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Ten years have passed since the publication of Friday Night Lights, and still, its words continue to influence and reverberate beyond anything I could have ever imagined. Nearly half a million copies are in print. The book is used in dozens of high schools and universities across the country. Barely a week goes by even now without getting a call or comment about it. Over the past decade I have heard strange and remarkable stories of the book's impact--a man who left his job in Brooklyn so he could become a football coach in Texas, a songwriter who wrote a moving ballad inspired by the book, teenagers forsaking Florida to make spring break pilgrimages to Odessa. When readers tell me they have been touched by this book in a way that no other book has ever touched them, their words of praise leave me humbled, but also make me wonder if I have become the writing equivalent of the high school football hero, destined to spend the rest of my life trying to get back to a moment and place that can never be reached again. How did it all happen? Why did it all happen? In light of the controversy that erupted in Odessa after the book was published and the accusations of betrayal that still ring in certain corners today, are there any regrets about what I wrote? I have had ten years to think about it all, ten years to examine what it was that catapulted this book into the reading consciousness of so many, ten years to examine the harsh judgments made of me as well as my own decisions about the words I chose and the words I did not, ten years too to think about this team that I grew to know so intimately during a remarkable year of my life. I said in my acknowledgements that I grew to adore the players on the Permian Panthers, whose lives I followed during the 1988 season. In the womb of a new millenium, it is a feeling that still stays with me. Memories crease through me at unexpected times--the awesome silence of the locker room with those eyes locked tight, the gleaming shape of a playoff trophy held high as another rung in the ladder of goin' to state is climbed, the thrust of a fist into a wall in the helplessness of defeat, the silence of the plains suddenly broken by adoring screams. I still think of how it all began, in the rocket ship of Ratliff Stadium, on a sweet and still night, when those teenage boys crashed through the handheld sign that had been made for them by the cheerleaders and a sea of fans drenched in black came to their feet. I still think of how it all ended, in spitting rain and misery, when that hand of Jesse Armstead came out of nowhere to swat down a pass that should have been the winning touchdown for Permian against Dallas Carter, the same Jesse Armstead who is now an All-Pro linebacker for the New York Giants. In particular, I think of the six players I wrote about who so graciously allowed me to intrude on their worlds. Our lives have all spread in different directions. But I still stay up with several of them on a regular basis, and both directly and indirectly, I am familiar with the roads their lives have taken or not taken. Brian Chavez returned to the football field at Harvard, for his undergraduate house tackle football team. He was a linebacker on defense and a blocking back on offense, but since these were Harvard men, an intellectual judgment was made to give him the ball in short yardage situations. He graduated Cum Laude from Harvard in 1993, and I was both honored and privileged to be invited to his graduation. Given the monumental transition he was forced to make from Odessa to Cambridge (it is hard to imagine any two places in the world at more opposites other than the moon and the sun), watching Brian get that diploma under the proud gaze of his family was one of the most inspirational moments I have ever witnessed. Brian approached the east coast with a combination of curiosity and anthropological interest, as if studying a different species, but he also concluded that it was no place for a human being to actually live. At the personal invitation of the dean, Brian went on to law school at Texas Tech University on a full scholarship. He started the Mexican-American Law Student Association at Texas Tech and graduated in 1996. Afterwards he returned to Odessa to his family's law practice. He recently opened a satellite office in El Paso, and has aspirations of becoming a federal judge. While he seems eternally wed to the haunted plains of West Texas, he is also thankful he spent time beyond its borders. "It was hard as shit for me to adjust and hard for me to deal with, but Harvard changed my life. It showed me that there's more out there than West Texas." Jerrod McDougal went to Odessa College in the spring and fall of 1990. He did not play football because Odessa College does not field a team, and he was not invited back to school after the fall semester.
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