Friday Night Lights: Chapter 4: Dreaming of Heroes Summary & Analysis

Bissinger recounts in brief the life story of Mike Winchell, Permian’s starting quarterback. Mike’s father, Billy, died when Mike was thirteen—Billy had been injured in an oil rig accident and never recovered fully. Billy taught Mike how to play football and baseball, and was considered a demanding but loving instructor and father. Mike lived with his mother in Odessa following his father’s death, and resolved to make Billy proud by performing well on the field. Mike’s mother was quiet, reserved—the family was poor, and Coach Gaines, who knew most players’ families, did not know Mike’s at all.

Mike became the Panthers’ starting QB when he was a junior. He was a talented passer, but often beset by a lack of confidence, which would cause him to make costly errors during games, overthrowing receivers. But Mike performed well enough to earn the starting job again in his senior year.

Bissinger then switches back to the narrative of the ’88 season, describing the Panthers’ first game, against El Paso Austin. Bissinger moves from Winchell to a running back named Don Billingsley, whose father Charlie sits in the stands, watching his son play.

Charlie Billingsley was a notable running back for Permian in the 1960s, where he was also a rough-housing drinker off the field. Charlie’s off-field antics were typically tolerated, because his production on the field never wavered. He was recruited by, and played for, Texas A&M for several years, but did not quite crack the starting rotation, and so transferred to a small college in Durant, Oklahoma, before finally leaving university without taking a degree. After football, Charlie lived a life characterized by continual fighting and heavy drinking, serial marriages, and several jobs held consecutively, without any one turning into a stable career. His son Don was raised by his mother, one of Charlie’s wives, in Oklahoma, away from Charlie, but Don decided to move back with his father in high school, to play for Permian.

Charlie, watching the El Paso game from the stands, comments that he is perhaps living through his son, “and that’s pretty special.” But on the field, Don has trouble “holding onto the football”; he fumbles several times in the game, and though Permian winds up defeating El Paso in a shutout, Don is taken out and replaced with an African American player, Chris Comer, a junior. Comer has several impressive runs, piquing the coaches’ interest, especially after the devastating knee injury Boobie has suffered. Don tells Bissinger after the game that he is frustrated another black player has taken “his” job at running back, using a racial slur to describe Comer and Boobie—a word that is all too common among white players and coaches at Permian, even in casual usage.