Memoir installment #13

Plotting an escape from Texas

My family and me, in front of our house in Houston, late 70s

There is no overstating how important football was at my Houston high school. Varsity team members were treated like kings: no other sport mattered, no matter to what degree you excelled at them. Each varsity player had a group of senior girls assigned to him, and they decorated his locker and made him baked goods on game day. If you were on the team, you never waited on line in the cafeteria, or the snack bar, and as long as you had a letterman's jacket, most of the teachers gave you a pass on grades too. And on Fridays during football season, a good portion of the school's population filed into the gym for pep rallies, where the cheerleaders whipped the assembled into a frenzy, and the marching band played, and the team was introduced and filed in, stone-faced, like the gods that they were to us. 

 Parents took football perhaps more seriously than their kids, and the school's booster club was so well-funded that they scouted one of the state's top coaches and bought him a car and a house in the school district so that he could run the team and so that his son, a star quarterback, could be a Memorial Mustang. It was all very Friday Night Lights, but somehow more so.