Odessa Odyssey: Writer turns nostalgic upon release of ‘Friday Night Lights’

Kirk Baird

Monday, Oct. 11, 2004 | 8:20 a.m.

Living in Lubbock, Texas, for several years, I never thought a land could be more ... bleak.

Then I moved to Odessa.

A two-hour drive south of Lubbock, in the heart of the oil-rich Permian Basin, Odessa offers scarce scenery.

In fact, once outside its city limits, all that separates you and the horizon are scrub brush, mesquite trees, pump jacks and the occasional dust storm.

It's a barren world, as if a raging firestorm washed through the land, incinerating anything lush or green unlucky enough to be in its path.

There's a reason locals jokingly call the town "Odessa-lation."

There's not much to the town. Downtown remains a remnant of 1950s city planning, where all streets seem to merge at City Hall. There are no looming skyscrapers. Just furniture stores, banks, restaurants and offices for attorneys and bail bondsmen.

In short, there's nothing at all remarkable about Odessa. Nothing, except its high school football team: the Odessa Permian Panthers.

A town abuzz

In 1988 a Philadelphia Inquirer editor, H.G. "Buzz" Bissinger, moved his family to Odessa for a year to chronicle the Panthers' football team.

Bissinger wanted to write a book about a town that lives and dies with its football team. In his book, Bissinger said he considered writing about other places but "all roads led to West Texas, to a town called Odessa."

Released in 1990, the book was a best seller. But many residents of Odessa felt betrayed by Bissinger's accounts of rampant racism in the town, and coaches driven to cruelty by win-at-all-costs boosters.

In an afterword, "Friday Night Lights" author Bissinger writes of "threats of bodily harm" that forced him to cancel a series of appearances in Odessa bookstores while on a national tour shortly after the book's release.

There was also talk of turning the book into a movie. But as the years went by, talk is all it ever seemed to be.

Until now. "Friday Night Lights," starring Billy Bob Thornton, opened Friday. Having recently read "Friday Night Lights" and watched the just-released movie, memories of the town that was my home for 2 1/2 years returned.

Odessa doesn't offer picturesque views.

The job market? Well, tied closely to oil, the local economy booms and busts along with the petroleum business. And the nearest escape from west Texas, Dallas, is a five-hour drive east.

Which is why football is so important to the town. It's a heritage that Odessans can claim with pride. Football is what evens the playing field in Texas, so to speak, the great equalizer between a gritty blue-collar west Texas town Larry McMurtry once wrote "is the ugliest place on Earth" and the snobby, white-collar big cities in the east.

In fact, often the team seems to be playing more for the pride of the town than for itself.

In the film one of the players comments to a teammate: "Do you feel 17? 'Cause I sure don't feel 17." The pressure to succeed placed on the team, and the players, is enormous.

Winning at all costs is a difficult enough burden for anyone, much less a teenager, to bear, and both the book and movie eloquently convey that struggle.

Help the team win and you're the topic of conversation for a week. Play well for the season and you're a local hero. Lead the team to a victory at state? Well, you can almost retire on those memories and bask in lasting glory.

But lose? That's unforgivable. Coaches who fall out of favor with Permian's fans can expect "for sale" signs posted in their yards. The players who fail to produce on the field can expect long letters written to the editor of the paper chastising them and demanding they be moved to the bench.

That said, when I moved to Odessa in the spring of '97, it seemed to me the Permian faithful had mellowed since the book was released.

I detected little discussion of the football team around town, which struck me as odd since the Panthers, or "Mojo," as the fans call them, were fresh off a loss in the state finals.

No "the coach must go" rantings at restaurants. Or, "Permian better win state this year or else" threats in letters to the editor.

All was normal and really quiet in the town of nearly 90,000.

Then football season began ... and everything changed.

Odessa High

While it's the Permian Panthers who get all the spotlight, there are actually two high school teams in Odessa.

The Odessa High School Bronchos (pronounced Broncos) are a team mostly ignored outside of West Texas, which makes sense in such a football-crazy state. After all, it's the Permian Panthers who own Odessa's only state football championships -- six of them, in fact.

But Odessa was different. The town was sharply divided by the black and white (Mojo) and red and blue (Bronchos).

Those differences were settled annually in the only place to play football in town, Ratliff Stadium, a multimillion-dollar, 20,000-seat behemoth.

The stadium was big enough to even impress a former Northwestern University offensive lineman as he stood on the sideline during a Permian-Odessa game.

"I played in college stadiums that weren't this big or crowded," he remarked to me.

The two teams shared Ratliff, so when Mojo had a home game, the Bronchos would be on the road and vice-versa.

During my first year at the paper, I worked as a copy editor. I had the responsibility of laying out the page with a photo of Mojo's homecoming queen. It was a horizontal picture, so I designed a page to run the photo three newspaper columns wide with a two-sentence cutline, giving the basic details of the picture.

The next week I was responsible for the layout of the Bronchos' homecoming photo. The news editor came over to me, laid down the previous week's page and said, "The photo needs to be the exact same size as this one," and pointed to the picture in the paper. "It also needs to say the exact same thing. We don't want any phone calls."

The phone calls ...

There were those in Odessa so consumed by the rivalry between the two teams that each week during football season they would take the time to measure the game recap stories and call the sports department to complain if their team got shorted -- even if only by an inch.

As part of a longstanding policy at the Odessa American, the home team always had the bigger write-up, because of logistics. It was a fact the sports editor would explain over the phone nearly every week, often to the same callers who were convinced the paper was biased.

Never mind that the week before the paper had run a longer story about their team.

So I made certain the measurements of the photo were identical. I placed it in exactly the same spot on the page. I even used the same photo caption, just replacing the names to match those in the photo and, of course, the school.

There were no phone calls.

Perhaps it's because everyone had something else on their mind: the upcoming football game between Permian and Odessa.

Grudge match

Permian High School owned Odessa High School. Each year the two teams squared off, and the results were always the same: Permian won, whether by a field goal or several touchdowns.

It wasn't that Permian expected to win. It was just a matter of by how much.

But in '97 there was a different feeling in town. After losing more than three decades worth of games consecutively, the Bronchos appeared to stand a chance at overcoming the Mojo curse.

The team was solid at most positions and matched up fairly well against their crosstown rivals. In fact, from the buzz I heard at the Odessa American and around town, it seemed that expectations were higher this year among Bronchos fans than in several years.

Even country-western singer Larry Gatlin joined the Odessa High believers. In 1965 Gatlin was the starting quarterback on the last Bronchos team to beat Permian. Thirty-one years later, during the Bronchos' two-a-day practice sessions, Gatlin stopped by to offer some encouragement to the team and, yes, to let them know it was actually possible to beat Mojo.

A week before the big showdown the football frenzy was contagious.

I couldn't drive anywhere in town without seeing shoe-polished car windows proclaiming yet another victory for Mojo, or red-and-blue streamers on the backs of trucks from Bronchos fans.

Most retailers, regardless of their allegiances, wisely appealed to both camps. Even the Dairy Queen passed out large plastic Panther or Broncho cups, depending on your request.

By game time Friday night, the townsfolk were bursting with anticipation.

I had to work that night at the paper. Not that I was missing anything. Everywhere I walked in the building, you could hear the radio broadcast of the game.

Nearly a decade later I'm fuzzy on the details. I remember only that the game was tight and, with a minute to go, Permian had the ball with the chance to win -- again.

But something happened that night those in attendance will never forget: The Mojo magic wore off. The Permian quarterback threw an interception, and the game -- and the streak -- were over.

The pressroom, where I was listening to the game with a dozen others, erupted into frantic screams and heavy sighs, followed by some choice profanities. You could even hear car horns blasting in victory salutes around town.

Odessa High School had beaten Odessa Permian. The Mojo curse was lifted.

Perhaps not coincidentally, it's been a steady decline for Permian since. The team made the playoffs that year, but lost in the first game. They returned to the playoffs again in 1998, but lost in the quarterfinals.

Odessa Permian hasn't made the playoffs since, a drought of five years, which is the longest such streak since the '50s. In Mojo time, that's an eternity.

Meanwhile, Permian's other big rival, Midland Lee, from neighboring Midland, produced three consecutive state titles from 1998-2000.

Still, I have no doubt the Permian faithful persist.

They undoubtedly meet in coffee shops talking about how to fix the team. They mingle at pep rallies, hoping this is the year for a return to state. They still write letters to the editor with strategies and player-personnel moves.

And I'm sure some even pray for Mojo's return to greatness.

It's the power and the lure of the Friday night lights. And it's a town's dream that those lights burn brightly again.

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