Buzz Bissinger
Nearly twenty-five years ago, H. G. (Buzz) Bissinger, then a young reporter for the â€œPhiladelphia Inquirer,â€ moved to Odessa, Texas, family in tow, to follow the fortunes of the 1988 Permian High School football team. He hoped to write a celebratory treatment of a team and a town. The result: â€œFriday Night Lights,â€ a bestselling American classic that spawned the popular film as well as the series, considered by many one of the best on television.,The original bookâ€™s most compelling character was James â€œBoobieâ€ Miles, and his experience in Odessa was, as Bissinger puts it in his daringly honest sequel â€œAfter Friday Night Lights,â€ â€œa symbol of everything that was wrong with high school football.â€ The complex friendship between subject and author has deepened over the years, and is, Bissinger writes, â€œthe most lasting legacy of â€œFriday Night Lights,â€ or at least the legacy I care about most.â€,Heading into the 1988 season, Miles looked like a star-in-the-making, a sure bet to ascend to college and the NFL. Abandoned by his mother, beaten by his dad, he had scraped through a rough upbringing, but it appeared that success on the field was soon to redeem his pain. Then, in a meaningless preseason scrimmage, Boobie blew out his knee. By midseason he was off the team, no longer needed by his coaches, who had found themselves a new running back.,â€œAfter Friday Night Lightsâ€ follows Boobie through the dark years he suffered after his injury right up to a present that is imbued with a new kind of hope. It is the indelible portrait of the oddest of enduring friendships: that of a writer and his subject, a â€œneurotic Jewâ€ and a West Texas oil-field worker, a white man raised in privilege and a black man brought up in poverty and violence, and a father and his â€œfourth son.â€ Their story encompasses the realities of race and class in America. And reveals with heartbreaking accuracy how men rise again after their dreams are broken.
Nonfiction,Football,Sports,Sports,History,Biography
After Friday Night Lights: When the Games Ended, Real Life Began. An Unlikely Love Story.