It’s that time of year…for me, that would be the time to put “Platinum Bells” by Destiny’s Child on repeat and set alarms for all the times that Elf will be playing on ABC Family. However, for a majority of American men (and also women who are not me) above the age of seven, it’s football season. I’ve always been somewhat confused by “football culture” and all the hype surrounding it, preferring sports like baseball and hockey. All of the scandals in Dallas, Kansas City, Pittsburgh, and too many other places to name suggest a culture of entitlement and recklessness. And while Friday Night Lights definitely addresses that aspect, this bestselling work of nonfiction really helped me to understand why football is important to so many Americans.
In a desolate, West Texas town called Odessa, Pulitzer Prize winner Buzz Bissinger spent a whole season, August to December of 1988, with the local high school football team, the Permian Panthers. Bringing in tens of thousands of fans to each game, the Panthers were no joke. As Bissinger discovered in his year at Permian High, the whole town of Odessa lived and died with this team. Stories of school board members “gerrymandering” to get the best football players, coaches recruiting players from other towns, and players receiving answer sheets with their English tests were common.
So obviously those are the bad parts. But what Bissinger found in his time at Permian was that football held these families’ lives together. When the desegregation of Odessa’s public schools in 1980 (yes, you read that correctly) and the decline of the Texas oil industry made Odessa the second most dangerous place to live in America, the one thing that gave everyone hope was high school football. It’s a hard thing to describe, but Bissinger effectively conveys the excitement and anxiety in his account of the Permian Panthers’ 1988 season.