Module 1: "Friday Night Lights" by H.G. Bissinger

He let him know it was okay to have a little beer every now and then because the Winchells were, after all, German, and Germans loved their beer, but he admonished him to never, ever try drugs.

And there was Billy, thin and wizened and slightly hunched, like a walking stick that had warped in the rain.

Under the demanding tutelage of his father, Mike could do no wrong in Little League.

And then somewhere around the time his father started slipping, Mike lost that innate confidence in himself.

The gift was always there, but he began to question it, doubt it, brood over it.

When he hit three homers in a game once, he didn't go back to the bench feeling exalted.

And Mike also knew how much Billy Winchell would have cherished seeing him on this September night, dressed in the immaculate black and white of the Permian Panthers, moments away from playing out the dream that had kept him in Odessa.

The Watermelon Feed had come and gone, and so had the pre-season scrimmage.

"Some of you haven't played before, been in the spotlight," said assistant coach Tam Hollingshead in those waning hours before Permian would take the field against El Paso Austin.

He offered some succinct advice.

They went through their pre-game warmups with methodical, meticulous determination.

He still had powerful memories of those days, and as he sat in the stands on this balmy and beautiful night where the last wisps of clouds ran across the sky like a residue of ash from a once-brilliant fire, it seemed impossible not to look down on the field and see his own reflection.

There were some kids who came out of Odessa ornery...kids who went through life as if they were perpetually trying to buck someone off their backs...

They were kids for whom the story of David and Goliath wasn't some religious parable but the true story of their own lives, kids who were lean and mean and weighed maybe 170 pounds dripping wet but were built like steel beams and had a kind of fearlessness that was admirable and irrational and liked nothing better than to knock some slow, fat-assed lineman up in the air and watch him come falling down like a tire bouncing along the highway.

He played for a few years, but one thing led to another, and Charlie Billingsley found out that life in college was a whole lot different from what it was in high school when it came to football: you were a whole lot more expendable in college, a hero one day and a broken-down nobody the next, and if you didn't like it no one really gave a crap because there was always a bunch of guys ready to replace you in a second.

He was in the floor-covering business in Houston, but high interest rates kind of put a damper on that.

It was a quiet, sedate kind of place and he was a star there, a starter on the varsity football team as a freshman.

But Don, who spent part of every summer with Charlie, knew of Permian and of his dad's exploits there.

The physical resemblance they bore to one another was striking—the same thin, power-packed frames coiled and ready to strike if the wrong button got grazed, the insouciant swagger, the same shark's-tooth smile that could be both charming and threatening, the same friendly way of speaking, the words falling casually out of the side of the mouth like cards being slowly flipped over during a poker game.

There was nothing exceptional about that in Odessa, where kids drank freely, often with the tacit blessing of their parents, who saw it as part of the macho mentality of the place.

El Paso Austin was held to six yards in three plays, the hapless Austin running backs suffocating under a pile of five or six raging dogs in black shirts.

As for Billingsley, his debut as a starter had become further mired after that first nervous fumble.

The locker room was hot and steamy, and Gaines and his four assistants were hardly euphoric.

The Panthers were dominating every facet of the game, but fumbles and penalties had kept Permian from leading 35–0 at the half.

And now there was something else to contend with, something that to Don's way of thinking was disappointing but somehow inevitable.