Quotes

"It was the very first official day of practice and it marked the start of a new team, a new year, a new season, with a new rallying cry scribbled madly in the backs of yearbooks and on the rear windows of cars: GOIN' TO STATE IN EIGHTY-EIGHT!" (3). Odessa is a die hard high school football town, with there rallying cries already written into yearbooks and on cars' rear windshields, they are very dependent on the team. The town goes up and down as the team does, they are one.
"If the season could ever have any salvation, if it could ever make sense again, it would have to come tonight under a flood of stars on the flatiron plains, before thousands of fans who had once anointed him the chosen son but now mostly thought of him as just another nigger." (xvii). Odessa seemed to only like people of a different color if they were a star in sports. Boobie Miles experienced this because he was the Boobie Miles, he was considered a god in the town of Odessa with his amazing skill at the running back position, but when he experienced a season ending injury which eventually ended his football career when he got tired of waiting for his time, he quit the team.
"The sound of vomiting echoed through the dressing room of the stadium, the retching, the physical embodiment of the ambivalence Ivory Christian felt about what he was doing and why he was there." (xxvi). The football team knows that they carry the town, and the game brought a lot of pressure onto the team. They all experience the worst feeling before a game, pregame jitters. And this was the biggest game of the season, against their rivals, so they had an insane amount of pressure on them that night.
Drew asked in his blog, "Why do you think race plays such an important roll in Odessa?"
I believe it plays such an important role because Odessa is in the very deep south, and even in the 1980's, there was still acts of racism. In Odessa, the only reason why there wouldn't be segregated, is that if you were a good sports player.