Pulitzer Prize winner H.G. ‘Buzz’ Bissinger’s new Byliner Original, After Friday Night Lights, was published today and tells the story of what happened to Friday Night Lights‘ Boobie Miles after the events in Bissinger’s book. Meant to be read in a single sitting, After Friday Night Lights examines the 25 year relationship between Bissinger and Boobie Miles, the ex-Permian Panthers running back whose “rare skills and heartbreaking story helped ignite the Friday Night Lights phenomenon.”
As author Bissinger puts it, the friendship he now shares with Miles is “the most lasting legacy of Friday Night Lights, or at least the legacy I care about most.”
The Story:
Heading into the 1988 season, Miles looked like a star-in-the-making, a sure bet to ascend to college and the NFL. Abandoned by his mother, beaten by his dad, he had scraped through a rough upbringing, but it appeared that success on the field was soon to redeem his pain. Then, in a meaningless preseason scrimmage, Boobie blew out his knee. By midseason he was off the team, no longer needed by his coaches, who had found themselves a new running back.
After Friday Night Lights follows Boobie through the dark years he suffered after his injury right up to a hopeful present. It is the indelible portrait of the oddest of enduring friendships: that of a writer and his subject, a “neurotic Jew” and a West Texas oil-field worker, a white man raised in privilege and a black man brought up in poverty and violence, and a father and his “fourth son.” Their story encompasses the realities of race and class in America and reveals with heartbreaking accuracy how men rise again after their dreams are broken.
