American Notes TEXAS

High school football is a quasi-religion all over the South, but in Odessa, Texas, it is more -- a mania, a frenzied obsession, a compensation, perhaps, for living in the wind-beaten, mesquite-covered, dust-ridden, sun-baked locale that novelist Larry McMurtry calls (in Texasville) "the worst town on earth." Odessans often fill every one of the 20,000 seats in the gleaming $6 million stadium, complete with two-story press box, built in 1982 for Permian High School's five-time state champions, the Panthers. Odessa's preoccupation with the Panthers is richly chronicled in Friday Night Lights, by H.G. Bissinger. Example: Permian High School budgets less for English department materials ($5,400) than for rush film prints of its football games ($6,400). Bissinger's book has stirred so much outrage -- and so many threats -- that last week he canceled a promotional visit to the town. "People here took the book as an attack on their values," said Eric Smalley, manager of the B. Dalton bookstore. "I believe the author is wise to stay away." Some Odessans viewed the book not only as an attack on the city but also as a possible contributing cause of another catastrophe: on Sept. 20 the University Interscholastic League executive committee found the Panthers guilty of conducting preseason workouts and banned the team from the 1990 state playoffs.