Instead of trying to make sense of the Panthers’ victories and failures by sanding their edges down and omitting inconvenient truths while amplifying more useful ones, he allowed people to simply be people instead of parables. Most ensuing interpretations of the narrative Bissinger laid out were less careful than he was about the inevitable tradeoffs that go along with turning living people into characters. Predictably, it is harsher and more abrasive than either the movie or the TV show, and better for it. His observations place the reader not just in the locker room but practically breathing down the necks of the players as they try to live up to the superhuman expectations of every person they’ve ever known. The writing is bold and dramatic but rarely feels exaggerated, probably because Bissinger wrings emotions from his subjects instead of trying to articulate his own. Bissinger referred to as the “haunted plains of West Texas.”īissinger’s book became a prototype because it is remarkable - more a portrait of the city of Odessa, Texas than of the Permian High School Panthers, told in such a way that Odessa (a place many readers likely have never given much thought) becomes not just interesting but important.

The reason for that, of course, is Friday Night Lights: A Town, A Team, A Dream (Addison-Wesley, 1990) - the book/movie/TV show/cultural phenomenon that found art, artifice, triumph and tragedy in what its author H.G.

Today, stories about a scrappy high school football team fighting against the odds for the seemingly-eternal glories of a state championship are cliché. īy now we are all familiar with the well-trodden narratives of the hardworking quarterback whose heart is in the right place, the coach with the stiff upper lip who needs to win and wants to help (and his tireless, supportive wife), the arrogant skill players for whom high school is a stop along the way to the NFL and all the others whose various off-field plights will be inevitably be overcome with each yard the team gains. Every week in her Good Form column, Natalie Weiner explores the ways in which the sports world’s structural inequalities and injustices illuminate those outside it - and the ways in which they’re inextricably connected.

Across the river kent babb