Despite the hits he has penned for Kenny Chesney and the venues he packs in Texas, Charlie Robison pines for lost football days. Jared Moossy

Fort Worth

321 Miles To Odessa

Not everyone has a redemptive moment to balance the hurt. Most just live with it forever. In the back lounge of a well-worn tour bus, a country singer lights another cigarette. Charlie Robison doesn't think about his career, about the recent Kenny Chesney hit he wrote or the packed shows he plays all over the country. He remembers the football glory he held and lost.

Robison is whiskey drunk, and he rolls up his blue jeans, uncovering the hamburger meat scar stretching across his right knee. He was once a schoolboy star, and sure to be a college one, and now he's 50 years old. The loneliness of the bus and the endless shots fed him by fans leave him in communion with the ghosts of games past.

"I played tailback," he says, three words containing multitudes.

His senior year at Bandera High, a play had him blocking for the fullback. The guard pulled and knocked his man straight into Charlie's knee. Everything exploded: ACL, MCL, PCL, meniscus. "My patella f---ing fell down into my f---ing shin," he says. "That was 1983."

He lights another Marlboro Red, checking football highlights on the television. His knee aches when the bus rumbles along the highway, town after town, year after year. Vicodin helps him out of bed in the morning, 16 surgeries total on his knees. After so many concussions, he sometimes finds himself in the grocery store without a clue why he's there. His 11-year-old son, Gus, is a star athlete who refuses to play football; he says watching his dad get out of bed cured him of that temptation. Charlie needed football, to sort out who he was and to become who he wanted to be, living in rough-and-tumble Bandera, a place still fighting for itself. His son, living in a moneyed enclave near San Antonio, doesn't ask those questions. Football is something from his family's past he wants to avoid.

Baseball is Gus' sport, and Charlie coaches his team. Instead of pushing his son to remake his mistakes -- which his hard-driving father, also a coach, pushed him to make in the first place -- Charlie celebrates Gus' decision, even brags about it, understanding on some level that it makes all the pain that football caused him somehow mean something. A cycle has been broken. Recently divorced, he schedules his tours around his kids. His face glows when he shows off their pictures.

He starts to cry.

"Man, I'm sorry," he says. "You know, driving to school every day is the best time of my life."

Maybe it's the whiskey. Maybe it's that he's started down a hill too steep for stopping. Regret and unfulfilled promise bloom in the shadows. Before his injury, he'd been recruited by all the schools: Tech, A&M, Texas. Suddenly, there's a song he badly wants to hear: "No. 29," by Steve Earle. After some searching, it starts on a phone. He lights another Marlboro. Tapping his feet, he stares glassy-eyed at something only he sees, as Earle sings about a small-town plant closing, and an old football player leaving his glory days behind. Charlie takes a drag and sings along. The second verse kills him.

We were playin' Smithville ... big boys, farm boys



Second down and four to go



Bubba brought the play in ... good call, my ball



Now, they're gonna see a show



But Bubba let his man go ... I cut back, heard it crack



It still hurts me but I don't mind



Reminds me I was Number 29

Charlie closes his eyes for that verse, clenching them tight. The tears leak out anyway. The bus hums with the ambient noise of a generator, and he wipes his face. As much as he liked football, Charlie loves the thought that his son will never sit in a dark room, his body and mind damaged, crying over something he lost when he was young. Tonight, that feels like a victory.

Ira

99 Miles To Odessa

Kids in crew cuts walk down the road in letter jackets.

Two years ago, Lance Morris was one of them, the king of them, 179 touchdowns and almost 12,000 yards as the greatest six-man football player ever. Now he works in the oil fields, 10 days on, four off, a pumper for Apache Corp. Today he is off and meeting a reporter at the school. The students are at lunch, and he walks the empty halls to his old locker, No. 7, painted orange. Morris opens it and looks inside for a moment, carefully closing the door.

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Hands in his pockets, he heads into the locker room, standing in front of his old spot, the air sweet and rank. As a senior, he broke the national high school record for career rushing yards, but a running back from Florida, Derrick Henry, broke it too, the very same night, ending his career with 258 more yards than Morris. Now he watches Henry play on Saturdays for Alabama.

Tuscaloosa couldn't be further from this wooden cubby in the small Ira locker room.

"This was mine," he says, pointing to the stall on the end. "My brother took it over."

Logan Morris is a senior, averaging 240 yards a game, hoping to win a state title and then be a fireman. Lance helps his brother break down film, even comes to the pregame locker room to talk to the team. He does everything except what he misses most: feeling the bruise of contact, the freedom of an open field. He wants it back.

There's a minor league indoor team in Odessa, and it has open tryouts in February. Lance has been training again, pushing a sled, lifting weights, working on his speed and footwork. The boys in the oil fields are pulling for him. When Lance thinks about his career, he doesn't think about the glory -- he honestly doesn't remember his career yard total -- but about the growing regret, the lingering thought that he didn't give every part of himself, that he took that flicker of years for granted. He won't ever make that mistake again, if he can just get one more chance. If he ever gets to stand in the backfield again, he will give every piece of himself, flexed and ready, the crowd buzzing, waiting for the blur to begin.

He's 99 miles and four months from Odessa.

Odessa

The last stop on the road is the home of Boobie Miles, the Permian Panthers and the newest boom in Texas. As long as the price of oil stays above $60 a barrel, the twin cities of Midland and Odessa -- white and blue collar, respectively, or ... "raise a family in Midland, raise hell in Odessa" -- will continue to swell. It's about $80 and falling now, at a three-year low. In his office, suffering from his own anxiety about what might be over the horizon, new Permian coach Blake Feldt is in rebuilding mode.

This is his second season. He arrived to find a mess.

"All that was left of the program was the fluff," he says. "The concrete things have been lost. But boy, we're gonna do the pep rally the same and our uniforms are the same."

He sighs.

"Right now," he says, "we're just trying to make the playoffs. If we win Friday night, we'll be in."

The myth of the Mojo dynasty outlived the dynasty itself, which poses a delicate question about myth: Was the it ever real? Put another way: What would people think about Permian, and what would Permian think about itself, had there never been a book? Friday Night Lights, which people in town love to trash, is about them because they were good right then. If Buzz Bissinger had been born two decades later, he might have written his opus about Allen or Southlake. Any other number of Texas high schools could have been the setting for the story.

Whatever the past, Permian won the last of its state titles in 1991, and the Panthers no longer have the athletes to compete with the powerhouses in Dallas. With the oil and gas boom, Feldt wondered whether any of these workers coming in might bring stud athletes with them.

"He was really, really stuck. Stuck in the fact that he was the football star." - La Donna Alexander, Boobie's ex-girlfriend

"It hasn't for us yet," he says. "That's shocking."

The school is growing. Permian is bigger than it's ever been, and a lot of the oil workers have brought young children with them. If the boom can continue, and about a thousand other ifs, then someday those kids might play for Feldt on Friday night. "The elementary schools in Odessa and Midland are busting at the seams," he says.

The town feels lawless, with fatal car wrecks and violent crime every night. Along I-20, man camps house people who cannot afford to pay the rent in Odessa or Midland. People worry about the bubble popping, because the excess is out of control: endless piles of cocaine and men flying private jets to see Justin Timberlake in San Antonio, and recently, an oil company paying the rapper Nelly a rumored $100,000 just to hang out at a Midland bar. Cab drivers are paying $900 a month to rent a dump. Even Coach Feldt can't find a house to buy. His family almost ended up in an apartment: a three-bedroom, about 1,500 square feet, renting for $2,300 a month. Last year Midland ended the 26-year run of Connecticut's Fairfield County as the nation's richest place per capita.

The famous 1988 Friday Night Lights team, and the 1989 team that actually won a state title, played in the bleakest economic period in the city's history, six years after an oil collapse gutted nearly every business in town. The team wasn't a representation of some oil-rich juggernaut but a survivor from brighter days. Something to hold on to, proof that they might endure.

Only a few of the guys are left. Coach Gary Gaines moved after the 1989 title to try working in college but returned to coach Permian again, chasing shadows, and he failed; Feldt replaced him in 2013. Tight end Brian Chavez went to Harvard and became a lawyer, but four years ago he pleaded guilty to a home invasion charge; a former teammate pleaded guilty along with him. Boobie Miles is an unseen name whispered in passing. He's been forgotten in town for many reasons, mostly because his knee injury is a reminder that life often has little in common with the myths we create to survive it.

"Where's Boobie?" the coach is asked.

"He lives, I think, in Crane," he says. "He drives a truck."

Feldt, a confident, good-looking man, seems sad.

"I've never met him," he says.