the athletes but for entire towns to proudly exhibit their winning colors and traditions, despite the boom/bust reality for many of these communities. The ultimate team game is the ultimate town game.

The luminosity of the lights squelches competing brightness, banishing the darkness of the world beyond the stands. The inky evening in the distance streaks shades of orange and black as the night envelopes the sunset; curly clouds above look cotton-candy pink against a faded-denim sky.

Stadium lights stand bunched together on soaring poles, like supernova lined inside an egg box. Swirling wildly around the bold contrast of black and white in the night sky, lights edged with a blinding penumbra, fly thousands of late summer bugs, legion around the 1500watt metal halide bulbs, bouncing off each other in a frenzy.    

Dreaming of glory, searching for new heroes under the Friday night lights; spectators are lost for a few hours at the end of a long grinding week. Maybe they’ll see another runner like Eric Dickerson, another passer like Matthew Stafford, or another kicker like Russell Erxleben? The rat, tat, tat of drumlines, the warbly wah, boo-wap of the horn section, the cheers and whistles during play: all repeat like fight songs echoing down through the decades. We can all sing our alma mater. I’m not too old to remember the freedom of roaming around under the stadium with packs of elementary school hoodlums, caring much less about the game than our parents.

An oil boom in the 1950s led to the opening of Odessa Permian High School in 1959, and 55 years later the oil boom/bust cycle, like a roller-coaster, continues. It has been 25 years since the book “Friday Night Lights” [FNL] was published by De Capo press in 1990; written about the 1988 season. The price for a barrel of oil was just as depressed back then, but TXHSFB was as well-lit and well-funded as it is today. My high school in Dallas just lost a home game for the first time in 84 contests; the streak started before many of the players were born. It takes years of work to perpetuate that kind of success.

Splintered wood benches give way to smooth aluminum seating and modern scoreboards, with replays and current statistics. During halftime the cold hot dogs and bitter coffee have been replaced by fancy concessions such as hot nachos and fruit smoothies. Entertainment by the cowboy hatted drill teams with red lipstick and tasseled white boots have morphed into a striptease show by scantily-dressed dancers. The players’ tight elasticized uniforms and Star Wars helmets look like pro football teams but protect our little boys from concussions: who thinks that head injury issues could ruin this historic American game? The “gear” seems as conflicted as having multiple teams in each district make the playoffs: we want to highs of powerhouse winning teams, but we neither want head injuries nor the agony of defeat felt by kids at the season’s end. It’s too high or too low?

Media coverage of TXHSFB has grown like the game’s big lineman, many of whom are 300-pounds, a girth formally reserved for college or pro. In the 25 years since the smashing success of Bissinger’s FNL, the steady increase in magazines like Dave Campbell’s, bloggers like Angel Verdejo, tweets by Dan Jenkins, commercials with the Boz, songs by Kenny Chesney, highlight shows on TV hosted by Craig Way, and movies like Peter Berg’s, pushed the popularity of high school football to a new level. High school coverage in the 70’s consisted of AM Radio and the back pages of Saturday's Dallas Morning News, with print the size of an IRS document. At the same time, the U.S. imported 46% of its oil. Boom or bust?

TXHSFB is a family game, passed from decade to decade; for example, in north Texas, Denison plays Sherman this fall for the 106^th time, missing only 3 games during WWII. Many things have changed but so much has remained: sweeping runs, head-smacking tackles, few QBs with good arms; the scream of “Dee-Fence” when the game is on the line.

Games bring together communities, allowing them to celebrate success and teach young people how to plow through challenging situations. The spirit of competition shows the collaboration and work ethic of future leaders, their effort and joy floating over to the stands to encourage beleaguered, anxious parents.

The sport exists mostly in analog, its basics what we call “blocking” and “tackling” in business when we want to illustrate the building blocks of any project. But more than that, the diving into a pile for a fumble, the clawing, grabbing and fighting of the interior line, the reaching high up into the corner of the end zone for the impossible catch, these are the small battles that represent everyday work, considered life and death in football. We love the game because it’s real; it’s a team battling together. It’s both shiny and brassy, but down and dirty; the highs and lows intoxicate us every Friday night: boom or bust?

©Mark H. Pillsbury