Before Friday Night Lights

The last time Gary Gaines wore the head coaching cap at Permian, it was a simpler time. Oh heck, maybe it's just better to say that he completed his first stint before the "Friday Night Lights" storm hit.

Gaines' Panthers won the 1989 state championship, and he was off to become an assistant coach at Texas Tech before the book turned Odessa on its ear when it was published in 1990.

But that's not to say the new Permian football boss didn't feel the tremors. After all, the best-selling book that became a movie that begat the current television series detailed his 1988 Mojo team and its demise in the state semifinal game against Dallas Carter.

And so Gaines found himself immortalized in a book he loathes and in a movie in which actor Billy Bob Thornton stepped out of character to accurately reflect the coach's quiet persona. Gaines pretty much said it all when asked about the proposed television series and the continuation of the FNL storyline in 2005: "I wish it would kind of die a slow death." His wish has not been granted.

Plus, anyone who has lived here since the book hit the scene has trouble being recalling just how it was in a pre-FNL Odessa.

So why not seek the wisdom of that era from Tim Timmons, who was sports editor of the Odessa American during the Gaines era and who left about the time author H.G. "Buzz" Bissinger was wrapping up his on-site research for the book.

Today Timmons is the owner and publisher of two small daily newspapers and a weekly paper in Indiana. 

Here's his take on arriving in his new home all those years ago:

"I was always amazed about how big high school football was in Texas. I came from Indiana, home of Hoosier Hysteria and its own movie, ‘Hoosiers.' Still, back then we put 17,000 in the seats for the state finals. I was astounded to see that Permian put that many and more in Ratliff Stadium just about every Friday night."

Timmons recalls going out to eat with Bissinger several times. "I remember Buzz telling us how he had scouted places in Georgia, Cincinnati, etc. before settling on Odessa. He said this was the perfect place for his book. He said he wanted this to be a candid picture of Americana and how high school football impacts a community."

But Timmons never envisioned the impact it would have, not only in Odessa but across the country. Of course, nobody could have imagined that "Friday Night Lights" would become required reading in countless college classrooms.

"I don't know that Buzz ever said that this was going to be a positive look, but that was the impression I had. Of course the book was indeed candid, but I don't know that it ended up fitting the description that Buzz initially gave. ... I've never talked to Buzz since I left Odessa in 1988. But the type of book he was talking about writing during our conversations wasn't the same one that I read a couple of years later."

One thing is for sure. Publication of "the book" changed the perspective of Permian football. For the past 20 years, outsiders' impressions of the Permian program has been tempered by the book, the movie and, to some extent, even the television show.

Even during the uncharacteristic playoff drought that ran seven seasons beginning in 1999, Permian was still considered a football powerhouse by many who didn't follow the program closely and relied on reputation and "Friday Night Lights" for reference. 

Timmons can vouch for that way of thinking.

"Texas high school football, and I think especially West Texas high school football, is a different world. Back then, Permian and Midland Lee were clearly the top two teams, and it was fun to watch," he recalled.

But he added, "When people today find out I worked a couple of years in Odessa, a few will ask if that was the place where ‘Friday Night Lights' came from? When I tell them yes they always ask a couple of things: Did they really spend more on athletic tape than the English department budget and was it really that crazy? I tell them I have no idea what the English department's budget was but that yes, if you mean ‘crazy' as in a community passionately following a high school football team and living and dying with each game, with each play and with coin flips on the floor of a truck stop, then yes, it's that crazy."

But Timmons also leaves them with a little of that pre-FNL perspective. "I also tell them that I wish more communities had something as positive to rally around."