Sooner, p.2
Sooner, page 2
But the spirit of the place remained.
Muleshoe Ranch itself still stands. A fifth generation of the area’s descendants run the place. There’s a statue in the center of town of a mule named Old Pete, a testament to the townsfolk’s work ethic. The economy is evolving, too. Oil rigs are still out there, but so are windmills, rising from the plains and whirling like gleaming white pinwheels, their wings larger than tractor trailers and sounding like jet engines.
The people who call Muleshoe home are warm and friendly and eager to make you feel good about yourself. “It’s great people,” Lincoln says. “Very strong sense of community. And I don’t think I’m much different from a lot of people from that part of the country … Taught the values of treating people the right way, and think of others as far more important than yourself. And so I was raised that way, both by my parents, and by my whole community.”
When Lincoln was growing up, the boys on the Muleshoe High football team talked a lot about how much butt they were kicking on the football field, even though they were actually terrible at football. Seems the boys put more effort into their partying than anything else: Bailey County was a dry county, so some kids bootlegged booze from Clovis, New Mexico, a bigger town about thirty miles west. (Others just took it from their parents.) Their parties got famously out of control. There were fights. There were girls dancing on tables in various states of undress, and there were drunken adolescent boys cheering them on. And that’s just what people heard about.
But that was the culture here. The people who made America into the United States were different, unlike anyone else walking the planet, full of piss and vinegar and fire in their guts that burst forth from their minds like a million miniature big bangs. And then there were the men who made Texas. They came here and took the land and claimed it as their own, and the animals that roamed the land, the cattle and the buffalo and the horses. They killed the people who already lived here. They were savage. They had unique spirit to them, spirit that seemed born of fire, and that spirit still lingers around West Texas to this day. There’s less savagery—we’ve at least evolved beyond that—but wild cowboys’ ghosts still seem to stir people up in small towns called Nazareth, Sudan, Eden, Earth. And Muleshoe.
More immediately, it could also be the open prairies that surround the town as far as the eye can see. They might as well be an ocean. Could be how the highways to bigger cities many miles away are surrounded by an awesome nothingness. Could be the way the sky feels bigger here, somehow, and the cinematic way it burns beautifully every night and then gives way to a display of stars that will engulf you if you look long enough. Some here call the sky their “true spirituality.”
Life in Muleshoe can feel like life on an island. Liberating, unless you feel marooned. A place the mind can rest, but only for so long, and then it begins to race, feeling starved. When there is little to be found to satiate that hunger, the natural next step is to find an escape. There were two primary means of escape for the children of Muleshoe: partying, and delusion. It’s hard not to feel for them. For adults settled there who call it home, Muleshoe can feel okay, but it’s hard to imagine being a teenager bursting with all the energy of adolescence and surrounded by a great desert sea.
Making matters both worse and better, the Muleshoe football team was bad, but beloved. Sports were the center of Muleshoe’s social universe. Muleshoe High hosted pregame meals where people could pay to eat with the team. And Muleshoe was one of those towns that largely shut down for every game. Everyone was in the stands at humble Benny Douglas Stadium, a grand name for a simple small-town high school football field tucked in a small valley behind the school, in the middle of town. Bleachers sat on each side of the field at the 50-yard line, a simple scoreboard beyond the east end zone. Imagine a lower-stakes version of Odessa from Friday Night Lights, only with no expectation of success. Muleshoe coaches lasted two years on average. Talented players kept leaving town for better football schools on other rural islands out in the desert. Nobody knew what to do and nobody expected anything to get better. Small wonder the kids made partying their favorite sport. It was the only thing they could truly master. Nobody believed things could get better because nobody could see how.
Then, in 1996, everything began to change.
Lincoln was in seventh grade that year, just turned thirteen. He had that West Texas fire in his spirit, and a dangerous competitive streak that would get him in trouble more than once as he grew older. But he wasn’t a party animal. “I’m an old soul,” he says. “And that kind of thing just never really tugged at me.”
He was the son of Mike and Marilyn Riley, Muleshoe natives who’d ventured out of town for college at the University of Texas seven hours south in Austin, then promptly returned home. She was an interior designer and he was a businessman. The Rileys went to church regularly, and they raised their boys on discipline and kindness. “My folks are two very hardworking people,” Lincoln says. “They gave me room to grow, but they were also very strict in a lot of ways. They really stressed just kinda basic core values of, I can make a mistake, but if I lied about it, that was way worse. You know, being humble, treating other people right—they were big on that. And they were great examples, too, because they lived their lives that way, and still do. So they were no-nonsense with academics, and they pushed me, but they raised me the right way.”
Mike Riley seems a self-motivated man with an independent streak. He ran his own business, Central Compress, warehousing cotton in Sudan, about fifteen miles south of Muleshoe. The South Plains grows a lot of cotton, and Mike helped sell it for those who grew it. Farmers would harvest their cotton and send it to cotton gins to be pressed and baled, and then Mike would store those bales in his warehouses and ship out orders to merchants. It’s a simple business but not always an easy one, especially as an independent outfit competing with the farmers’ co-ops that fill the area. The goal of those who run co-op compresses is generally to maximize volume. The goal of an independent compress like Mike’s is generally to maximize income. To do so, he maximized his outfit’s efficiency and profit margins, such as by building warehouses using many wooden beams instead of all steel. He also packed his bales in such a way that they were not always easy to get to, maximizing the usable space in every warehouse, so sometimes forklifts ran into the beams while loading and unloading cotton, and the beams cracked or broke. But wooden beams cost much less, and if they got damaged or broken they could just be repaired or replaced. This sometimes meant more work, but it was also more efficient and cost-effective, so it was worthwhile. A water tower rose from the grounds there, the name Central Compress stenciled in huge letters on its side.
Lincoln grew up working with his father, hauling some of the five-hundred-pound plastic-wrapped bales of cotton, and driving forklifts and trucks around the place by the time he was thirteen years old. The warehouses, with their metal siding and utter lack of insulation, get hot as a sauna during the summers and cold as a freezer in the winters.
The Rileys weren’t especially wealthy, but they did well enough to live in a neighborhood called Richland Hills, which locals nicknamed Rich Man Hills.
They had a home on the corner of West Twentieth Street and West Avenue F, just down the road from a field full of white caliche rocks and mule deer and occasional rattlesnakes. Sometimes Lincoln and his friends played there. By the time he was eleven years old, playing football with friends in backyards and rocky fields, he just saw the game differently from the other kids. The plays he drew up weren’t standard backyard football plays. His friend Jeff King remembered, “They were as complex as you could be at eleven years old … Running backs crossing paths in the backfield, and a toss over a ducking running back to the back guy, who caught the ball. It was all an illusion.”
Lincoln’s father and grandfather had both been quarterbacks before him. Claude Riley, Mike’s father, was the quarterback for Muleshoe in 1938. The Mules had gone undefeated and won the state championship. Mike’s teams fared less well. “We weren’t any good,” he likes to tell people, matter-of-factly. He quit his senior year. “Didn’t see eye to eye with the coach.”
Still, Mike stayed involved in the school’s athletic programs, especially as Lincoln and his brother Garrett—younger by six years—got more involved in sports. Mike served on the school board and was part of the booster club that painted a big mule at midfield every Wednesday night during football season. Thursdays were for middle school and junior varsity, Friday nights and their lights for the varsity.
That’s what tugged at Lincoln. Football. He played baseball briefly as a kid, and he played basketball and ran track as he got older, but football was the game he loved. From an early age he had a natural feel for being unnaturally good at the game.
Muleshoe’s coaches noticed Lincoln early on. “He was that kid,” says Ralph Mason, the coach of the junior high school team. “When he came in and started to play, even in seventh grade, you looked at him, and said, ‘Hey, there’s our leader right there. That’s the guy we want to lead this group of kids.’ And he had that, combined with good athleticism. But I think probably his greatest attribute was his leadership and his drive, more so than maybe his skills, at that point … It’s just one of those things that some people have and some people don’t.”
On a Sunday morning when Lincoln was in junior high, as he sat in a Sunday school class at church, his teacher taught a lesson about how Christians should encourage people the same as Jesus had. Looking at Lincoln, she asked, “How would you feel if there was no pep rally before the football game? Or if the band didn’t show up? Or if the student body didn’t come? Or there were no cheerleaders?”
“That would be okay,” Lincoln replied. “I just love football.”
He loved the way plays unfolded. “Football just made sense to me,” he says. “Just the Xs and Os of why you do things.”
He loved working hard to get better. Mason remembers helping Lincoln throw a tighter spiral in seventh grade. “He was determined—that was gonna get taken care of,” Mason says. “And in the meantime, he was just gonna work at it, where a lot of kids give up and go to something else.”
And Lincoln loved the fire and intensity that were as much a part of the game as anything else, especially in West Texas. When he was in ninth grade, Muleshoe High’s freshman team was coached by a man who was, in the words of varsity coach David Wood, “just crazy.” “Not crazy like loopy crazy,” Wood says. “He just … he would head-butt kids who had helmets on.”
At the first practice, Lincoln and his teammates were in the locker room, dressed and ready to go, when the crazy coach came in, turned off the lights, and started yelling. He yelled about passion and toughness. He yelled about how much passion and toughness you really need to be great in this game and to be great in life. And at some point in all the yelling, the coach squared up to Lincoln, who already had his helmet on, and head-butted him. The blow split open the coach’s forehead and made him bleed. All through practice, blood streaked his face and stained his thick mustache.
In some ways, now, that feels like the vestige of another time, the coach who strives to inspire his players by splitting open his own forehead by head-butting one of them in the helmet. It is a type of violence that feels addictive and primal, as much psychological as it is physical. It’s a coach, a grown man, a leader, head-butting you, a child, to the point of drawing his own blood. Horrifying, yes, but to some, also thrilling for the rush that such violence provides.
“He just scared us all to death,” Lincoln recalled.
He still remembers the crazy coach’s thundering voice, his mustache turning red.
And, he said, “It was awesome.”
* * *
By his sophomore year, Lincoln had not only made Muleshoe High’s varsity team, he was competing for the starting quarterback spot. He threw like a pro, with textbook form, over the top, passes leaving his fingers in tight, beautiful spirals.
Still, none of that would have mattered much without the right coach, especially the way Muleshoe High’s football teams had been for so long. Lucky for Lincoln, a few years earlier Muleshoe had hired David Wood, who was just right for him. To understand Coach Wood is to understand the effect he had on Lincoln as both a player and a person through high school. He wasn’t just a good coach, although he was that, too—Lincoln watched him change everything about Muleshoe High’s culture. Watching this man, Lincoln saw what it meant to have a unique vision and then work hard and be dedicated to seeing it through to the end.
In 1999, Lincoln’s sophomore season, Wood was thirty-three years old. He was tall, thick-chested, and broad-shouldered, and he had endured many tribulations through his early years in Muleshoe. The high school had hired him in 1996 to be its new athletic director and football coach, and he’d ridden into the place like a new sheriff ready to clean up the town. Especially the football team.
The job was a risk. Muleshoe was the worst 3A high school football program in the state of Texas. They’d won zero games in 1995 and they were expected to win zero games in 1996. But Wood had wanted a head coaching job for a long time, this was the best opportunity he could find, and he had a plan: “I’m not here to win games,” he said. “I’m here to change lives. The wins and losses will take care of themselves.”
It was a big task. Wood’s father was supportive when they discussed the job—Nowhere to go but up, they’d agreed—but secretly, Jim Wood worried the job would be a dead end for his son. And even he didn’t know the full picture.
After Wood was hired, Muleshoe High superintendent Bill Moore took him for a drive. They parked at the Sonic in the middle of town and Moore pointed to an empty lot across the street. Some two dozen teenagers were gathered there, congregating around pickup trucks and drinking right out in the open, in the middle of the day.
“Man,” Wood said, “those guys—I guess they don’t want to be part of any program. I’d sure like to have them.”
Moore replied, “No—they are the program. Those are your athletes. That’s why we hired you.”
Wood had twenty-two players, total, on his football team that first season. Most of them were “renegades,” he says. “Just outlaws.”
Muleshoe reminded Wood of his adopted hometown of Quanah, another rural island about three hours east. “Quanah was very much the same way as when I took over Muleshoe,” he says. Wood himself, like Lincoln, had never been big on partying. “I don’t know why I wasn’t, but I was never an outlaw,” he says. He never drank in high school. He was a sophomore in college when he drank his first beer. “I saw it a lot,” he says, “but I just didn’t understand. Why are you doing that? We’re playing football.”
His senior year, he was Quanah’s starting quarterback, and his father was the coach. Jim Wood had been an All-American defensive end for Oklahoma State in the 1950s and got into coaching not long after that. Spent a few years as the head coach for New Mexico State, then a few more years coaching the Calgary Stampeders in the Canadian Football League when David was a kid. He moved to Texas for David’s freshman year so that he could become a scout for the New York Giants. Soon after that he decided to become a high school football coach.
“He was a big disciplinarian,” David says.
Jim’s discipline boiled down to a simple rule: Don’t do stuff that’s gonna hurt you.
At Muleshoe, David Wood laid down the law: no facial hair and no cussing, for starters. “But that wasn’t under the big rules,” Wood says.
Here were the big rules: no smoking, no drinking, no breaking the law, no associating with those who do, no getting suspended from school.
No doing stuff that’s gonna hurt you.
And while he was at it, he put a stop to all the bragging his players liked to do. They’d talk and talk about good plays they’d made as if those plays had won them the Super Bowl, like prospectors celebrating fool’s gold. Talk is cheap, Wood would tell them. You guys don’t really know how to win. You know how to talk the game. The way you talk, you feel like you won a state championship every year. But the way you work is not even close to it. And you gotta do the walk before you can do the talk.
Wood enforced his rules with diligence. There was a grill across from Muleshoe High School where kids would hang out during lunch so that they could smoke inside. Wood regularly visited during lunch hour. The owner protested to Wood, angry, saying that he had to quit coming in like that because it was hurting business. (Wood declined.)
Those who broke the rules faced severe consequences. Culprits ran ten laps—two and a half miles—every day, followed by four sets of “hard yards,” four-hundred-yard sprints, crawls, and other exercises up and down the football field. Most, at some point, threw up. They did this at every practice until they were back in good standing, which could be achieved upon service of their ultimate consequence: suspension.
The suspensions shocked everyone. Coaches didn’t suspend players in high school for things like partying. Wood knew this as well as anyone. Before Muleshoe, he’d been an assistant coach at various West Texas high schools for eleven years, most recently at 5A Canyon Randall High an hour and a half northeast, near Amarillo. He says, “A lot of coaches come in and say, ‘Don’t get caught. Don’t do it, or, if you do do it, don’t get caught.’ Or, they’d get caught, and nothing was done to them.”
Even if coaches did give out discipline, it never seemed to accomplish much. They’d make players run and that sort of thing, “But it didn’t really make a difference in the kid,” Wood says. “It didn’t make an impression on them. They would run a hundred laps if they could still play the game, and they still got away with it in their minds.”
Wood felt the kids weren’t learning anything. “We were successful,” Wood says, “but I didn’t see a change in their lives, really, some of those kids. And I wanted to make a change in their lives … I don’t want to teach them a lesson after the fact. Let’s teach them the lesson right now. Don’t make mistakes twice.”
