9.6.15   “Friday Night Lights” twenty-five years later

H. G. “Buzz” Bissinger spent a year living in Odessa and following the Odessa Permian Panthers football team in 1988. He wanted to write a book about the importance of high school football in a town “that had seen better times.”

Odessa was suffering from a colossal oil bust, but Permian’s football fortunes and expectations continued to dominate Texas football.

The resulting book, Friday Night Lights: A Town, A Team, and A Dream, was published in 1990 to great critical and best-selling acclaim — except perhaps in Odessa, Texas. A movie and a TV series eventually were spun off from the book.

Twenty-five years later, Da Capo Press has brought out a 25th anniversary edition of Friday Night Lights ($15.99 paperback), including a twenty-five-page afterword by Bissinger tracking down several of the players featured in the book and reporting how their lives have turned out since high school.

When the book first came out, Bissinger’s planned book tour of Texas was cancelled because of death threats, presumably from irate Permian fans who felt their team and their town had been unfairly portrayed.

Evidently emotions have calmed down quite a bit in the ensuing quarter of a century, because this month Bissinger, now sixty, embarks on that long-delayed Texas book tour. He will kick it off in Odessa on Sept.14, then proceed to Midland on Sept. 15, Houston Sept. 16, Abilene Sept. 18, Dallas Sept. 19, and Austin Sept. 20.

He will speak at the Abilene Public Library on Sept. 18 at a noon lunch program being billed as a pre–West Texas Book Festival “bonus event.” The festival actually begins the next Monday, but festival planners couldn’t resist lining up Bissinger when he became available. The program is free, with an optional lunch of Frito Pie for $5. Bissinger will talk for 30-40 minutes,  then sign books.

If you haven’t read Friday Night Lights, this new edition provides a good opportunity to do so. Carlton Stowers and I included the original book as one of our sports selections in 101 Essential Texas Books last year. Lone Star Literary Life last month ranked it number one on a list of best all-time Texas football books.

Looking back, Bissinger says “the controversy that exploded after the publication of the book in 1990 made me a marked man.” While he felt he had written many good things about Odessa and especially the Permian players, he “also exposed thick veins of racism and misplaced academic and social priorities.”

He said he has been back to Odessa many times since the book came out and has several “friends for life” there.

“Odessans are more forgiving than they think,” he writes, “or maybe they just learned to ignore me, an old shoe, dusty and cobwebbed, kept in a forgotten corner of the closet.”

For more on Bissinger’s talk in Abilene on Sept. 18, or on the West Texas Book Festival Sept. 21–26, go to abilenetx.com/apl. More details about his tour can be found at lonestarliterary.com.

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Glenn Dromgoole is co-author of 101 Essential Texas Books.

Contact him at g.dromgoole@suddenlink.net.

>> Read his past Texas Reads columns in Lone Star Literary Life here.