Friday Night Lights: A Town, a Team, and a Dream by H. G. Bissinger Page A

were, after all, German, and Germans
loved their beer, but he admonished him to never, ever try
drugs. And he told his son he loved him.
    He didn't say much more after that, the arthritis eating into
his hips and the agony of the oil field accident that had cost him
his leg too much for him now. In the early morning silence of
that hospital room in Odessa, he let go.
    Mike ran out of the room when it happened, wanting to be
by himself, to get as far away as he possibly could, and his older
brother, Joe Bill, made no attempt to stop him. He knew Mike would be back because he had always been that kind of kid,
quiet, loyal, unfailingly steady. Mike didn't go very far. He
stopped in front of the fountain at the hospital entrance and
sat by himself. It was one in the morning and hardly anything
stirred in those wide downtown streets. He cried a little but he
knew he would be all right because, ever since the split-up of
his parents when he was five, he had pretty much raised himself. Typically, he didn't worry about himself. He worried about
his grandmother.

    But he didn't want to stay in Odessa anymore. It was too ugly
for him and the land itself bore no secrets nor ever inspired the
imagination, so damn flat, as he later put it, that a car ran down
the highway and never disappeared. He longed for lakes and
trees and hills, for serene places where he could take walks by
himself.
    Mike came back to the hospital after about half an hour. "You
were the most special thing in his life," his brother told him.
"It's a hard pill to swallow, but you're gonna have to make him
proud of you." As for leaving Odessa to come live with him, Joe
Bill gently talked Mike out of' it. He used the most powerful
pull there was for a thirteen-year-old boy living in Odessa,
really the only one that gave a kid something to dream aboutthe power of Permian football.
    He talked about how Mike had always wanted to wear the
black and white and how much he would regret it if he didn't
because there were so few places that could offer the same
sense of allegiance and tradition. Mike knew that Joe Bill was
right. He had already carried that dream for a long time, and
despite what he thought of Odessa, it was impossible to let it go.
    He stayed in Odessa and sometimes, when he went over to
his grandmother's house and talked about his father, it helped
him through the pain of knowing that Billy was gone forever.
"His daddy worshiped him," said Julia Winchell. "He sure
loved that little boy." And Mike returned that love.
    "When he died, I just thought that the best person in the
world had just died."

    Billy and Mike.
    There was Mike, smiling, curly-haired, looking into his (lad's
face at Christmastime. And there was Billy, thin and wizened
and slightly hunched, like a walking stick that had warped in
the rain. There was Mike at the flea markets they went to together on Saturdays and Sundays over on University, helping his father lift the boxes from the car and set them in the
little booth. There was Billy following him to a chair so he could
sit and rest. There they were together on those hot afternoons
that Mike hated so much but never complained about, selling
the cheap tools and knives and toys and Spanish Bibles that had
been found in catalogues or on trips to Mexico.
    There was Mike playing Little League baseball with that goto-hell stance of his-feet close together, up on the toes, taking
as big a stride as he could possibly muster into the ball-jacking
one homer after another. And there was Billy, the proud master, watching his gifted disciple from the car, unable to get out
because of the pain in his leg and the arthritis.
    Under the demanding tutelage of his father, Mike could do
no wrong in Little League. He became the stuff of legend, with
twenty-seven pitches in a row thrown for strikes, a single season
in which he hit thirty home runs. And then somewhere around
the time his father started slipping, Mike