Friday Night Lights by HG Bissinger

Friday Night Lights

It's just a game, right? And everyone loves football? Combined with the recent media examples of parents who get a little bit too worked up about their children's sports, all of these factors might seem to indicate that the setting of H.G. Bissinger's modern sports classic Friday Night Lights is totally arbitrary. But the fact is, this story of the tragedies of a Texas high school football team couldn't happen just anywhere, in any town USA. Instead, Bissinger paints an impressive picture of a 1980's town in Texas where everything revolves around high school football. The town is economically and racially torn. The Panthers are largely white (with some exceptions) and the town, which was once prosperous, is now suffering a bust after a period of boom in the oil industry. People have lost everything they own, with no hopes of getting it back, thus the town's residents focus all of their energy and time upon the game of football and the young men who come to symbolize youth and living for the pleasures of today. People wait for days for game tickets to see, not ESPN superstars, but seventeen-year-old hometown heroes in uniforms of black and white.

These young men, Bissinger stresses, however, are not soon-to-be football greats. They are talented, 170-pound guys for the most part, who could, if they worked hard, perhaps play decently at a college level. However, the top college recruiters often show little interest -- these are ordinary athletes, for the most part, but their combined spirit and devotion is what makes them great. Everything that these boys work for is for the moment of the high school games, not the future. The 1980's Texas town on the Permian basin of the state has come not to believe in a future anymore. Students waste time in class, and injured athletes robbed of their glory waste time on the bench. Thus the protagonist of the book might be, not a specific character, but the hopes of the town itself for the boys to win the state championship game. The Panthers lose, but what the town has really lost is the ability to give young people a vision of a better life beyond high school. The town's lack of a future vision is the book's true antagonist. The town is its own best motivating force and worst enemy, and the most clearly defined character in the book, as it goes through an internal conflict of values.

The book tells the story of one year in the lives of the boys on the Panthers team. Some athletes go on to glory, some fall by the wayside. Some act arrogantly, smirking and showing little effort in class and terrorizing the pep squad Pepettes when they only get candy rather than home baked goods for pre-game treats. Some of the boys stand slightly outside the institutions of the town, such as an African-American student who is an aspiring preacher as well as a football player. But the narrative and nexus of the book is the focus of this otherwise dispirited, undereducated town upon the championship game that the boys ultimately lose.