Friday Night Lights: Chapters 11–13

Giebel had also got caught in the classic Texas trap of who could be the most flamboyant and outrageous, flipping a coin once with a fellow oilman to see who would get the drilling rights to a tract near San Antonio.

Over at the country club, or in enormous corner offices with picture windows that seemed to deserve something more than wide-angle views of scrub brush and mesquite, they confused luck with business acumen.

After all, this was an area where people had developed an insatiable craving for boats, big, big boats, even though the nearest water was a hundred miles away.

Careful checks of collateral became almost laughable and utterly contrary to the ultracompetitive, machismo attitude that pervaded the banking industry in Texas.

An examination was quietly begun by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency off the bank premises to preclude local panic.

When asked to jeopardize millions of dollars of their own money to keep the bank going, they did so, still rooted in the ethos of the fifties, when you just gave help with no conditions attached when a friend asked for it.

On Friday evening, October 14, 1983, at 6:13 P.M., the First National Bank was declared insolvent by the Comptroller of the Currency. In terms of the size of assets, the bank’s failure was second largest in U.S. history.

In its heyday MGF Drilling had had about twelve hundred people working for it and about fifty-five rigs.

The Rebels scored more points against Permian in a 42–21 win than any team had scored against them in twenty-three years, and Winchell's own performance had been abysmal.

But sometimes he was paraded before school board meetings to be torn apart by the public in a scene like something out of the Salem witch trials, or had several thousands of dollars’ worth of damage done to his car by rocks thrown by irate fans, or responded to a knock on the door to find someone with a shotgun who wasn’t there to fire him but to complain about his son’s lack of playing time.

Her husband still knew that the hardest part of the criticism wasn’t what it did to him but what it did to his family. “That’s what I worry about,” he said, “their ability to fight back at things they don’t have any control over, hearing things you can’t really refute, innuendos. I’m big enough to handle it. Certainly my hide’s a little bit bigger than theirs is.”

Not every attack was so blatantly vitriolic as the letter, but around town came the suggestion that it was time to bring back the man whose initials had been A.G. when he had been here, short for Almost God.

“I told my husband, I’m sure he needs a friendly face right now. Unfortunately, I can’t bring myself to do it,” she said as she watched practice several days after the Lee game, her face filled with apprehension at the thought that the team might not make it to the playoffs.

This had been a can’t-miss team, and if it didn’t make the playoffs, it was scary to imagine the enmity that thousands in town would feel for him.

There was a flurry of accusations, both of them lost in the misery of what wasn’t and the painful reality of what was, Boobie feverish, despondent, with a puffed-up knee that no longer contained the God-given gift of speed as sweet as the wind, L.V. heartsick at how all that work, all those attempts to mold his nephew into the next winner of the Heisman, all those hours spent teaching him the spins and the jukes and the angles for the corner, had ended up like this.