The football coach who inspired Friday Night Lights

Gary Gaines 1949–2022

Gary Gaines never read the book that made him famous. The soft-spoken Texas football coach felt betrayed by Buzz Bissinger’s best-selling Friday Night Lights, which was adapted into a film starring Billy BobT hornton as well as a popular TV show. Bissinger had been intrigued to hear that Gaines’ high school team, the Permian Panthers, played to crowds of 20,000, and he traveled to Odessa, Texas, to chronicle the 1988 season. Gaines said his wife read the resulting book and called him sobbing, saying the journalist had depicted their football-obsessed town as crawling with racists. “Bissinger came to do something and he did something else,” Gaines said in 2015. “I’m glad it’s behind us.”

Born in Crane, Texas, Gaines was a high school quarterback and played wingback at Angelo State University, said The New York Times. After graduating in 1971, he went straight into coaching and became Permian High School’s head coach in 1986. In just two years, he led the team to the state semifinal. But in Odessa, that wasn’t good enough; Gaines found “For Sale” signs in his front yard after a loss.The next year, though, Permian had a perfect season and won the state championship. After four winning years, with a record of 47-6-1, he moved on to college coaching, and did stints at Texas colleges and high schools for the next two decades.

He found his way back to Permian in 2009, said The Dallas Morning News, but “it wasn’t the same,” and he retired in 2012, unable to re-create his past glories. He was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s five years later. “A lot of people were attached to the book and the movie,” he said in 2015. “It’s hard for me to put my head around that.”