Friday Night Lights: A Review

I can't think of a better book to recommend to my loyal readers than Buzz Bissinger's Friday Night Lights.  Not only is Bissinger's work an excellent piece of journalism - part research paper, part interview, part cultural commentary piece - but it's a perfect book for those interested in learning more about the varying experiences of sports fans across the globe (I presume that's why you're here, unless you're a relative of mine.  If that's the case: Hi Mom!).  Though Friday Night Lights isn't mentioned alongside other excellent works of sports journalism (such as The Blind Side by Michael Lewis, for example)- likely because it's been a bit over-exposed by the presence of the film based on the book, and in turn the TV series based on the film based on the book - it's truly worth the read.

Buzz Bissinger's Friday Night Lights is the best sports book I've read in some time.

As I've discussed before, I grew up without much of a non-professional sports influence.  There's only one thing Long Island lacks more than decent college football, and that's decent high school football; I graduated from a school whose football team, while I was there, went an entire season without scoring a point.  I know nothing about the Friday Night Lights culture that dominates Texas and other parts of the south and midwest, and before reading this book completely lacked the ability to fathom a town or community completely consumed by a high school football program.  Bissinger's Friday Night Lights is the closest I'll ever get to experiencing a football season in a place like Odessa, Texas.  Not only does the book do an excellent job of documenting the pandemonium that is Permian High School football from the perspective of an outsider, but it also allows the reader to empathize with the characters on a personal level.

This book is not really about football; it's about what football can do to a community.  Sure, the chapters that talk about the results of particular games are interesting, but when you get down to it these games happened over 20 years ago (the work follows Permian High's 1988 campaign) and have long since been deemed as historically irrelevant.  What's far more compelling, and far more timeless, is Bissinger's ability to describe in detail the ways Permiam football changes - and dictates - the everyday lives of virtually every resident of Odessa.  From the Uncle who agrees to adopt his broken-home-fleeing nephew because he sees the opporunity to mold him into a Permian star, to the boosters who support the program even though their children and grandchildren have long since graduated high school, to the coach who comes home to "For Sale" signs stuck in his front lawn following every loss, almost every member of the town is engulfed by high school football.  Bissinger mixes in a bit of history here and there, too, helping the reader understand the origins of Permiam's on-field dominance and off-the-field obsessiveness.  The school district's committment to preserving the strength of the football program - often at the expense of academics, demographic heterogeneity, and safety of the players - is simultaneously terrifying and riveting.

If you like sports, read Friday Night Lights.  Even if you don't, though, anyone who has interest in the social sciences and leaning more about how communities of people interract will get a lot out of this book.  Bissinger's work is far more than the traditional non-fiction sports work.  Often that can be a recipe for disaster (read my review of Rhoden's Forty Million Dollar Slaves), but Friday Night Lights is the near-perfect mixture of sports, history and psychology.