ADDRESS
to the National Association of Independent Schools

by H.G. Bissinger

[March 1, 2001]

It was thirteen years ago that I, without consciously knowing about it, set off on the journey of a lifetime.

That journey was called Friday Night Lights. And it began the way most journeys began—innocently, a little bit wild-eyed, reckless, maybe even stupid.

Had I been smarter, I would have listened to those who looked at me with such aching sadness, convinced that I was ruining my professional life by quitting and moving with my family to Odessa.

At first, when some people thought maybe I was going to the Odessa in Russia, they were more willing to forgive. At the very least, what the hell, I’ll taste new foods, maybe learn a new language. When I told them that it was actually the Odessa in Texas, their pity only multiplied.

Even I wondered what the hell I was doing…. but a writer never listens to his head. He listens to the poundings of his heart, the fantasy and dream of finding the perfect story, the one worth telling. And my heart told me that in those West Texas plains lay a remarkable tale about school sports and the ways in which it shapes us and informs us and molds us, the awesome way in which it can bring a community together, and yet at the same time, split it apart.

I come to you today as a proud product of all that you stand for and believe in as educators. I went to the Dalton school in New York City. Then to Andover. Then to Penn. I grew up in an atmosphere of privilege that looking back on it was almost embarrassing.

So for me, the journey to Odessa represented something deeply personal, the idea of going to a place in the middle of nowhere and not treating it as nowhere but to listen to it, observe it, to not treat it with elitism and condescension.

How little I knew then what it meant. How little I was prepared for those Friday Night Lights and the way in which they lit up every facet of Odessa. And not just Odessa I have since learned, but a thousand, no, ten thousand places like it—a way of life, a way of American life that somehow, someway I was able to capture.

Initially at first, the basic intent was to write a book about sports, high school football to be exact, and the way in which it impacted on a community. But along the way it became a book about so much more.

Race. Attitudes about education. Fathers and mothers living through their sons. The institutionalized inferiority of daughters. The power of hope, the spellbinding brilliance of it as well as the danger of it. The need to believe in something, to cling to something, even if the ends could never justify the means.

Dedication and duty. Sacrifice and sorrow. Heroism and heartache and horror. It all came to play under the intoxicating shield of those Friday Night-Lights, in that so noble and so conflicted a place called Odessa.

I saw moments of performance and sacrifice in the high school boys of Permian High that I will never forget. I will never forget the silence in that locker room before a playoff game, a silence as great in its own way as the roar of the ocean. I will never forget the feeling of being in that stadium that felt like a rocket ship in the desert, pulsating, rocking, alive with 20,000 fans under the power of those Friday Night Lights.

Could anything be more beautiful? I am not sure. Could anything be more exciting? I am not sure. In communities across this vast and great nation of ours starving for hope and joy and the very essence of what makes them a community, is there anything more powerful than sports, more able to bind young and strong, weak and powerful, black and white. I am not sure.

But as an observer on those moonswept plains, as someone, who at a certain point could detach himself from the community and must detach himself, I also saw the other side.

I saw the way in which kids, high school kids, were being sacrificed in the name and hope of going to state. I saw the way in which they were discarded once their athletic powers dried up. I saw the way in which one of them was called a nigger because he could no longer perform on the football field. I saw the way in which educating these boys, because they were still boys, of preparing them for life after football, was considered as little more than an afterthought.

Ten years later after its publication, Friday Night Lights still endures as a book. I am humbled to say that it has sold over half a million copies and it sells tens of thousands a copies a year.

Ten years later, I still get half a dozen comments about it a month. All the comments are gratifying and flattering, but the comments that touch me the most, mean the most to me in some way, are the ones that come from kids, high school kids from private schools and public ones and parochial ones, kids who have told me that this book has touched them and transformed and made them think about things, many many things, in a way that no book has ever moved them before.

Given that I have a teenage son, a 17 year-old junior who is about to take his SAT’s later this month and for whom the very concept of reading means glancing at the thumbnail reviews in TV Guide, the idea of creating something that teenagers respond to does seem like self-serving hyperbole.

But it has happened. Not just with boys but with girls. And as I sift through the ability of Friday Night Lights to make a connection like that, I think so much of it has to do with the blazing and blinding power of sports in our country, the way it can fashion everything, make everything revolve around it. If I was smart about anything, it was in the ability to make those themes accessible, to get at them by writing about kids that other kids all over the country were able to identify with.

Ten years later, there is no way to overestimate the power of sports in our schools. Ten years later, the issues that this book raised, of warped priorities in which more money was spent on athletic tape than on English books, in which the high school football players of Permian High School flew to away games on chartered jets costing $70,000, in which kids were discouraged from taking the SAT’s because it interfered with the Saturday morning film breakdown of the game the night before—ten years later I am more convinced that what happened in Odessa was by no means unexceptional.

I pick up a copy of the most recent Sports Illustrated, and I read that in Southern California, elite schoolboy basketball players are being routinely paid by a coterie of coaches and agents, leading lives, as the writers of the article put it, “of bizarre itinerancy, relocating from far-flung towns and far-off states to showcase themselves at high-profile hoop schools.”

I pick up the Boston Globe and read about a father killing a father after a PeeWee hockey game. And I wonder about the kids who witnessed that, and how we all know their lives, whatever they do, will never be the same. I pick up the Philadelphia Inquirer, and I read about a group of football players who given their exalted status as athletes, went on an illegal spree of drinking and carousing, only to be sentenced by a judge who among other punishments, actually ordered them to read Friday Night Lights.

The misdeeds are everywhere. The imbalance is everywhere, and please let’s not kid ourselves if we think it’s only confined to big public institutions. Just recently, William G. Bowen, the former president of Princeton, and James L. Shulman, the financial and administrative officer of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, wrote an op-ed piece in the New York Times in which they exposed once and for all the dirty little secret that the so-called elite colleges, the Ivies and the Williams’s and the Bowdoins’ — colleges that many of your students aspire to and will matriculate at — give more preferential treatment to athletes than the Michigan’s and the Ohio State’s.

“What does distinguish campus life for these athletes is their membership in what might be called the athletic culture.”

It is a culture that exists everywhere, including your own schools I’m willing to bet. To deny the presence of it would be dishonest. And in ten minutes, we could come up with a list a hundred feet long of all that is wrong with it, because there is so much wrong with it, the way in which works against the very theme of this conference—equity and justice, an atmosphere in which students, all students, walk freely and proudly in the comfort of their own identity whatever that identity is.

But to deny the pleasure of sports, what it can bring to a community, would be dishonest as well. It is a push and pull I grappled with all the time across those West Texas Plains. I saw horror, real horror, boys being catapulted into men, boys somehow becoming responsible for the hopes and dreams of the community in which they lived. I saw boys playing with broken ankles that were purposely never x-rayed. I saw boys vomit in the locker room before each game out of fear of failing. I saw smear campaigns to run a coaching staff out of town because they had lost two games, two games, each by a single point. I saw high school women afraid to be smart, afraid to be assertive, afraid to say much of anything because of the legitimate fear that it went against the athletic culture.

But also saw wonder. I saw the wonder of a group of boys coming together with little more than a dream in their heads and somehow getting an inch away from that dream, the dream of a state championship. I saw the miracles that can happen when a community puts all its resources behind something, and I began to wonder what would have happened if the value of that community wasn’t a state championship but something different — something that lasted, something that had value beyond the grainy image of a video tape of that championship season.

And watching those boys pour their hearts out, the way they sacrificed and were sacrificed, the way they believed, I knew they could have been propelled to do anything. Not just football.

A dozen years after I was in Odessa, it is still all so vivid to me in a series of images, so many strands of what I remember and will never forget.

It comes to me in the looks of those faces in a silent locker room. It comes to me in the joyful sway of those fans, twenty thousand strong, in the balmy beauty of a West Texas night. It comes to me in hands grappling to touch a gleaming playoff trophy.

But most of all, it comes to me in the form of a player I wrote about called Boobie Miles. There was no running back in Texas that year as good as Boobie Miles. He knew it, and so did the school. The plans for him were grand, as they are for many high school athletes who are big and strong and run like the wind. The idea of supplying him with an education was an afterthought, incidental to the experience of being a football star, a high school football star. That was his role, his reason to be.

I will never forget the sight of Boobie sitting at the back of English class one day, opening his recruiting letters to the vast amusement of the teacher who was supposed to be teaching him. I am not sure why, but I can still hear the sound of him tearing those envelopes, followed by the sweet coo of him as he read yet another whisper in his ear from Texas and Texas A & M.

I heard something tragic in that sound, something fatal. And just as I can still see that glowing face of Boobie, I can also see the face of that teacher — amused, smirking, making no attempt to teach Boobie because she had come to the conclusion, as had everyone else at the school, that this was a kid not worth teaching.

What happened with Boobie was all too familiar — he blew out his knee and he never recovered. Robbed of his dreams of football glory, he had no underpinnings, nothing to fall back on. He had no identity left, and he also had no education.

I keep in touch with Boobie regularly today. We talk on the phone as much as once a month. We make small talk. He tells me about his life — how his wife has left him, how he is somehow someway trying to take care of his twins who just turned one, how he wants to hold a job but cannot hold a job, how he is lonely and how he is scared and how, the minute he gets a rung up the ladder, there is always something to knock him down.

He asks me for money, a hundred here, a thousand there, and I give it to him. I give it to him because I love him, because I saw what happened to him when he was no longer a football star, the scorn they heaped upon him, the racist abuse.

I know that he was never meant to be a rocket scientist. I know that academics never came easily to him. But everytime I wonder, I wonder what would have become of Boobie if someone, someone at that school, would have given him the minimum he was entitled to, which was an education.

Such speculation doesn’t matter of course.

What’s done is done and nothing can change it. But when I get those phone calls from Boobie, when I hear his pain and panic and desperation, I also realize that it is these feelings and emotions, his ceaseless and eternal struggle, that will be the permanent legacy of what it meant to play under the Friday night lights.