Texas: Odessa's Obsession

Odessa's Obsession

High school football is a quasi-religion all over the South, but in Odessa, Texas, it is more -- a mania, a frenzied obsession, a compensation, perhaps, for living in the wind-beaten, mesquite-covered, dust-ridden, sun-baked locale that novelist Larry McMurtry calls (in Texasville) "the worst town on earth." Odessans often fill every one of the 20,000 seats in the gleaming $6 million stadium, complete with two-story press box, built in 1982 for Permian High School's five-time state champions, the Panthers. Odessa's preoccupation with the Panthers is richly chronicled in Friday Night Lights, by H.G. Bissinger. Example: Permian High School budgets less for...

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