Are You Ready for Some Football?

If you’re a football player at Permian you get one year. One year to be treated like kings, not have to do work, skip class if you want. Win and you’re a legend forever, lose and you’re never remembered. Boom or Bust.

The town of Odessa also adheres to the Boom or Bust lifestyle. Oil is king there, and if it’s good, it’s real good. More often, though, it’s not.

The parallels between the football team and the town are almost too good to be true, and H.G. Bissinger does an amazing job of drawing conclusions from the two. Self destruction and excess are two big themes that are prevalent throughout the book, which makes sense for a football-obsessed oil town.

The writing itself is extremely entertaining, taking the best parts of the sports section for the football stuff, and the best parts of a character study for the town-stuff. Mixed with the fact that Bissinger came away with some clear-cut and expertly written conclusions makes this one of the better books I’ve read this year. I am also sure that Bissinger chose his subjects carefully. The people he chose to include in the book both from the town and the team serve as symbols for the people who inhabit Odessa as a whole.

So we’ve established that this book does well as a study on a late 80s town and how it’s obsession with football pretty much changed 90% of these kids’ lives for the worse, but the actual football drama is super entertaining as well. To give an example, (Spoilers) there’s a section where three teams are tied at the end of the season, and only two can advance to the playoffs. So the three head coaches meet at an undisclosed location at one in the morning in order to FLIP A COIN to determine how their seasons officially ended. It’s ridiculous and dramatic at the same time. And it also illustrates how football-crazed Texas is, because all three teams were wide awake in their respective gymnasiums waiting to hear the result.

Bissinger makes it pretty clear that a lot goes wrong in Odessa. Kids are allowed to pretty much skip school in order to play football, there is a ton of overt racism, coaches are basically abused by supporters, as are the players. It’s a mess. But maybe it’s the football romantic in me, because I do find something admirable about how they put it all on the line every Friday night. To live and die for something you care about so much is something that most people can only hope to have in their lifetimes. The famous Jim Valvano quote goes, “If you laugh, you think, and you cry, that's a full day. That's a heck of a day. You do that seven days a week, you're going to have something special.” Not too many people do that, but the high school seniors who played football did. Bissinger writes about the systemic problems in Odessa with extreme clarity, but he also writes about the Friday Night Addiction with such love that the reader can’t help but at least understand why people in that town feel the way they do about football. There’s a certain magic about it.

Anyway, this is a great book that reminds me a lot of In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, but a bit easier to read. Definitely worth your time to check out.

It’s 5/5 from me because of it’s entertainment, honest reporting, intelligence, and conclusions. I’m gonna say it’s like this smartest plays compilation. Guys at the top of their game who know exactly what they’re doing.