Odessa files Texas style: see under F for football

Odessa, Texas. Until you open the door you think there can be no place on earth where it is hotter right now. The gym, however, gives off a furnace blast that repels you. About a dozen kids are working out in the heat, slicking great lakes of sweat on the floor. Raging heavy-metal screams from the massive speakers. I've owned cars which were smaller than those speakers. And the kids? They are juvenile mountains. A range of them. As one they stop what they are doing and regard the strange face with hard hostility. On the back wall is a slogan.

"Fight them till hell freezes over. Then fight them on the ice."

"Uh, sorry guys." You don't let the door slam your ass on the way out. Ten years ago I read Friday Night Lights, a wonderful book by a great journalist, Buzz Bissinger. The book concerned a football season in the life of Permian High School. I've wanted to see Odessa and the Permian Panthers ever since. You know what they say. See Odessa and die. Well, take me lawd, I'm ready.

West Texas. Oil and football is all it's got. Driving the highways at night, you think of Dante. The graceful derricks dip their necks in silhouette, like wading birds probing the shimmering Texas earth. Their shadowy forms people the skyline while long stovepipes rise up out of the earth and great licks of orange flame burn away the waste gas. The air is hot and unmoved by breeze. The town of Odessa is smothered with the smell of oil and stilled by the desert heat.

Just up the road is George W Bush country. Midland is Odessa's sister town, a more genteel place where the oil millionaires live and play. Odessa is where the roughnecks who work for the millionaires live. Odessa is another country.

Three Texan writers on Odessa: "The worst place on earth." - Larry McMurtry. "An armpit." - Molly Ivins. "This town has been compared to worse body parts than an armpit." - The Odessa American newspaper. Odessa shows up every time in the dank basement of those surveys of best American city to live in. Odessa is its own punishment. It's racially troubled, poor and has the murder rate of a 1970s detective series. Did I mention that it smells too?

"Howdy," he says, pumping your hand like it was the turkey for dinner. "TJ."

"Hi," you say. "Tom. Just driving through." "Tom", he drawls, turning your name into a three-syllable word, "One thing's for sure, you weren't drivin' to Odessa. You might be drivin' through it or past it or round it, but sure as hell nobody drives to it. Which is a pity 'cos this place has a heart."

The heart is oval shaped. It beats here in this 40-year-old low-slung school on the edge of town. "Mojo Country," says the sign on the wall, referring to the nickname cum battle cry of the most successful school football team anywhere in America. TJ Mills is a big likeable gap-toothed Texan with sun on his face. He's been coaching high school football for 23 years, 18 of them as a head coach. He's the only man to have won four Texan State Championships back to back. That was in Sealy down on the Gulf Coast where sanity exists. This is Odessa. They don't believe in sanity. If you lived in a town that owed its existence to a cruel investment hoax by some 19th century Ohians and had been boom or bust ever since, maybe you wouldn't either. Anyway TJ's football life has led here to Mojo Country. Permian High School, Odessa. The Holy Grail. In this town of 100,000 people his is the best known face and his is the most important job. When he arrived his office was filled with trophies, state championships, regional championships, districts, divisionals. He cleared the shelves and stuck the baubles in a backroom. Then he set to redesigning the sacred school helmet. From grey to Darth Vader black. It's called gambling the house. "Y'alls think your summin'," they said to him. In West Texas they say Y'alls where in East Texas they say Y'all and in Dublin we might say Yiz. Yiz all think yew're something TJ. "Guess I do," he says. "I'm the new boy. They fired the last guy's ass and they fired the ass of the guy before him. I'll do it my way. If I don't win you think they'll fire my ass, too?"

"S'pose?"

"You're darn raaaht ya s'pose."

"Worried?"

"Nah. Worry is for losers, bub. Ah love it. Texas is the only place to coach football. Best football is played in Texas. The best football in Texas is played in West Texas. The best football in West Texas is played here." Is he right? He's right. The education system here exists to support the football. Ross Perot once tried to change that and they ran him out of town, shifting his bones quicker than they'd root out a gay Yankee communist who hated football and loved musicals. TJ fits because he is a football man and he is a republican and he is a Texas uber alles man. He makes that clear up front.

"I'm prouder to be a Texan than I am to be an American," he says. "I'd take us out of the Union tomorrow." He pauses to see if you are keeping up. Then he adds the capper.

"That Clinton. We had him down here? We'd a hung him."

How crazy is this town? The mall is filled with shops selling high school football souvenirs. The town built itself a 20,000-seater football stadium just for its high school football. Tickets are $35 a seat per match. Sold out for years. TJ runs a big money programme here, revenue runs into millions of dollars. Deeply crazy.

Where does the money go? The weights room, the fieldhouse, the 14 coaches who assist TJ with the senior or varsity team, the 18 others who look after the younger teams. TJ ain't sayin' so, but this is a $120,000-a-year job he has, looking after all this school sport. Pinch yourself. This is a High School. These are kids. Cut them and they bleed, squeeze them and their spots burst. Their season is four weeks away but first there is the media day, then there is the big Watermelon Feed fundraiser, then there are warm-ups and then there is the first Friday night in September, when the town will lose its mind and begin to decide how it will remember this generation of its young men.

"Pressure? These kids?" says TJ. "This is what they grow up to in Odessa. If they can't handle it they'll have found something else to do (by) now." In the vast locker room you pass through to get to TJ's office, a picture gallery tells the story of 40 years of football history and teenage hairstyles. A pantheon of kodachrome heroes. The snaps reflect the life of this hard-bitten oil town. Early stars all hair-oiled and white, the later generations reflecting the grudgingly accommodated diversity from crew cuts to afros through to corn rows. The 43-man squad which won the first state title in 1965 was all white. Today's squads have about 20 black players each year, most of them starters.

TJ thinks this could be a good year. Lord knows they need it. Last year Midland Lee kicked Permian around the place on the way to winning the State. TJ's got hot prospects like Tommy Miller and Justin Whitaker and Mark Gonzales and a few kids coming through who might do a job. And what about Buzz Bissinger and his book? The school produced its best ever team the following year and won everything. Then they got involved in scandals relating to player ineligibility, training sessions outside of the school year, and under-the-table payments from booster clubs to the school's head coach.

They haven't won a lick since. In these times of drought and plague, does anyone remember the book, any ripples still spreading? "Oh, I liked that book," says TJ. "But round here they hated it."

"Yeah?"

"Hated it. He was s'posed to come back here to do a big signing and they sent him letters saying he'd be shot. If you come back, they said, you will be shot. Meant it too. People reckoned he let down a few players. This is West Texas. You don't let football players down. Didn't help none either that he was a Yankee. " You walk to the car. Leave town. Decide not to send TJ a copy of your piece when you write it.