15 Years Later - Remember the Titans

This is an off-shoot of the Friday Night Lights discussion a few threads below this one. As a history major, I really hate it when films get it wrong. I don't mind a few minor details here and there for dramatic license. But when a film based on true events looks nothing like what the real life events did, that is when I start having problems.

And this brings me to Remember the Titans, a film that was released 15 years ago. I think all of us have seen it. We know what it's about. But that is not how it happened. Deadspin posted an article last July which really shed light on just how horribly inaccurate the film was.

LINK

In short, there was racial tension in Alexandria in 1971, but not near to the degree as the movie depicts. The schools in that city had been integrated since 1965. The real players on the roster of the 1971 T.C. Williams Titans had been playing on integrated teams since before the merger.

And as for Herman Boone, the head coach of T.C. Williams, the film cast him as a mix between Vince Lombardi and Martin Luther King, Jr. In reality, as his former players point out, he was a real piece of shite. He was eventually forced out of T.C. Williams due to accusations of verbal and physical abuse, the very public defection of several assistant coaches, and a player mutiny.

You really see how shitty Boone is when you compare his interviews from the 70s to the interviews and speaking engagements he gives today.

For instance:

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In an interview with the Washington Post that ran midway through the 1971 season, Boone was asked about the role race played in his selection as head coach. The piece pointed out that Boone had been "one of the most successful" high school head coaches in North Carolina before coming to T.C. as an assistant two years earlier. Yet some folks in Alexandria, the writer noted, were floating rumors that Boone, who is black, got the job "because of his color." Boone pooh-poohed any such talk.

"All I know is that if I were selected for this position solely on the basis of color, I would never have taken the job," Boone said back in the day. "I couldn't sleep at night."

Boone changed his tune pretty quick after the movie's release. During a February 2001 speech for Black History Month at the University of North Carolina, he told the crowd that he had initially turned down the head coaching job at T.C. because, well, he'd gotten the offer because of his color.

"They didn't want me," he said. "They just wanted a black coach." He's been telling audiences he was strictly an affirmative action hire ever since.

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In that same 1971 Post interview, Boone also said that the merger of the three high schools was going smoothly because "the people in this city have really joined in to make this thing [the consolidation] work."

"I get calls before each game from businessmen wishing us well," he said. "After a game, my phone doesn't stop ringing with people offering congratulations. If prejudices are there, the people who hold them should be in Hollywood, Calif., because they're some damn good actors."

But ever since that damn good actor out in Hollywood, Denzel Washington, made him famous, Boone stopped acknowledging the locals who embraced him from the beginning. Speaking to a Dartmouth audience at an MLK birthday event in 2012, Boone instead said that his being named T.C.'s coach spawned such hate that even his family was targeted for violence. "I told my children, who were chased home every day by men riding in trucks who wanted to beat up on them because they were my children, and I said that life is not easy and you will experience adversity," Boone said.

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