Friday night in San Benito

San Antonio Express-News/Houston Chronicle:

With one of every two of its children expected to drop out of high school and all of them eligible for free school lunches, this town deals with its social problems and clings to its modest circumstances much like the rest of the Rio Grande Valley.

Purses and wallets carrying what's left of minimum wages keep the tattered downtown busy — the Dollar General and the Jack in the Box on Sam Houston Boulevard are always humming. Fully one-third of the city's 25,000 people live in poverty.

But these limitations mean nothing on certain fall nights, when San Benito's humble reality melts away in the glare, hype and community celebration of high school football.

Especially now that a new $4.5 million stadium houses the beloved purple-and-gold Mighty Greyhounds, portraying them as the town's warriors on a $500,000 scoreboard, the grandest of its kind south of San Antonio.

A maze of steel I-beams and uprights, aluminum bleachers, beaming lights and a massive video screen, it's a structural status symbol that — like the Alamo — gives its town an immeasurable sense of pride.

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It can hold half the town.

"This is high school, (yet) this is like something you have in the pros or in college," marveled Bobby Morrow, a triple gold-medal sprinter in the 1956 Olympics who played football here.

The stadium was named after him, but watching from the sidelines the night it opened, he said, "It's for the people to hold their heads up high."

Fans stomp in the stands whenever the announcer says it's "time to release the dogs." The stadium rumbles like thunder.

But what's really deafening is the silence of critics. There was virtually no public opposition to the stadium's cost or accessories. Ask why, and the answer around town is, "Why not?"

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There is more. With an answer like that, they could be Kinky Friedman supporters. San Benito is where I graduated from high school in 1963. We had some very good teams back then. In my junior year we lost in the state semi finals on a fluke play to a team caoched by Bum Phillips who went on to other coaching opportunities.