After Friday Night Lights

Buzz Bissinger went back to find out what happened the the folks he covered in Friday Night Lights.  Here's an excerpt from his new book, After Friday Night Lights:

When Boobie got hurt in Lubbock during that preseason scrimmage of 1988 and another black player with excellent skills came out of nowhere to replace him, the Permian coaches no longer had to pretend to deal with Boobie any longer. They were relieved he wasn't playing, and one white coach referred to Boobie as a "big ol' dumb n-----."
I never named the coach in the book because I liked him. This was also the price of access. I realize now that this was a mistake, because of the devastating impact his comment has had on Boobie. His name was Mike Belew. He coached the running backs, and he was otherwise affable and self-deprecating. He later married an African American woman, hardly the actions of a racist. It may have been ignorance speaking, but it doesn't matter. Belew's anonymous words, which Boobie came across in the book, scarred him forever.
As we drive to Monahans and sift through the cold ashes of Boobie's Permian experience, he asks me who called him "a big ol' dumb n-----." I tell him. I think he has known for a long time anyway. "I could not believe he would say that shit about me," Boobie says. "That hurt for real when he said that. I could not get that shit out of my mind. He actually called me that, bro."
When I put Belew's words in the book, the intent was to show the virulence of the racism expressed against Boobie once he got hurt. But several years later, we were talking about the book when Boobie railed against what the then-unnamed coach had said about him: "Do you have any fucking idea of how it feels to see this stuff said about you and know it's goin' to be there forever?"
He was right. In my mind, I had been protecting Boobie by using the anonymous quote. But the only person I was protecting was the coach who said it. If I exposed Boobie to the sentiments of that coach, I should have exposed Belew at the same time. So 22 years later, I am correcting the mistake.

Bissinger makes a good point.  His coverage of the incident was very important to the book, but it was unfair to leave the coach anonymous when Boobie was laid out in the open.