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

who had been to the very first Permian practice in
the fall of 1959, when the school opened. Since that time he
had missed few practices, and it went without saying that he
hadn't missed any games, except for the time he had heart bypass surgery in Houston. But even then he had done what he
could to keep informed. After his surgery, he had resisted taking painkillers so he would be conscious for the phone calls
from his son-in-law updating him every quarter on the score of
the Permian-Midland Lee game. When he learned that Permian had the game safely in hand, he then took his medicine.
    More toward the back of the room was Brad Allen, president of' the Permian booster club in the early eighties when
billionaire businessman H. Ross Perot had made his pitch for
educational reform in the state. Perot had routinely rubbed
shoulders with the most powerful men in the world-presidents, senators, heads of state, chief executive officers of Fortune 500 companies. But the machinations behind building up multi-million-dollar companies or working up a deal to get the
hostages out of Iran proved to be mere trifles in comparison to
what happened when Perot threatened the sanctity of football
in Odessa.

    The dominance of football in Texas high schools had become
the focus of raging debate all over the state in 1983. The governor of Texas, Mark White, appointed Perot to head a committee on educational reform. In pointing to school systems
he thought were skewed in favor of extracurricular activities,
Perot took particular aim at Odessa.
    On ABC's "Nightline," he called Permian fans "football crazy,"
and during the show it was pointed out that a $5.6 million high
school football stadium had been built in Odessa in 1982. The
stadium included a sunken artificial-surface field eighteen feet
below ground level, a two-story press box with VIP seating for
school board members and other dignitaries, poured concrete
seating for 19,032, and a full-time caretaker who lived in a
house on the premises.
    "He made it look like we were a bunch of West Texas hicks,
fanatics," said Allen of Perot. The stadium "was something the
community took a lot of pride in and he went on television and
said you're a bunch of idiots for building it." Most of the money
for the stadium had come from a voter-approved bond issue.
    The war against Perot escalated quickly. The booster club
geared up a letter-writing campaign to him, state legislators,
and the governor. Nearly a thousand letters were sent in protest of Perot's condemnation of Odessa. Some of the ones to
him were addressed "Dear Idiot" or something worse than that,
and they not so gently told him to mind his own damn business
and not disturb a way of life that had worked and thrived for
years and brought the town a joy it could never have experienced anywhere else.
    "It's our money," said Allen of the funds that were used to
build the stadium. "If we choose to put it into a football program, and the graduates from our high schools are at or above the state level of standards, then screw you, leave us alone." At
one point Perot, believing his motives had been misinterpreted
and hoping to convince people that improving education in
Texas was not a mortal sin, contemplated coming to Odessa to
speak. But he decided against it, to the relief of some who
thought he might be physically harmed if he did.

    "There are so few other things we can look at with pride,"
said Allen. "We don't have a large university that has thirty or
forty thousand students in it. We don't have the art museum
that some communities have and are world-renowned. When
somebody talks about West Texas, they talk about football.
    "There is nothing to replace it. It's an integral part of what
made the community strong. You take it away and it's almost
like you strip the identity of the people."
    The pull of it seemed irresistible. Allen's stepson, Phillip, had
been a fullback on the 1980 Permian team that