Howard researched the '71 Titans and made contact with Herman Boone, the black man who coached T. Williams at the time and whose character, portrayed by Denzel Washington, is at the center of the movie.
Boone, a proud man, resisted. Howard wore him down, and Boone eventually helped him work through the pipeline of flummoxed former Titans who were just as shocked that Hollywood would be interested in their story.
The resulting movie is a fairy-tale treatise on race, youth and football. It is full of hoary cliches and cartoonish characters the bigoted white girlfriend of the star white linebacker, the redneck assistant coach but succeeds as wholesome entertainment and what Howard calls "a different paradigm on race: You don't have to like each other to get along; you just have to respect each other.
Players rebel, then bond and win all their games amid social unrest. A divided city celebrates as one. Fade to black. Those who lived the '71 season can nitpick the celluloid version of their lives, but they are virtually unanimous in their overall assessment of the film: "The movie captures the spirit of the team and the time," says Rufus Littlejohn, a starting linebacker in ' The movie has brought the players together in a sort of nonstop reunion. They have a website.
Groups of them drive together to speak to community groups and the like. The movie is shown and, afterward, questions are answered by the Real Original Titans. Nobody, however, has been affected as much as Boone. A crusty man given to speech-making to even the smallest audience one listener will do , he was signed last fall by the American Program Bureau, a Boston-based agency that counts Mikhail Gorbachev and Johnnie Cochran among its more than speakers.
He's developed a following almost separate from his character in the film. Yoast accompanies Boone roughly four times a month, and the two men, close friends, work the audience together. Best of all--better than small fame or big money for any of these men--is the knowledge that the message of the movie is real.
Coming together in had been every bit as difficult for them as the film conveys. At the end of the previous school year, administrators had brought together returning football players from all three of the schools that were being merged. In real life T. Hammond High were joined, not two schools. The players sat on the tiered risers in the T. Williams band room in three distinct groups, segregated mostly by the colors of their skin and of their school shirts.
Players fought even more than those in the movie. And the part about uniting a city? Many say it's true. It's true. It really brought the city together. Boone coached T. Williams for seven years after ' His record in Alexandria was a solid , but he never won another state title, and the Titans went in , his last season. His replacement was Paul Doc Hines, one of his assistant coaches, who went in three years before Glenn Furman, another former Boone assistant, began a year run that included state championships in and ' In the middle of the season Furman's final team was and nationally ranked, but it fell apart in a five-game losing streak.
That began a slide that has continued until today, leaving little similarity between the movie team and the current squad. How did the Titans devolve from inspirational diversity and on-field excellence to resegregated ineptitude? They had help. Like many other U. The availability of affordable middle-class housing diminished until the majority of the city's residents were either very poor and often members of a minority or very well-to-do and often older, with grown children, or single and childless.
Williams were white. The mandatory school desegregation portrayed in Remember the Titans has been reversed, in part because many middle-class white families have left the city. In more than 21, white couples owned homes in Alexandria; now around 14, do. By contrast, the number of low-income or publicly subsidized housing units in the city, many of them populated by minority families, has increased to 4, from 1, in the days of the original Titans.
As the city's demographics changed, so did support for school programs. Football, the sport with the need for the most funding, suffered worst. Williams for 30 years. Another kind of trouble contributed to the decline.
In the winter of , following Furman's second state title, all-state linebacker Tracy Fells was arrested and charged with possession of crack cocaine with intent to distribute. He was acquitted of that charge, but he was later convicted of the same offense, and in he was sentenced to a year term with a minimum of 17 years in prison. Later, another Titans player was arrested for cocaine and handgun possession.
Players from both the '84 and '87 teams told SI that drug use and drug dealing were rampant among the Titans throughout the middle of the decade. Bill Dawes, who played on the '87 and '88 teams and is an actor living in New York City, says, "On both of my teams there was drug trafficking and drug use. You would hear conversations in the locker room.
Nobody was hiding anything. I used to give some of my teammates rides home to the projects, and they talked openly about the drug trafficking on the team, and it was by no means limited to Tracy Fells.
When we came together, we were skeptical of who they were and what cheers they did. Williams, where the newly combined squad would practice outside the cafeteria. Each contingent had brought their own experience, their own cheers, and their own style to the mix. Saadiqa-Turner says that GW had used more soulful moves with their cheers, while the Hammond girls were more rigid.
Williams was somewhere in between. As the days went by, a common, amalgamated style emerged—along with an increasingly strong bond. We became close, as a matter of fact. As the school year started, the on-field Titans also began to realize what they had by coming together.
In combining the best players from three schools and culling the herd during training camp, they had essentially built an Alexandria all-star team. The coaches knew they had the talent to win a state championship, and they dangled that prize in front of their players as motivation to not only do their individual best in school, but also to make sure everyone else in the student body behaved as well.
After all, the busing situation was still an experiment. They saw us working together. In reality, the team more than lived up to its mythological mascot, going undefeated and outscoring opponents — Nine of their 13 wins were shutouts.
And unlike in the film, which claimed that T. Williams was playing strictly white opponents, all the competition was integrated just like the Titans. In the actual title game weeks later, T. Williams held Andrew Lewis to negative-5 yards of total offense en route to a 27—0 anticlimax and a state championship. The Titans finished their season ranked second in the nation. Along the way, many in the community did rally around their team. Luckett remembers the stands full of people who had started the season keeping to their own, sitting according to race, and how they were soon mixed and united in rooting on the Titans as they rolled.
Littlejohn counters that the feelings of togetherness had more to do with victory than with overcoming racism. When Gettysburg College, where T. And Paspatis is still at it. The college promoted the appearance via a press release that introduced Boone as a guy who found success as the "newly appointed" football coach for T. Williams "during its first season as a racially integrated group.
I'm on his mailing list. I got the Paspatis treatment in , when he wrote into Washington City Paper pointing out several errors I'd made in a column about … T. I've been an admirer ever since. Paspatis isn't the only guy aware of the inaccuracies, of course. Brad "Bubba" Smith, a dominant Titans tight end on the team, also knows how phony the movie was. He started playing varsity at T. He also wishes they'd shown T.
He's still perturbed that he was left completely out of Howard's script. But Smith, now a security guard at Gallaudet University in D. Paspatis has admitted to being "a little bitter" about how his senior season under Boone played out.
The T. Despite maintaining the massive enrollment advantage, T. The most notable event of the season, Paspatis says, was a player revolt sparked by Boone's locker-room tirade after an upset loss, one in which he blamed the defeat on specific players and invited them by name to quit. The entire squad walked out of school and threatened to sit out remaining games unless Boone apologized.
He did. But Paspatis says whatever bitterness he still holds isn't what motivates his enduring letter-writing campaign. Boone spins history his way. My agenda is just to give an accurate history lesson. Nobody else wants to do it. That's my hobby. Boone appealed his firing to the Alexandria School board in the late s, only to have his removal upheld.
He doesn't mention his departure from coaching during speaking engagements. Instead, Boone has gotten increasingly messianic. After telling the Dartmouth crowd in that he had "dedicated my life to the visions and dreams" of Martin Luther King "long before the movie Remember the Titans was made," Boone said he regarded himself as a successor to the slain civil rights leader. Boone returned to the T. Gerry and Julius were friends just like many of the other players were friends.
Theirs was not the only new friendship. The character of Emma Hoyt Kate Bosworth is purely fictional. She was created to demonstrate some of the negative traits and beliefs instilled in the youth of that time. This did not happen in real life. The film also implies that Ronnie "Sunshine" Bass might possibly be gay. This is also untrue. In fact, like Ronnie Bass, most of the other players on the team had long hair in , including the real Gerry Bertier.
During our investigation into the Remember the Titans true story, we confirmed that Titan quarterback Ronnie Bass did come from California, but portraying him as a long-haired hippie is a bit of an exaggeration.
I'll say for the record my hair was never that long. Unlike what is seen in the movie, there were no protestors outside of the high school on the first day. Williams Titans to the undefeated season chronicled in the film. Although racial tension did exist in Alexandria, Virginia in , it was significantly embellished for the movie. For example, T. Williams High School saw the integration of black and white students when it opened in the fall of , not in Former students state that many of the racial barriers had been broken down by , when federal pressure resulted in the consolidation of three high schools, one of which was T.
In an interview with the Greenville News, the real Ronnie "Sunshine" Bass said, "They the movie had a community divided down black and white, and it really wasn't like that in Alexandria. In reality, all of the other schools that the Titans faced during the season were integrated schools. This scene was fictionalized for the movie, as was Coach Tyrell Brett Rice. In the movie Remember the Titans , we see Coach Yoast Will Patton confront a crooked referee, telling him to call the game fairly or else he'll expose the whole plot to make the Titans lose the game, resulting in the firing of Coach Boone.
Coach Yoast also tells the ref that he'll personally see to it that the ref never works again. This incident never really happened. Sheryl wasn't as deeply intense about football as the film depicts. Sheryl ends up watching game films with Boone instead.
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