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

had been in the stands that night. They had been separated for
some time, and it was the first time James senior had ever seen
his son play football at Permian. He was almost unprepared for
what it felt like to watch his own flesh and blood out there on
that field. "Oh, man," he remembered. "The first I seen him
carry that ball, he busted that line for eighty yards. Do you
know how you feel when you see your son doin' good, doin'
somethin' special? It kind of put a lump in your throat. Man,
that boy ran that ball that night!"
    The fire had been there during the Arlington game in
the playoffs, after he had come off the field with tears in his
eyes because one of the opposing players had called him a
nigger. Gaines tried to comfort him and told him the other
team only wanted to get him worked up so he would get himself kicked out of the game. And then he saw a change come
over Boobie as if' something had snapped, the hurt and humiliation giving way to a raging anger. He only carried the ball
twelve times that day for forty-eight yards, but it was his savage
blocking that made the recruiters up in the stands take notice,
the way he went after the Arlington defenders with uncontrolled vengeance, the way he flattened a linebacker and rendered him semi-unconscious. It proved to them that Boobie had more than just the requisite size and speed to play big-time
college ball. He had the rawness, the abandon, the unbridled
meanness.

    "He's strong as snot," Mike Winchell said of him.
    "He's the best football player I've ever seen," said Jerrod
McDougal.
    Boobie himself was well aware that all eyes were poised on
him this season, and while he luxuriated in it, he seemed almost
carefree about it. Holding court in the trainer's room shortly
after the practices had begun in the August heat, he bantered
with the nine-year-old son of one of the coaches as if they were
best pals in grade school together, calling him "waterbug head,"
asking him if lie had a girlfriend, grabbing his head and giving
him it noogie, telling him that when it came to "the shoe," Adidas would never hold a nickel next to the almighty Nike. He lay
on one of the brown trainer's tables, but it was impossible for
him to keep still. With his head hanging over the table, he ran
his fingers along one of the crevices in the wall and started to
do a rap tune.
    He asked one of the student trainers to dial the phone for
him and call his girlfriend. The student held the phone out as
Boobie, shaking with laughter, yelled from across the room,
"What's the deal, what's the holdup on comin' to the house?"
When Trapper walked in, Boobie called him "cuz" and "catdaddy." A few minutes later he was handed a list of defensive
plays to study. He looked at it for several seconds, the droning
terminology of numbers and letters as appealing as Morse
Code, and started to read it aloud in rap to give it a little flavor,
a little extra pizzazz.
    He continued to play with the wall and then turned onto his
stomach before flipping over again on his hack. He spoke in
little snatches.
    "My last year ... I want to win State. You get your picture
took and a lot of college people look at you.
    "When you get old, you say, you know, I went to State in
nineteen eighty-eight."

    He dreamed of making it to the pros, just as long as it wasn't
the New York jets because he didn't like the color green. And
as he flipped onto his stomach one more time, he said he
couldn't ever, ever imagine a life without football because it
would be "a big zero, 'cause, I don't know, it's just the way I feel.
If l had a good job and stuff, I still wouldn't be happy. I want
to go pro. That's my dream ... be rookie of the year or somethin' like that."
    He moved off the line against the Palo Duro Dons and everything was in pulsating motion, the legs thrust high, the
hips swiveling, the arms pumping, the shoulder pads clapping wildly up and down like the incessant beat of a calypso