Pulitzer Prize winner H.G. Bissinger was fascinated by the idea of high school sports keeping a community together. So, he began a search for a town where “living and eating and breathing high school football had become a way of life.”

All roads led Bissinger to Odessa, Texas, located in a severely depressed area of Texas, with a high school football team called the Permian Panthers that played its games in front of as many as 20,000 fans on Friday nights.

It was Bissinger’s intent to live in Odessa for a year, not only to spend a season with the Permian Panthers, but to explore Odessa’s attitudes toward race, its politics, its educational system, its crime rate, its economy, and other aspects of life in a single-economy town.

After meeting the members of the 1988 Permian Panthers football team, Bissinger remained with them and their coaches for the next several months. He attended every practice, every meeting, and every game. Bissinger explains, “I went to school with them, and home with them, and rattlesnake hunting with them, and to church with them, because I was interested in portraying them as more than just football players, and also because I liked them.”

As for learning as much as possible about Odessa itself, Bissinger talked with hundreds of people, but much of what he learned came from his personal experience of living there. Odessa became a place where Bissinger, his wife, and 5-year-old twin boys who went to school in Odessa forged lasting friendships.

Bissinger explains that “it was in Odessa that I found Friday night lights, and they burned with more intensity than I had ever imagined. Like thousands of others, I got caught up in them. So........

© Finger Lakes Times