Saturday, September 30, 2000
Real Titans better than movie
Remember The Titans? Darn right, I remember the Titans. Best high school football team I ever saw. A whole lot better than the one depicted in the new Disney film.
When T.C. Williams won the Virginia state championship in 1971, it had no need for last-second heroics, trick plays or Denzel Washington. The Titans went through their schedule like a steamroller does spaghetti. They were 13-0 with nine shutouts, including a 27-0 victory in the championship game.
Disney doesn't do documentaries, of course, and a juggernaut doesn't often make for compelling cinema. When a movie is “based” on actual events, this is another way of saying there is a grain of truth in a piece of fiction. Remember The Titans is long on poetic license and short on fealty to the facts.
It's entertaining enough. At a special screening this week
in Norwood, the audience burst into spontaneous applause at the feel-good finish. But as a history lesson, the film suffers from Hollywood distortion.
“Having been a player on that team, it was hard to watch that film,” said Cincinnatian Dennis Harrington. “I think it's unfortunate that Hollywood or Disney felt the need to simplify things. They feel like they have to hit you over the head.”
Harrington, director of the Weston Art Gallery at the Aronoff Theatre, captained the punt team for T.C. Williams in 1971. He attended the movie's premiere this week in Washington, D.C., along with President Clinton and the Rev. Jesse Jackson. He recognizes that the film is more about message than memory - about how common purpose can ease racial tensions - but he is uncomfortable with its portrayal of events.
“I think,” he said, “they did some disservice to the people of Alexandria.”
So do I. Like Harrington, I was a high school senior in
Alexandria, Va., in the fall of 1971, when consolidation turned T.C. Williams into the state's preeminent powerhouse. Three public high schools — Francis Hammond, George Washington and T.C. Williams — were merged that year. Hammond and GW were set up to serve the ninth- and 10th-graders. All of the upperclassmen, including 47 football lettermen, went to T.C. Williams.
To many of the privileged preppies at Bishop Ireton High School — and certainly to me — the reorganization seemed not so much a necessary step toward equality as an egregious stacking of the local sports deck. It was as if our rival had gone out and recruited an entire roster of ringers.
Maybe we missed the bigger picture, consumed by our petty competitive concerns, but the Alexandria public schools already had been integrated, and the need for further social engineering did not appear to be particularly acute.
So far as we knew, the T.C. Williams story was not a major motion picture, but a tedious highlight film. The Titans won only one game by less than two touchdowns that year, scored 357 points and allowed just 45. They were as potent as a cheerleader's perfume and as impenetrable as The Pilgrim's Progress.
What we didn't know, until now, is how awful the racial climate was in Alexandria in 1971. We didn't know that Titans coach Herman Boone had a brick thrown through his window, was called a “monkey” by an opposing coach and “Coach Coon” by the father of one of his players. We didn't know some of his players were refused service at local restaurants and influential figures conspired with game officials to cheat his team.
We didn't know about any of this, I suspect, because most of it never happened. Neither, Harrington said, was there any picketing at the school to protest the consolidation plan. In their effort to make the Titans' story more dramatic, to hammer their message home, to make a more sweeping statement about the roadblocks to and rewards of assimilation, the filmmakers have twisted the truth with mid-60s Deep South stereotypes.
This is not to suggest Alexandria was any more enlightened than most other American towns of that era, but neither was it some bumpkin backwater. This wasn't Selma or South Boston, but suburban Washington, D.C. — lots of military, lots of transients, lots of people accustomed to different cultures. Even 30 years ago, it was a pretty cosmopolitan place.
Perhaps I am too sensitive on this point. The strength of Remember The Titans is not in its accuracy, of course, but its aim. It wants children of another generation to understand that racism is usually the product of ignorance and fear and that shared goals can provide impetus to understanding.
One of the best excuses for team sports is their capacity to bring people closer. When the home team wins, whatever its demographics, we tend to think of them as “us.”
What I remember about the Titans is that they were terrific. What the film is selling is tolerance.
E-mail: tsullivan@enquirer.com
Sports Stories
Reds 8, Cardinals 1
Box, runs
Reds best road draw ever
Workhorse Sullivan on record pace
Not even Bengals' best getting job done
Brown backing LeBeau
UC receivers must give all
UC's Jones injured, out for 8-10 weeks
