Boobie Miles: Failure and Friday Night Lights

Winning for Losing in Friday Night Lights

Friday Night Lights, like many based-on-true-events sports films, takes many liberties with its source material. Despite revising the factual history included in Bissinger’s text, the film provides a level of verisimilitude to its story about the isolated and insulated town of Odessa and the local politics of high school sports in Texas. A selective recount of the 1988 football season of the Permian Panthers, the film follows many sports genre conventions. The soft-focus narrative eschews historical record, employing both realism and the melodramatic mode to heighten the identificatory, emotional, and moral registers in the film. “Sports movies,” Aaron Baker (2003) suggests,

generally frame history as adequately represented by the individual desires, goals, and emotional dramas of the main characters, often in a biopic story. Such telescoping attempts to exclude the complexity of historical questions, and by the end of the film answers in the form of individual actions are fit into a single explanation, represented with a realistic mise-en-scène and an emotional resonance that undermine critical scrutiny. (p. 8)

With its “feel-good” qualities and, for those unfamiliar with the Panthers’ story, surprising non-triumphant ending, Friday Night Lights operates within these sports film tropes and textual systems while paradoxically maintaining and challenging ideological notions of meritocracy and the American Dream.

While the film adaption condenses the book’s historical, political, economic, and cultural investigation on the sociality of sports, Berg’s creative interpretation of Bissinger’s text has made it one of the most celebrated sports films and led to two television series—NBC’s short-lived Against the Grain (1993) and the critically acclaimed NBC (2006-2008)/The 101 Network (2008-2011) drama Friday Night Lights. The film captures Odessa’s obsession with football and how it puts pressure on the coaches and players to be “perfect,” the abstract quality defined as the team winning the Texas state championship. Not only is head coach Gary Gaines (Billy Bob Thornton) under the microscope of parents, community members, and boosters who expect him to produce a championship team (and will lead the charge to have him fired if he does not go the distance), but the teenage players also feel the undue stress and anxiety of others’ expectations for them. The Panthers’ players are constantly reminded that winning state is the end-all and only goal and become burdened with the responsibility to continue Permian’s distinguished athletic tradition. Ex-Permian players, long past their high school glory days, assert to their younger counterparts that anything short of a state championship ensures the promise of a lifetime of regret.

To briefly summarize, Friday Night Lights begins during preseason and follows the turbulent ride the Permian Panthers face as they make their way to the state championship game. The film follows the on and off the field worlds of a small collection of players, including the shaky but effective quarterback Mike Winchell (Lucas Black) who wants to find a way out of the small town that has economically and socially depressed his struggling family; athletic but troubled fullback Don Billingsley (Garrett Hedlund) whose abusive father previously won a state championship playing football for Permian; smart and upwardly mobile safety Brian Chavez (Jay Hernandez), the only Latino player who is the class valedictorian and on his way to Harvard; quiet and intimidating Ivory “Preacher Man” Christian (Lee Jackson) who is the heart and soul of the team; third-string running back Chris Comer (Lee Thompson Young) who is initially not very good but blossoms into a great player; and the gifted and arrogant star running back James “Boobie” Miles who sees football as way out of the ghetto for him and his family.

In the beginning, the Panthers’ success is largely predicated on their star player, Boobie, who is being recruited by top college football programs across the nation. In the season opener, however, Boobie tears his ACL during the blow-out game. Despite the pressure on Coach Gaines to exploit Boobie’s talent—evidenced in the objectifying and dehumanizing dinner party scene where a White female booster tells him to play Boobie on offense and defense because “that big nigger ain’t gonna break”—he is accused of overusing the team’s now-fallen star. The loss of Boobie, and ostensibly Coach Gaines’s entire offensive strategy, leads many in the town to demand his resignation. However, he does not quit, and instead rallies his team to win despite Boobie’s absence. Boobie attempts a premature comeback later in the season despite being warned that his injury is too severe and that he may never play football again. Unfortunately, Boobie only exacerbates his injury, sealing his football fate. Dejected, he quits the team. Forced to find a way to win without him, the Panthers’ scrappy team play and the out-of-the-blue, spectacular performance of Chris Comer makes them postseason contenders. The regular season ends, and the cinematic second-act concludes with the Panthers in a three-way tie for a trip to the playoffs. With their fate decided by a flip of a coin, Permian secures a spot in the playoffs and makes it to the Texas state championship.

In the final game, the Panthers are matched against the undefeated Cowboys from the all-Black Dallas-Carter High School. Playing at the Houston Astrodome, the stakes to win are high for both teams. The Panthers struggle in the first half of the game as they are pounded by the faster, bigger, stronger, and dirtier play of the Cowboys. The physical disparities and racial optics at play on the field signal to what James Snead (1994) describes as Hollywood’s attempt to marginalize Black people on screen through cinematographic contrast or the play between the binary visuals of light and dark. This tactic of the marking of Blackness as morally and imagistically overdetermined, codes the visual economy throughout the game, with the Cowboy’s “othering” predicated on Black stereotypes. The Black players from Dallas-Carter are depicted as hyper-aggressive, oversized, and animalistic (they even bark at the Panthers); their characterization engages the racist connotations of Black people as genetically superior in sports. When both teams run out of their respective tunnels to warm up on the field, the contrast between the Panthers (wearing their white away jerseys) with the Cowboys (in a bold red) cannot be clearer. The Cowboys look like grown Black men next to the mostly White rugged youthfulness of the Panthers. Even the cheerleaders are opposites, the all-Black squad saunters out with attitude as Permian’s all-White squad stares, blank faced holding their pom-poms. If sports rule-governed contests rely on competition and regulation, the hierarchies elicited in the scene code these antagonisms as dramatic and racial tension in the film.

Down at the start of the second half, the Panthers challenge the first-half dominance of the Cowboys, staging a comeback as the game-clock dwindles. The showdown between the two teams comes to its climax in the final 11 s of play. With the Cowboys up 34-to-28, the Panthers are on offense. On fourth down, the Panthers are 7 yards from a first down and 8 yards from the end zone. In their first effort, Billingsley runs the ball down to the 1-yard line for a first down only to have a flag called on the play. With 2 s left, the Panthers have one final attempt to win the game. Taking the snap, quarterback Mike Winchell looks down field, finding no open receivers, he takes off running. Meeting resistance, his body is trapped by two competing forces, with both teams pushing him toward victory or defeat. Winchell is finally brought down and for a moment it is unclear whether he got the touchdown. With the announcer asking if “it’s in,” meaning did the Panthers make it into the end zone, the referee signals that the play is short of the goal line. As Dallas-Carter’s players and coaches rush the field, the Panthers fall to the turf, stunned and devastated by their loss.

This final game sequence dramatizes what Jack Halberstam (2011, p. 93) calls the “antiglamour of losing,” the unique position of coming close to victory only to fall short, to watch it slip away in the final moments. Having lost, the players come together, lifting each other in the shared experience of almost winning. Even Billingsley’s father (played by Tim McGraw), who previously attacked him during preseason for not living up to his playing standards, goes so far as to walk on the field to provide solace to his son, slipping his own state ring on Billingsley’s finger to show respect for his son’s futile effort. As rendered on screen, failure complexly “showcase[s] the business of winning” (Halberstam, 2011, p. 93) with its cuts to the Cowboy’s celebration but in its focus on the Panthers it also revels in “the inevitability, indeed the dignity of losing” (Halberstam, 2011, p. 93), using the swelling musical score and the camera work to reestablish the worthiness of the Panther’s striving for success.

The logics of failure in Friday Night Lights recall Halberstam’s (2011) description of Australian aboriginal artist Tracey Moffat’s photo series Fourth, which depicts the first loser in events at the Olympic games in Sydney. Halberstam (2011) observes that the

images remind us that winning is a multivalent event: in order for someone to win, someone else must fail to win, and so this act of losing has its own logic, its own complexity, but ultimately, also, its own beauty. (p. 93)

Halberstam’s (2011) case study on Fourth is part of his attempt to locate failure within a range of queer political affects by engaging with literature and visual culture that “marks failure, almost heroically, as a narrative that runs alongside the mainstream” (p. 89). Friday Night Lights’ ending operates in this conventional way, with the Panther’s loss framed as courageous and the film itself acting as a triumphant anecdote to the repetitive happy endings that typify the genre more broadly.

Halberstam’s study in failure maps onto Friday Night Lights’ football narrative in productive ways. As demonstrated by his examination of two sports documentaries—The Best That Never Was (Jonathan Hock, 2010) and The Marinovich Project (John Dorsey and Andrew Stephan, 2011), Thomas Patrick Oates’ (2014) uses Halberstam to “considers how sporting ‘failures’ can challenge dominant ideas about the NFL and its sociopolitical implications” (p. 215). Oates (2014) explains that these documentaries draw attention to football’s darkside of hidden costs “by questioning the norms that shape dominant definitions of success” (p. 21). Oates suggests that potentially counterhegemonic discourses exist in the respective documentary profiles on football “flops” Marcus Dupree and Todd Marinovich. Friday Night Lights operates, to a degree, within this potentially ideologically contested territory described by Oates.

Eschewing the traditional “happy ending” of many sports films, Friday Night Lights ending in defeat challenges sports films’ generic tendency to celebrate winning and sporting excellence. Sports films often represent athletes, typically men, on screen as heroic individuals who overcome adversity on and off the playing field. In doing so, they reify traditional, American mythologies of meritocracy and individualism, affirming and exalting the power of winning toward utopian ends. They dramatize the promise of sports “that once the contest begins, success depends primarily on one’s determination and effort” (Baker, 2003, p. 11). Berg’s film attempts to capture the expected and unintended personal, communal, and sociopolitical costs of striving to win. However, despite the film’s attempt to dignify loss, Friday Night Lights “double-movement” (Hall, 1981, p. 231)—its critique and celebration of the sports industrial complex that commodifies and monetizes pain, sweat, and tears (which is just a nice way to say punishment, exhaustion, and suffering)—signals the contradictory space of sports in popular culture. There is a repulsion and fascination with the physicality, complexity, spectacle, competition, affectivity, and embodied practices of football. Friday Night Lights captures much of this fraught sporting dimensionality; however, the film’s possible “counterhegemonic discourse of losing” (Halberstam, 2011, p. 12) comes undone by the racial politics that shape what losing really means in the film.

Failure in Friday Night Lights, I contend, is not fully actualized in the narrative’s most obvious place—the final game outcome at the film’s conclusion—but, instead, is located elsewhere. The team’s devastating loss is softened by and through the team’s relationship to the film’s overdetermined production of Blackness. The process of mythification in the film, or the interrelationship between Black and White bodies, codes not only the final game imagery in terms of racial hierarchies but also “correlate[s] these images in a larger scheme of semiotic valuation” (Snead, 1994, p. 4). Winning in Friday Night Lights occurs in a different form—winning for losing. The film exalts the primacy of Whiteness through its denunciative and redemptive gestures. Jared Sexton (2017) aptly surmises, “The bad black athletes may win the game, but they are a disgrace to the sport and, moreover, they fail to attain—and are likely even unaware—of the higher rewards it offers to the true believer” (p. 72). The Panthers achieve what Sexton (2017) calls a “moral victory” through their “valiant and narrow defeat at the hands of their black urban counterparts (whose mythic invincibility is dealt a symbolic blow)” (p. 69). A racial conquest, this blow comes in the form of the film’s final moments when on-screen text reveals that the following year Coach Gaines would lead Chris Comer to an undefeated season and a state championship. This epilogue bookends the diegetic loss with a subsequent win. This futured success is underscored by the extradiegetic knowledge that Dallas-Carter’s 1988 Texas State Championship win would be vacated soon after due to academic fraud, a detail included in Bissinger’s book and ESPN’s 30 for 30 documentary What Carter Lost (Adam Hootnick, 2017). If the Panthers have a moral and imminent victory in the film, how and where does failure exist? I argue that failure becomes embodied in the film’s first celebrated, then injured and later discarded Black player, Boobie, and it is his racialized corporeality that stages its own complex subjectivity and critique on winning and losing in America’s sporting culture.

Boobie’s Embodied Defeat

In Friday Night Lights, Boobie is represented as a Black sport icon, an athlete whose mastery and dominance on the field sets him apart and whose career-ending injury renders him a “common-sense” story of sports’ harsh reality. A gifted player on the field, Boobie is exalted by his coaches, teammates, and the town as the anointed one who will lead the Panthers to a state championship. With a mercurial and outsized personality, Boobie’s braggadocios behavior is stereotypically expected, his showboating is in keeping with his exceptional athleticism, the team’s racial objectification, and the film’s mythification of his Blackness. Like many Black characters in sports films, Boobie is defined by his physicality, whereby his racial capital and potent performances on the field circulate already existing tropes about Black athletic achievement. He represents what John Hoberman’s (1997) forceful and controversial criticism of Black people as “Darwin’s athletes’ posits about the eugenic fantasies of innate toughness, endurance, and ability” (p. 5). This focus on Boobie’s embodied prowess commodifies his bodily utility, reifying it as his sole source of mobility, social and otherwise.

For example, in the opening scenes of the film, Boobie is first seen on screen running amid establishing shots of his impoverished environs. Jogging from “the other side of the tracks” to Permian High School, his morning exercise serves the double function of being both a workout and a literal means to get to school before preseason practice. Shirtless and sweaty as he listens to music through his Walkman, Boobie’s rich, muscular physique seems to effortlessly make its way up a hill; with each sway of his arm, his body fills more of the screen’s frame. While giving visual attention to his form, the film negates his subjectivity and forecloses on any possible interiority for the racial athletic icon. Instead, diegetic voiceover is of a radio host and caller discussing the fact that Permian’s head coach makes more money than the principal. Despite his amateur status, the film sonically exposes Boobie’s personal fitness as a kind of professional labor for which he reaps no present reward. The physical work he puts into himself at this stage of his career is for his coach’s financial gain, signaling how amateur sports as much as professional ones mix culture and commerce and highlighting how “the fundamental roots of racial capital are interwoven into the seemingly meritocratic and voluntary markets of athletics” (Fleetwood, 2015, p. 81). As the scene continues with Boobie running, a cohort of little Black children wearing his jersey—number 45—ride bikes and run alongside him, desperately trying to keep pace with him.

In this opening sequence, Boobie represents the lone exemplary Black athlete and the collective Black hope for achievement, an exceptional and yet familiar sporting figure circulated in the public imaginary. An individuated multiplicity, Boobie is a singular figure who projects the broader experiences of Black boys in the fraught and unforgiving cultural arena of sports. He functions as role model and cautionary tale, sport and urban legend all in one. As someone to be imitated, Boobie represents the athletic desires of the little Black boys who want to literally and figuratively follow in his footsteps.

An exceptional running back, Boobie is shown as a charismatic yet arrogant athlete. He revels in his athletic prowess and uses it as an excuse to not worry about his education. As Boobie attests, he gets good grades because he’s an athlete and, as a result, football is the only subject necessary to make the grade in school. The film presents this systemic educational problem when Boobie, during a weight room session, struggles to read the letters from college programs interested in recruiting him. As he slowly reads aloud a letter from the University of Southern California, he gets to a word he doesn’t know. His teammate, Brian Chavez, tells him the word is “distinguished.” Boobie’s inability to pronounce the word is countered with his boastful barb to quarterback Mike Winchell: “You gonna come visit my distinguished ass in California.” A distinguished body, Boobie’s athletic abilities are used to excuse his academic deficiencies. Able to block, spin, and juke players, his exceptionality structures how the film articulates failure in terms of his embodied performance on the field. Defeat for Boobie is an undoing of his embodied excellence. It is a personal injury with collateral damage, individualized and systemic; or what bell hooks (1996) calls the institutionalized ways “racism and white supremacist attitudes in every American life actively prohibit black make participation in diverse cultural arenas and spheres of employment while presenting sports as the ‘one’ location where recognition, success, and material reward can be attained” (p. 79).

To understand how Boobie’s embodied failure comes to be the real “defeat” in the film, it is important, first, to recognize and textually unpack how his injury shapes and propels Friday Night Light’s narrative. Boobie’s injured body structures the film’s story arc. Presented as the film’s first act’s inciting incident, Boobie’s injury becomes a plot point, an obstacle for the Panthers to overcome through hard work, self-reliance, and determination. While there are previous glimpses of his skill and ability during the preseason practice and season opener, his on-the-field play on screen takes up only a small fragment of the film’s nearly 2-hr run time. Instead, Boobie’s life-changing knee injury catalyzes the team to find a new offensive strategy based on teamwork and not just one individual talent, increasing the stakes and potential payoff of the Panther’s hard-fought journey to the state championship game. As Jared Sexton (2017) describes,

Boobie was to be a sacrifice for the team, for the school, and for the city in this precise sense: as the team transforms the substance of its internal bonds at his direct expense and in his name—all the better now as a non-competitive mascot—departing from the blind drive to win only to return to it more proficiently, his subtraction from the journey to maturity seems both permissible and preferable (p. 70).

There are two significant points to tease out of Sexton’s reading of Boobie as a sacrificial figure. First, he underscores the ways in which race operates within the film’s narrative framework to construct Boobie’s Blackness as overdetermined. Boobie’s proud proclamation that “God made Black beautiful. God made Boobie beautiful. Black and strong” attests to how, as Fleetwood (2011) argues, “the visible black body is always already troubling the dominant visual field” (p. 6). A familiar yet disruptive body, Boobie becomes the team’s handicap, an impediment to the team’s moral victory over its undeserving Black opponents (a team of Boobies) in the state championship game. In this regard, Boobie represents abject Blackness, and his troubling presence must be exorcized from the team and the film. Second, Sexton’s description of Boobie’s subtraction and its ramifications captures only a fraction of his embodied manipulation in the film, a corporeal arithmetic played out most significantly in the scene where he is injured.

Friday Night Lights depicts Boobie’s injury as an avoidable, unfortunate twist of fate. In the final minutes of a game, the Panthers are decisively winning, third-string running back Chris Comer is summoned off the bench to play his first snap of the game. With Comer unable to find his helmet, Boobie re-enters the game. As the on-field play continues, the Panthers quarterback hands the ball off to Boobie who takes off, running to the outside in an attempt to make it down field. As he cuts back in, Boobie is tackled by an opponent, who sends him toppling over another opposing defender stretched out behind him. The camera focuses on Boobie’s askew legs at impact; a loud popping sound magnifies the bone-crunching contact. Screaming out and writhing in pain, Boobie’s injury freezes all action on the field as players take a knee. The once fast-moving game slows down as reaction shots provide alternating perspectives on Boobie’s injury and subsequent fate.

The moment of Boobie’s undoing is visually framed through shot-reverse-shots of his injured body and others’ perspective on it caught up in paroxysms of pain. The film’s editing in this scene provides a calculated measure of affective reactions, filtering Boobie personal experience through communal witnessing. From one angle, Boobie’s uncle and guardian L.V. (Grover Coulson) sits in the crowded stadium in disbelief, his eyes pleading for Boobie to be okay all the while knowing the potential life-changing stakes at play. From another angle, fans in the stadium stand up, holding their breath in quiet hope that Boobie will be able to walk off the pain and lead them to a championship. Between these shots, the camera cuts to view Boobie on the field, his cries growing in pained intensity. As the film score swells, the vantage point shifts to Coach Gaines as the camera orbits around him, reframing Boobie’s injury as his own personal traumatic experience. Disoriented by the emotional impact of his star player down, Gaines asks another coach if he thinks Boobie’s has injured his knee. The film cuts to more shots of the crowd, interspersing their hopeful stares with Boobie’s prone body on the field. Boobie’s image goes in and out of focus as the field of vision shifts from L.V. to the silent fans back to Coach Gaines. The sounds of Boobie’s cries pierce the continued montage of reaction shots including fellow teammates as well as opponents, adding them to the stakeholders with vested interest in Boobie’s outcome. The most insidious of the group, however, are the two opposing players who give a sly, celebratory slap of hands at Boobie’s distress.

One of the final perspectives on this moment comes from the camera cutting to the Panther’s sideline, where two assistant coaches look toward the injured star. In a small role, the real Boobie Miles plays one of the assistant coordinators. Shaking his head in a close-up, the scene cuts back to the fictional Boobie in pain, shots of the crowd, L.V., and the lopsided scoreboard to underscore the tragedy of the moment that Boobie’s professional football dreams are over in game that did not need him. The film, however, quickly reorients the camera and the narrative, focusing on Coach Gaines (who seemed to never actually make it over to check on Boobie) as the camera orbits around him as he stalks back toward the bench. Staying with Gaines into the next scene, it becomes apparent that Boobie’s individuated tragic fate on the field is the starting point for the player’s collective competitive journey to the top and the film’s narrative ascent to its actual climatic moment—the state championship game against Dallas-Carter. As an injured player, it is Boobie who comes to embody failure in the film.

If Boobie’s sacrifice, as Sexton describes, subtracts him from Permian’s journey, what can be made of the injury scene’s corporeal arithmetic, the bodily divisions, additions, and multiplications exhibited in the scene? Boobie’s knee fractures his once whole, exceptional body. Divided, the cameo of the actual Boobie Miles adds an extradiegetic bodily dimension to the film. One “Boobie” body is multiplied on screen to make two. Boobie’s real body and reel body are linked and contrasted as past and present, star and cameo. This double-take causes the real-life Boobie to wince at the fiction(s) of himself. ¹ Boobie’s face provides both an immediate and delayed reaction at the unexpected (re)enactment of the beginning of the end of his football career. The twin diegetic characters represent Boobie’s before and after, the promise of Black exceptionality that the emotional devastation of injury converts to pathology. Boobie has been damaged beyond repair in this cinematized moment. As the real-life Boobie watches from the sideline, he (re)views what it means to put your body on the line in sports. Unable to use his body to make a future for himself, his witness is embodied testimony to his own undoing on the playing field.

The real-life Boobie appears twice more in the film. First, when his on-screen character tries to play again and further exacerbates his injury. Boobie again watches the moment from the sidelines, instantly replaying a script that has haunted him throughout his life. Second, he appears at the end of the film in an emotionally charged locker room scene during the championship game’s half-time. As Sexton previously described, Boobie becomes a noncompetitive mascot for the team, cheering the Panthers on from the sidelines despite having quit the team earlier. In his half-time speech, Coach Gaines points to Boobie as an example of someone who wishes he could play as means to inspire his team. As both Boobies stand next to each other, the message of being and becoming is twofold. This redoubling narrates the physical and emotional consequences of curtailed opportunity and unfulfilled talent not only for the individual subject but also the countless others who will suffer the same fate; what Harvey Young (2010) calls a “remarkable similarity, a repetition with a difference” (p. 5).

The real-life Boobie’s cameo in the film echoes a long history of athletes playing either themselves or versions thereof on the big screen. Most notably, Jackie Robinson portrays himself in Alfred E. Green’s The Jackie Robinson Story (1950), adapted from the book of the same name by Brooklyn Dodgers publicist Arthur Mann. Alessandra Raengo (2008) describes Robinson’s body-image as both source material and adaptation. “Unlike other biopics,” Raengo (2008) notes, “by having Robinson perform himself, the film conflates the usually visible distinction the actor and the character in a tightly sutured and suturing text” (p. 88). The real and representative Boobies in Friday Night Lights function in a similar matter, though the real Boobie’s authenticating presence requires additional spectatorial knowledge of not just who he was then (the skilled 6-foot teenager who could run the 40 in 4.5) but more about who he is there/now (the overweight, grown man sidelined by forces out of his control). The film’s intertextual cues nonetheless negotiate this double-embodiment, providing the real-life Boobie and the audience diegetic distance to watch his athletic undoing.

“I Can’t Do Nothing Else But Play Football”

As Friday Night Lights’ narrative ends, the seniors Mike Winchell, Brian Chavez, and Don Billingsley stand outside of Permian’s stadium and reflect on their high school careers. Interspersed between shots of Gaines replacing the nametags of the senior players, there are updates on Winchell, Chavez, and Billingsley’s future where “the end of this chapter for the youthful trio is indemnified by the soft landings featured in the final still-frame sequence that announces their relatively bright futures” (Sexton, 2017, p. 71). Noticeably absent from the scene, are both Black senior players Ivory and Boobie, though both are given on-screen updates. Most vaguely, however, Boobie’s follow-up notes that he played football in junior college and now lives in Monahans, Texas with his 4-year-old twins. Bissinger’s (2015) “where are they now” update in Sports Illustrated to celebrate his book’s 25th anniversary reveals that Boobie got caught up in legal troubles is currently incarcerated following a parole violation in 2012. Unlike his White counterparts, Boobie’s injury on the field puts into motion the hardships that shape his life in seemingly indescribable ways.

If Boobie’s injury is his undoing, breaking him from the inside out, what can his embodied failure teach us about the racial and gendered politics of success and failure in sports culture? Ben Carrington (2010) explains,

It is important to map the fissure, cracks, and moments of existential crisis within the ambivalent spaces of racialized hegemonic masculinity. To move beyond glorifying the performance of sporting hyper-masculinity in order to see the psychic damage done to those individuals, and those around them, who are conditioned and expected to perform such identities. (p. 131)

In two scenes in Friday Night Lights, Boobie’s embodiment of defeat articulates this psychic damage and moments of rupture in glorifying the abuse of sporting Black male bodies. This first scene occurs when Boobie visits Midland Memorial Hospital hoping to get cleared to play. With his uncle L.V. accompanying him, Boobie learns about the significance of his ACL tear. After doing a CT scan of his knee, the specialist begins examining Boobie’s leg. Making small talk, the doctor shares that his son was once a football player at Midland but now is at Penn. Mistaking the University of Pennsylvania reference with Penn State, Boobie thinks the doctor’s son plays for Joe Paterno’s infamously celebrated program. Correcting him that his son does not play football but is pre-med at the Ivy League school, this small moment gets at how sports as means of mobility shapes how Boobie sees his options. Colleges are football programs, not educational systems for intellectual, social, and economic advancement.

Unlike the previous doctor who told him he would be back to playing form in 3 weeks, the specialist explains to Boobie that his injury is too severe for him to play at his previous level, thus effectively suggesting he will never play collegiate and professional football. Balking at the idea that he can’t play, Boobie retorts that he’s going to play and that his team needs him. The Panthers have won without him, but they are one loss away from being out the playoffs. Growing frustrated with the doctor’s diagnosis, Boobie rejects the idea that he can no longer play. Fear drives his emotional outburst as L.V. puts a hand on Boobie’s chest to try to calm him down. Boobie becomes more distraught and anxious. In a panicked state, he reactively accuses the doctor of being jealous and in cahoots with the rival school’s football team. Boobie screams at the doctor, asking him: “who’s paying you!” He grabs the X-ray of his knee from the lightboard, crying out that the doctor is trying to take his football career from him. L.V. restrains the distraught Boobie, and the two leave the office.

The use of a hand-held camera in the scene positions the viewer as frantically swept up in the emotionally charged moment. The fact that the following game is against Midland, one that Permian must win, or they will be in a three-way tie for a spot in the playoffs, is no small coincidence. With L.V.’s assistance, Boobie petitions a skeptical Coach Gaines to play. Asking how it went with the doctor, Boobie and L.V. look at each other but say nothing, insisting after a beat that Boobie is ready to play. With the team losing, Boobie lobbies to play, stating from the sidelines: “Y’all wanna win? Put Boobie in. I’m about to spin.” Desperate to win, Gaines puts Boobie in but on his first snap of the game Boobie exacerbates his injury, sealing his fate as the game announcer accurately predicts that we have maybe seen the last of Boobie on Permian’s field.

The second scene depicting Boobie’s psychic trauma occurs after he quits the football team while he cleans out his locker. Making his way back to the car where L.V. waits for him, the reality that his football career is over, hits him. Injured to the point that he will never play the same way again, Boobie explains that football was the only opportunity to get him and his family out of poverty. Crying, he looks to L.V. repeating how much they had practiced and that his uncle had promised they would go to the pros. Shattered, he questions whether he can do so on his broken knee. Boobie’s dream of class mobility through sports is gone. Having never done well in school, Boobie questions, “now what are we going to do? I can’t do nothing else but play football.” Framed in close-up but filtered through car window, the camera functions as an interloper, eavesdropping on a moment of excessive sentimentality, underscoring the film’s melodramatic impulse and pathos. Boobie sobs uncontrollably, utterly devastated by the realization that at 18, in many ways to him, his life is over. L.V. tries to console him, but Boobie goes over the hours he spent perfecting this one option of economic mobility to make it not just to the pros but out of the ghetto. Boobie does not get to be Permian’s great Black hope. Boobie, through the film’s racial stereotyping and his diegetic injury, is constructed as the victim. His suffering, as Linda Williams’ (2001) insights on racial melodrama suggests, compels the film’s anxieties about race in terms of injury and the narrative containment of defeat in Boobie’s embodied defeat.

Boobie’s story of curtailed success narrates the lived and affective experiences of many Black male athletes in various sports (but particularly football and basketball) whose failure on the field transcends their feelings of failure in real life. The scene captures how

the overemphasis on individual exceptionalism in the representation of African American star athletes contributes to what bell hooks calls a “spirit of defeat and hopelessness” among poor and working-class blacks so that they have “no belief that they can attain wealth and power on any playing field other than sports.” (Baker, 2003, p. 31).

Boobie’s realization that his football career is over speaks to the financial complex of sports as an economic enterprise that so rarely works in favor of or fairly compensates Black athletes. The sports American Dream exploits poor Black male athletes who are willing to risk their bodies and—in terms of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) in football—their lives in pursuit of success.

Boobie’s embodied and emotional defeat suggests that for many Black male athletes receiving substandard educations, the game of life is “fixed” if success is based on making it to the NFL. As Gary Whannel (2008) explains,

Of all those who aspire to leave the ghetto by sporting success, very few become professional sports performers, of those very few make the grade, and of those who make the grade very few win. Of course this would not matter if losers also had reasonably dignified lives; but in the neo-liberal capitalist world, for many, losing means permanent entrapment in poorly paid jobs, often casualized and de-unionized, with few rights and no security of employment. Often two or more jobs are necessary to cover the basic necessities. As much as any other country, USA is a world of sharp extremes of wealth and poverty. (p. 201)

Boobie’s performance of defeat recalls the cruel exploitation of sports mythology that individual hard work guarantees success and opens critical space “to reject the patriarchal standards of ‘success’ that privilege the abuse of bodies and the celebration of power for its own sake” (Carrington, 2010, p. 130).

Boobie’s injury also gestures to alternative ways of reading Black male sporting failure. In his analysis of boxers Mike Tyson and Frank Bruno, Ben Carrington (2010) explains that their respective sporting failures in and outside the ring provide them the agency to embrace loss and disappointment so that they do not become defined merely by their physicality. Carrington (2010) observes that “Bruno and Tyson present an alternative narrative that even these hard, disciplined and most powerful of black bodies cannot be maintained, that they are prone to breakdown and failure” (p. 131). Carrington’s notion of an alternative narrative provides a way to reconsider Boobie’s embodied defeat as a repudiation of proscriptive, hegemonic Black masculinity. The devastating loss in Friday Night Lights is less about Permian’s runner up status and more about Boobie’s narrative and ideological last place finish. As a result, Boobie’s failures challenge the utopian narrative within sports and the sports film. The difference between being on a losing team and being the real “loser” challenges the common-sense conclusion that the defeat rendered on screen is one of equal opportunity. The physical and psychic effects of Boobie’s injury suggest otherwise. In doing so, failure here exposes the contradictions of the film and its hegemonic sports structure, specifically the racial and economic inequities that sports and American culture create and affirm. Failure then becomes a way to become more self-reflexive and critical of racial scripts in America that tells Black males “they can do nothing but play” sports.

The Hometown Hero

Historically, Black male athletes on screen have been visually and ideologically reduced to their bodies, commodities of danger and desire shaped by the intersections of race and masculinity (Regester, 2003). As I have argued elsewhere, “film shapes Black sporting bodies function into what Stuart Hall calls ‘canvases of representation’ whereby ‘the Black body is a creative and mutable corpus, a text made of texts, able to ‘mean and mean again’ on screen” (Sheppard, 2017, p. 473). Boobie’s cinematic body operates within this framework of surplus of expressivity. Boobie’s transmedia shapeshifting continues and amplifies the signifying processes of his body, re-addressing and redressing his relationship to the notion of failure in and through popular culture. Specifically, Boobie’s textual reappearance in hip hop culture engages in the kinds of rhetorical signifying practices that Henry Louis Gates denotes of Black vernacular traditions. Defining this tradition as “double-voiced,” Gates (1988, p. xxv) explains that texts speak to other texts and contexts. Operating within this dialectic, hip hop “underground” ² artist Big K.R.I.T.’s songs “Hometown Hero” and “Boobie Miles” signify upon Boobie in Friday Night Lights.

Cited in both songs, Friday Night Lights is one of the rapper’s favorite films, and from the fact that the character of Boobie is cited in both songs denotes his import to the lyricist (Pablo, 2012). Big K.R.I.T.’s record label, Cinematic Music Group, further underscores the relationship between iconic Black images in visual culture and sonic modes of cultural production and creative expression. These references to Boobie call attention to the role of commodification of Black youth in contemporary culture industries, a critical agency that Ben Carrington (2010) explains needs to be considered:

It is important to remember that, especially within the black diaspora, the processes of cultural consumption and identification cannot simply be reduced to the circuits and flows of commodity spectacle. There is always an element of creative consumption and reworking of cultural texts that need to be acknowledged if we are to avoid a “top-down” ideological account of how cultural meanings are produced, decoded, and then used. Indeed, the play of desire and fantasy always works to both reproduce and challenge dominant ideologies. (p. 113)

Carrington’s insistence on avoiding top-down ideological account echoes Halberstam’s (2011) ideation of low theory as a methodology for examining popular culture and discourse. Big K.R.I.T.’s consumption of Friday Night Lights and his identification with Boobie evinces the creative consumption and skilled reworking of the football player as a cultural text. Boobie, for Big K.R.I.T. becomes (re)textualized as a racial icon that Black people specifically can fixate on, attach themselves to, and signify on.

Boobie is first referenced in Big K.R.I.T.’s song and music video for “Hometown Hero,” a track from his 2010 mixtape K.R.I.T. Wuz Here. The song samples both Adele’s single “Hometown Glory” and snippets of dialogue from Friday Night Lights. “Hometown Hero’s” lyrics self-consciously reflect on Big K.R.I.T.’s southern roots and newfound fame. In her seminal hip hop studies text Black Noise, Rose (1994) suggests that rap video “conventions visualize hip hop style and usually affirm rap’s primary thematic concerns: identity and location” (pp. 9-10). Fixating on these bimodal concerns, Big K.R.I.T.’s music video was shot at night in the rapper’s hometown of Meridian, Mississippi, setting the landscape and stylistic context for the video’s reception. With much of the city shut down, Big K.R.I.T. travels freely about the streets in King City. As a solitary journey through his familiar stomping grounds, the film’s low-budget production value enhances the intimate mode of visual storytelling. Shots are sometimes out of focus, and part of the rapper’s face is often obscured in darkness. The hand-held camera, however, provides the close-ups and visual intimacy coded in this deeply personal, meditative track.

“Hometown Hero” begins with edited dialogue from Berg’s football drama, using the braggadocios words of Boobie’s character as both a prelude and proclamation for the confident, yet, contemplative track. With narration lifted from two different scenes in Friday Night Lights, Big K.R.I.T. samples and remixes the film, turning Boobie into his own hype man. The song begins with cut and spliced quotations from the film:

You know God made Black beautiful.

God made Boobie beautiful, Black and strong.

And when Boobie knocks some fools out

Boobie gonna knock ‘em out with black Nikes on his feet.

Ain’t that right?

And I’ma smile when I do.

Yeah. Yeah. I’m distinguished now.

As the edited snippet continues, quarterback Mike Winchell’s voice enters the soundscape, reminding Boobie that he did not lift any weights during the training session. The next line, Boobie’s response to Winchell, pridefully rings out: “Come on man, this is God given. Only thing I got to do is just show up.” Responding to this call to “show up,” Big K.R.I.T. takes over the beat with his southern lyrical flow. Boobie is mentioned one more time in the song at the end of the first verse. Lamenting what will happen to hip hop after him if he left the rap game, Big K.R.I.T. flows: “That’s like a torn ACL to an athlete, Boobie Miles, Friday Lights, capture me.” The cinematic Boobie sampled on this track is used as a point of identification, self-expression, and cautionary tale. Big K.R.I.T.’s identity as a rapper from the “Third Coast” uses Boobie, the character to situate his own artistic persona and pivots the perspective on both toward local heroism and iconoclasm. In doing so, the song and video demonstrate what Stuart Hall (2000) meant

of identity as constituted, not outside but within representation, and hence, of cinema not as second-order mirror held up to reflect what already exists but as that form of representation which is also able to constitute us as new kinds of subjects and thereby enable us to discover who we are. (p. 80)

Boobie becomes both a performance and a persona.

The sampling of Boobie’s dialogue in Friday Night Lights evinces the complex narrative reformulation in rap music and contemporary Black cultural production. Drawing on Dick Hedbdige’s concept of “versioning” in Cut n Mix, Rose (1994) extends his concept of reworking compositions to explore how, in sampling, “the referenced version takes on alternative lives and alternative meanings in a fresh context” (p. 90). While contemporary sampling has given way to a host of legal and financial issues, Rose (1994) argues that “to reuse portions of copyrighted material without permission undermines legal and capital market authority” (p. 90). Released on a mixtape—which is different from a studio produced album or music streaming services like Spotify or Tidal, “Hometown Hero” boastfully eschews Friday Night Lights industrial machine of secured rights. Big K.R.I.T.’s revised authorship and originality produces a new text and context for seeing him and—in this medium specifically—hearing the cinematic Boobie. As Rose (1994) reveals, the relationship between Black oral traditions and sampling technologies produces communal narratives, making sampling “a process of cultural literacy and intertextual reference” (p. 79). Boobie is framed as a venerated Black football folk hero, the stuff made of legend in rural and urban inner cities. While the beat sampled is Adele’s “Hometown Glory,” Boobie’s prelude dialogue pays homage through “an invocation of another’s voice to help you say what you want to say” (Rose, 1994, p. 79).

Dissimilar to the film’s coding of Boobie’s defeat as the reason the Panthers can “win for losing,” Big K.R.I.T. mobilizes Boobie in quotation as an extracted persona and performance of what José Muñoz (2009) calls “virtuosity that is born in the face of failure within straight time’s measure” (p. 178). For Muñoz, failure and virtuosity are two critical aspects of queerness as utopia. Queer virtuosity becomes a means to dislodge from the “dead-end temporality of straight time” (Muñoz, 2009, p. 178). In describing acts of queer performance and performativity, Munoz signifies a possible dialectic between failure and virtuosity that can be used to think through what is potentially queer about “Hometown Hero’s” cultural discourse even as rap music has an uneasy history with homophobia and misogyny. Queer virtuosity also provides a frame in which to think through how Big K.R.I.T. untethers Boobie’s bravado from a cinematic text that always moves his body forward to its undoing, playing out the tape of his embodied defeat over the course of the film’s run time. Cut and remixed as the opening sonic force in “Hometown Hero,” the intertextual Boobie refuses to be anything but “distinguished now.” Through this revision, a queer re-signification, Big K.R.I.T. introduces both his rap persona and the cinematic figure as hometown heroes that we identify with and celebrate.

“Hometown Hero” is not the last time nor the most well-known occasion Big K.R.I.T. uses Boobie Miles as a pop and sports culture reference. In 2012, the hip hop artist released the song titled “Boobie Miles” from his mixtape 4 Eva N a Day. “Boobie Miles” samples “Morning Tears” by MFSB, and this composition draws more abstractly on the cinematic footballer. The song’s title functions as a signifier, a code about the cultural politics of winning. While the lyrics and music video do not quote the film as explicitly as “Hometown Hero” does, the name-dropping title, athletic metaphors, and sporting imagery directly and indirectly connect the anthem to Berg’s film. The line—”ACL torn, and you’re a couple yards short from a Super Bowl championship and it was down 4”—most explicitly references a football player. For Big K.R.I.T, the song is “a motivational song telling my fans to stay at it. Things are put in your way for a reason. Just keep at it and you’ll win” (Big K.R.I.T. quoted in Pablo, 2012). If “Hometown Hero” produced an alternative world in which failure does not define him, the eponymously titled, “Boobie Miles,” also provides another counterlogic on failure, a somewhat commonplace idea that if at first you fail you should try, try again. In the Black and White video montage of male athletes missing shots in their respective goals, Big K.R.I.T. raps,

Get money, don’t be no lame

Bench warmers never ride foreign, so play the game

Never drop the ball, never accept a loss, get back up if you fall

And when your number’s called, you better give your all

I hope you give your all

You gotta play until the end

The only difference between a winner and a loser is a winner plays until he wins

Unlike the novice confidence and reflective lyrics in “Hometown Hero,” “Boobie Miles” references the cinematic football player through the discourses of success and failure. The song’s motivational anthem makes it a catchy workout tune but not necessarily a counterhegemonic discourse on losing. Sampling here is both homage and, for Bissinger (2012) who encourages the former Panther player to “sue the motherfucker” for using his name without asking, constitutes identity theft. This alongside the commercial aesthetics and capitalist impulse in the song challenges its potential progressive stances on losing as a critique of financial structures that require you to use your body to economically advance. And yet, there is some resistance to this reductive narrative as well when one considers the logics of the song—only difference between a winner and a loser is a winner plays until he wins—in relationship to the film. As a racial icon, the song “Boobie Miles” and by extension the other mediated versions of Boobie “makes us want to do something” (Fleetwood, 2015, p. 4), to play until we win—defined in whatever terms one decides—in a culture, society, and world that wants to punish losers. “Boobie Miles” refuses the fixed scripts of sports, race, and masculinity that circulates in Friday Night Lights. Big K.R.I.T. refuses to lose on the film’s terms. Instead, he’ll play until he wins, a rewinding of the start until the outcome proves favorable.

For Big K.R.I.T., Boobie’s virtuosity and his own are doubly defined through rap music as a sonic cultural expression that imagines and reimagines; calls upon, calls out to, and calls back Black people pushed to the margins. It is Friday Night Lights’ cinematic Boobie’s “distinguished” self, his diegetic rhetoric and performative stylistics, that sets the tone for Big K.R.I.T.’s own rhetorical and performative agency. On both songs, alternative logics on failure are expressed. To different ends and with different aims, “Hometown Hero” and “Boobie Miles” offer a radical refusal for Boobie’s beautiful, Black, and strong body to be defeated.

A New Spelling of My Name ³

As detailed throughout this essay, Boobie circulates as a racial icon throughout different mediated forms. Beyond the examples described here, Boobie exists in other forms and by other names. In the NBC television series Friday Night Lights, the character Brian “Smash” Williams (Gaius Charles) is a nod to the cinematic and actual football player. The star running back for the Dillion High School Panthers, Smash inherits many of Boobie’s personality characteristics, including referring to himself in the third-person, and narrative obstacles, specifically injury. Raised in poverty, Smash, looks to football as means for him, his two sisters and his widowed mother to escape their economic entrapment. Like Boobie, Smash’s knee injury initially ruins his collegiate and, by extension, professional prospects. As his character exits after the third season, Vince Howard (Michael B. Jordan) and other Black male football players like Ray “Voodoo” Tatum (Aldis Hodge) are (re)iterations of the f(l)ailings of Black male athleticism. On one hand, their characters and narratives expose the inequities of the sports industrial complex for young poor Black men of athletic means while the filmic and televisual apparatus and overall telos suture these narratives not to a critique of the raced athletic system but to the moral and other lacks projected onto Black manhood. Boobie’s televisual representations underscore the different and differentiating processes of Big K.R.I.T.’s reclamation of his story. As unofficial narratives, “Hometown Hero” and “Boobie Miles” are subversive tracks that resound rap music’s capacities to “[prioritize] black voices from the margins of urban America” (Rose, 1994, p. 2).

Finally, with all of Boobie’s mediated resignifications at play, it comes as no surprise that artists such as Big K.R.I.T. and countless other everyday people invoke and affirm Boobie’s athletic and cinematic history, quoting lines like “let Boobie shine coach” from the film to reference his iconic memory in their daily lives. ⁴ Embracing the character’s swagger, the cinematic Boobie, previously pathologized, is reclaimed as a Black football folk hero, whose feats and failures on the field have become remembered and celebrated in (Black) popular culture. This essay’s attention to Boobie’s intertextuality and intratextuality forms a critical multimedia metarepresentation of Blackness as projection, failure as moral fate and abjection. Boobie’s textuality provides expressive space for subversive arts of reclamation, not predicated on Boobie’s redemption or White recuperation of his failures. Instead, Black creative consumption, identification, and reworking represent an oppositional theorizing that makes Boobie (as he once boasted in Friday Night Lights) “distinguished” in the then, here, now, and future.