By MICHAEL ZITZ
This fall’s feel-good film has
elements of truth, but offensive tackle Kerry Lundin says racism among teammates
just didn’t exist.
By MICHAEL ZITZ
The Free Lance-Star
WALT DISNEY PICTURES is promoting "Remember the Titans" with the stirring line "History is written by the winners."
But Kerry Lundin, one of the T.C. Williams High Titans featured in the hit movie, says history is really written by Hollywood screenwriters.
And Hollywood’s version of history can paint innocent kids as racists who needed to have some sense knocked into them.
Lundin, now a resident of Spotsylvania County’s Fox Point subdivision, had goosebumps as he watched the football heroics and listened to the soaring music of "Remember the Titans" last week.
He was an offensive tackle on Alexandria’s 1971 T.C. Williams High football team, the subject of the new Denzel Washington film. The Walt Disney Pictures production is No. 1 at the box office after its opening week in theaters.
"It was very exciting," Lundin, 46, said about seeing the movie with his former Titans teammates at its black-tie Washington première.
But the experience wasn’t all positive, Lundin said.
"We had mixed emotions," he said.
During the movie, Lundin said, "some of us were looking at each other incredulously."
The feel-good film tells of a black head coach at a newly desegregated school overcoming prejudice to bring together a racially divided team and using the team’s success to unite the school and the city.
Lundin said the portrayal of Coach Herman Boone as a hero who brought a school and city together was absolutely correct. But he said little or no racial tension existed on the team itself.
"I guess that’s the Disney version of what happened," Lundin said.
"Overall it was a great story—a story of the heart and spirit of the team and the school," he said.
"Coach Boone did an amazing job," Lundin said, "especially with all the pressure put on him because of the color of his skin. He took a lot of heat—hate mail, racial slurs."
Lundin said the film was accurate in its portrayal of hostility toward Boone in the white neighborhood his family moved into.
And he said Boone’s gradual acceptance by white fans, neighbors and colleagues might have had more to do with winning than enlightenment.
But Lundin said the filmmakers did an injustice to the Titans by manufacturing race hatred within the team for dramatic effect.
Walt Disney Pictures officials didn’t comment yesterday when asked whether racial tensions on the team were made up for the movie.
Lundin works for Ace Carpentry in Manassas. His wife, Dawn, is a senior programmer at Bae Systems, a Navy contractor at Dahlgren. They have three sons.
Dawn Lundin was a freshman at T.C. Williams in 1971. She backs up her husband’s version of events, at least from the perspective of a student observing the team from the outside.
Dawn Lundin said the team seemed to have the same kinds of relationship problems any group of kids might have, but that none of that was racially motivated.
"Same old stuff as anywhere," Dawn Lundin said. "Pretty much normal behavior."
Kerry Lundin was particularly bothered by the treatment of one of his best friends, Gerry Bertier, the high school All-American linebacker who is one of the movie’s central characters.
Bertier is portrayed early in the film as the leader of a white racist faction on the team who initially has to be shamed and intimidated into line by Boone. Boone tells him that if he has a problem accepting blacks as teammates, he will sit the bench.
In the movie, Bertier learns to respect Boone and like his black teammates. But Lundin said Bertier wasn’t prejudiced, respected Boone and liked his black teammates from the beginning.
Bertier died tragically at age 28, after being the victim of two car wrecks.
"The way Gerry is portrayed as a racist is very upsetting," Lundin said. "I talked to other guys who were on the team, and we don’t want Gerry remembered that way. That is so unlike him. He was a great team leader. He was kind to a fault."
In the film, the team rallies around Bertier after he is paralyzed in a car crash during the 1971 state playoffs. The film shows Bertier watching the championship game on television from a hospital bed.
In reality, Bertier played in that game. The crash in which he was paralyzed didn’t happen until December 1971, weeks afterward.
The movie changes the margin of victory in games for dramatic effect, making it seem that T.C. Williams was an underdog when it really was favored in almost every game and blew out almost every opponent.
"This was a super team with the best players from three schools," Lundin said. Any tension between players existed only because all those top players were vying for starting positions, he said.
"We were expected to win it all," Lundin said. "If we hadn’t won it all, heads would have rolled. So there was pressure on the coaches from the beginning just for that reason.
"Coach Boone and his staff did a great job of shielding us from that pressure and from the racial stuff that was going on outside the team," Lundin said. "They told us not to pay attention to that stuff—that all we needed to worry about was winning."
Boosterish 1971 press reports in the Alexandria Journal Standard offer a glimpse of what really happened.
In the film, white opponents conspire to keep Boone from getting the game films coaches usually exchange as a matter of courtesy.
In reality, one white coach, Ralph Gahagan of Woodrow Wilson High in Portsmouth, refused to swap films with Boone before his team met T.C. Williams in the state semifinals. It’s not clear whether that was anything more than gamesmanship, however.
Five thousand T.C. Williams fans traveled from Alexandria to Norfolk for the semifinal game. Before that game, the Alexandria City Council presented Boone with a Coach of the Year award.
The film depicted the semifinal game as a tense one. In reality, the Titans jumped out to a 21–0 lead and coasted to a 36–14 win.
The film made T.C. Williams’ opponent in the next week’s state championship game seem an unbeatable juggernaut.
In truth, Andrew Lewis High School of Salem was undefeated, but the Titans were favored going into the game.
Lewis High Coach Eddie Joyce, portrayed as an having ice in his veins in the film, was described as "congenial" in the Alexandria paper. He joked before the state title game that "prayer will be the best defense" against the Titans’ offense.
In the movie, the Titans come from behind to win, 10–7, on a last-second touchdown. In reality, it was a 27–0 T.C. Williams blowout.
Filmmakers are allowed artistic license, of course. Too much truth might make for boring movies.
Despite the distortions, the Lundins say they’re thrilled that the movie was made, thrilled that the Titans are being remembered.
"This is his 15 minutes of fame," Dawn Lundin said about her husband. Twenty-nine years after he won that state title with Titans, Kerry Lundin remains close to his playing weight and looks fit enough to play semipro ball—which he did in the late ’80s for a team in Sterling.
But even while awash in "Remember the Titans" glory, Kerry Lundin seems prouder of the state championship his 18-year-old son, Jeremy, helped win last spring as a member of the Courtland High School Cougars baseball team.
"We have three generations of champions in our family," Lundin boasted. Jeremy’s paternal grandfather was a member of the ’53–’54 Wisconsin football team that won the Rose Bowl.