Friday Night Lights: What the Book Found
Near Midland Odessa, Texas
In nineteen eighty-eight, a journalist named H.G. Bissinger moved his family to Odessa, Texas, to spend a year following the Permian High School Panthers football team. He had been a Harvard Nieman Fellow and a Pulitzer Prize winner. He expected to write something like the basketball movie Hoosiers, a story about how a sport holds a small town together in difficult times. What he found was more complicated than that.
The book he published in nineteen ninety was called Friday Night Lights: A Town, a Team, and a Dream. It followed the nineteen eighty-eight season, during which the Panthers were a strong playoff contender. Bissinger moved among the players, the coaches, the boosters, and the townspeople, and wrote down what he observed.
What he observed included, in his own words, the ugliest racism he had ever witnessed. The schools in Odessa had not desegregated until the nineteen eighties, and even then, Bissinger found that the district boundaries had produced a school system in which Permian High School drew the majority of the city's relatively small Black population into its zone while Odessa High School remained predominantly white and Hispanic. The arrangement was not incidental to the football program. Black athletes were central to Permian's success, while the educational infrastructure around them, SAT coaching, college advising, academic support, received far less attention than the sports medicine budget. Bissinger named this directly.
He also found that the school spent more on sports medical supplies in a single season than it did on the entire English department budget. Coaching salaries exceeded teacher salaries. The booster club held financial power over the athletic program and by extension the school, and its members cared primarily about winning games.
The book made Odessa furious when it was published. It also made Odessa famous. Bissinger's account of the nineteen eighty-eight season, including the playoff loss to the Dallas Carter Cowboys, remains one of the most widely read works of American sports journalism ever written.
