I grew up in West Texas, San Angelo, not Odessa, but definitely football country, the era and culture of Friday Night Lights. I learned football sitting in the flute section of the Edison Junior High School band as my band director explained to me first downs and safeties and extra points. I never learned it well, but I knew enough by the time I got to high school that I could get my flute in place to play the fight song when our team made a touchdown.

Friday Night Lights has become a movie and a TV series. I’ve never seen either one. However, I can vouch that the culture and the obsession depicted in the book did exist, and probably still does. I graduated from Central High School in San Angelo in the mid-seventies, and football was a Big Deal. We saw Permian, the school featured in the book, as the school to beat. We detested “Mojo” and all their black and gold trappings. They probably saw us as not so much of a threat since the San Angelo Bobcats have only won two state championships in their history, in 1943 and again in 1966. I think Mr. Bissinger, who is a Yankee from Philadelphia, probably got a a narrow but accurate picture of the place and influence of high school football in a West Texas town, as he spent a year following the fortunes of the Odessa Permian Panthers.

He also made a lot of people mad. In the afterword, written in 2008 ten years after the book was written, Bissinger says he received death threats at the time of publication and that many Odessans still resent and argue with the depiction of their town, their attitudes, and their football team in the book. I’m sure the fictional extension and embellishment of the story in movie and television has done nothing to change the perception that Bissinger misquoted, fictionalized, and sensationalized a narrative that was dear to the people of Odessa. I don’t know. Certainly, football is important, even worshipped, in Odessa and in other towns and high schools and colleges in Texas. I’ve seen it myself. Perhaps Mr. Bissinger could have found many people with a more balanced and rational view of the significance of the Permian Panthers football team and its win/loss record had he tried. However, he wasn’t writing about those balanced people with little or no interest in football; he was writing about the Mojo of Permian High School football and about its effect on a group of young men who found their identity in a series of Friday night football games.

Friday Night Lights is a sad book. It asks the question, “If football is your life, what happens when the season is over?” Win or lose, the answer to that question isn’t pretty. I felt sorry for the boys in the book. How could such a system be good for anyone concerned? And why do we continue to perpetuate such intense pressure on young men to succeed at a game that is essentially meaningless in and of itself? When I read about football mania as practiced in Friday Night Lights, I’m glad we homeschool. And it makes me look carefully at my own life and the expectations I have for my children. Is there anything that I have made into an idol that takes the place of God in the lives of my children? I pray not.

The book is excellent. It deals with both the strengths and weaknesses of a community’s having a cause or a team to unite them. Taking pride and inspiration from the accomplishments of a group of athletes or other successful people is a good thing, in moderation. Loading the hopes and dreams of an entire city on the shoulders of a group of seventeen and eighteen year old boys is a mistake and a perversion of true community.