A fantastic book | Friday Night Lights: A Town, a Team, and a Dream

Friday Night Lights | Friday Night Lights: A Town, a Team, and a Dream | H.g. Bissinger

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	• Friday Night Lights: A Town, a Team, and a Dream H.g. Bissinger Da Capo Press, 2000 - 400 pages average customer review:based on 285 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Best Sports Book Ever Written

This is my pick for the best sports book ever written, and the reason is because it transcends sports. It captures the mood and feel of small town America as well as any book since Larry McMurtry's The LAST PICTURE SHOW. What Bissinger describes about the so-called pinnacle of life in western Texas, playing for the local team, applies just as well to high school athletes in Ohio or Pennsylvania. The flip side, of course, is once the ride is over, so is your worth to the community.

Great, great read.

A fantastic book

H.G. Bissenger's book Friday Night Lights is a non-fiction account of a football team in Odessa, Texas spanning the decade of the 1980s. A once financially successful town dependent on oil revenues, Odessa's fate makes an about turn as profits dwindle, families face bankruptcy, and the crime rate climbs, far exceeding the national average. Enter the Permain Panthers football team, a group that seems to be defying all odds, proving that determination and grit can bring hope and success to this small town. It goes without saying that just as surely the team can also bring the town to its knees if it fails to win the State Championship.

At an early age, children are indoctrinated into the faith known as the Permian High School Panthers Football Team, a religion that is followed just as fervently as any other. Boys pray that they will rise to the challenge and become the next star of the Pantheon Panthers, while girls dream of becoming a "Pipette," a glorified indentured servant whose sole obligation is to meet the needs of an adoring, or as the case may sometimes be, un-adoring, football player. When they shine, the players are treated much like Greek gods, but like those gods, their reign is brief, landing some in their own version of Hades.

Bissenger follows several players, and their coach, as they travel on a journey to the State Finals. Along the way, the star player, Boobie, sustains a knee injury and learns the hard way that not only is he expendable, but that all privileges once extended to him are no longer afforded. This is made abundantly clear when the once promising star realizes that he is now actually required to attend class to receive a passing grade. While some players do show academic promise, most are unprepared for the rigors ahead of them in the real world. These players live in an eery twilight zone, reinforced by adults obsessed with winning the next Friday night's game. Along with portraits of the players, Bissenger offers a sympathetic portrayal of the coach who tries to create a winning team against the backdrop of adolescent angst, and families struggling to stay intact against a rising tide of economic and emotional woes.

Bissenger doesn't focus his reporting solely within the boundaries of the football field, he also examines how football dominance intersects all other aspects of town governance. Bissenger explains how Permian High School, once the bastion of white middle and upper-middle-class families, gerrymanders town lines so that it can pick and choose its star athletes from less privileged areas. He also reports on how funding is disproportionately spent on the football team; making scholastic achievement a secondary function of the school system. Bissenger takes us to a court proceeding where a judge is asked to rule on whether a star athlete with a questionable passing grade in algebra is qualified to play in the next game. By the time you reach this point in the book, you will fully understand that in Odessa, a town where winning a game is everything, judgment will always favor the athlete. Whether the Panthers succeed in becoming champions or not, in the end, the season is over, the old players move on, and new players replace the old, and for a brief moment, they too are stars.

Quill says: A tale of the American Dream gone awry. A fantastic book.

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Friday Night Lights

Friday Night Lights
A Town, A Team, and A Dream
By H.G. Bissinger

By Cael Kiess

H.G. Bissinger spent over a year getting to know the people of Odessa, Texas. During that year he spoke with Permian football players, their families, and Odessa citizens in his attempt to write a book that told the story of how one team of teenage kids could inspire an entire town. Bissinger, an American journalist, has won the Pulitzer Prize, the Livingston Award, the National Headliner Award, and the American Bar Association's Silver gavel for his reporting. He is also the author of A Prayer for the City, and is a contributing editor at Vanity Fair. Bissinger did a great job accomplishing his goal of reliving the wild journey of the 1988 Permian football season and the struggles off the field. He vividly portrays the racism through schools in Odessa County, the oil booms, typical school days of Permian football players, the Mojo Fanatics, and Friday Nights in late August. One chapter, "The Watermelon Feed," really describes the passion and devotion of Permian football fans and Mojo Fanatics. Bissinger writes, "The faithful sat on little stools of orange and blue under the lights of the high school cafeteria, but the setting didn't bother them a bit. Had the Watermelon Feed been held inside a county jail, or on a sinking ship, or on the side of a craggy mountain, they would still have flocked to attend and support their team." This description allows me to feel like I'm actually there and helps me sense the amount of pride and dedication given to Permian football by the fans. He also gives a second look farther into the town of Odessa, off the football field, enhancing a better view of what was occurring in the town of Odessa and its neighboring towns. There were many highlights and struggles happening in the streets and classrooms that one would not be able to find out in just the movie. One weakness of the book is the possible effect of losing the reader through the ongoing descriptions and passages of events, people, and struggles in Odessa. There is not as much of the actual football games incorporated into the book as one would think from watching the movie. In the book, Bissinger does a marvelous job describing the life and events of the 1988 Permian football players and the Mojo fans.

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Return once again to the timeless account of the Permian Panthers of Odessa--the winningest high-school football team in Texas history. Odessa is not known to be a town big on dreams, but the Panthers help keep the hopes and dreams of this small, dusty town going. Socially and racially divided, its fragile economy follows the treacherous boom-bust path of the oil business. In bad times, the unemployment rate barrels out of control; in good times, its murder rate skyrockets. But every Friday night from September to December, when the Permian High School Panthers play football, this West Texas town becomes a place where dreams can come true. With frankness and compassion, H. G. Bissinger chronicles a season in the life of Odessa and shows how single-minded devotion to the team shapes the community and inspires--and sometimes shatters--the teenagers who wear the Panthers' uniforms.

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