ATTEND the We Are Marshall Movie, If You Like

We Are Marshall' is anything but a true story
Chuck Landon, Daily Mail sportswriter
Friday January 05, 2007

ATTEND the "We Are Marshall" movie, if you like.
Cry during it. Laugh during it. Applaud during it.
Just don't believe it.
That's because this film doesn't accurately portray what actually happened before, during or after the horrific Marshall plane crash in 1970.
Oh, sure, the Warner Bros. production claims to be true. In fact, the words "This Is A True Story" flash across the screen at the very beginning of the movie.
That's a lie.
How can Warner Bros. have the audacity to label this movie as "A True Story" when three of the main characters are fictional? Or when the movie title itself is skewed time-wise? Or when the filmmakers knowingly and willfully distorted the facts?
Had "We Are Marshall" been billed as "Based On A True Story," the moviemakers would have deserved some leeway.
That's how it should have been labeled.
But, instead, they chose to mislead audiences nationwide into believing "We Are Marshall" is a factual account. It's not. It's not even close. I know because I was there sharing a dormitory with all of the players who were killed.
I experienced those times firsthand and it simply didn't happen the way it's portrayed in this movie.
Just consider this lengthy list of inaccuracies and distortions in the "We Are Marshall" movie: The character portrayed by actor Ian McShane, the cheerleader/waitress named "Katie" and Nate Ruffin's roommate, "Tom," who overslept, missed the plane and couldn't bring himself to play football anymore, all were fictional.
Neither the Marshall cheerleaders nor the band made the trip to East Carolina.
The movie depicts Red Dawson as giving up his seat on the ill-fated plane to fellow assistant Deke Brackett. That didn't happen. All along, Dawson was going to drive to Virginia for a recruiting trip on his way back to Huntington. The coach who actually agreed to give Brackett his seat on the plane was graduate assistant Gail Parker, who, then, rode back to West Virginia with Dawson. But the movie has Dawson driving home alone.
There is an emotional scene where Dawson's wife is distraught because she thought Red was on the plane. That wasn't true. She knew all along that he was driving back from North Carolina.
Just before the crash, the film showed the Marshall team celebrating like it was at a fraternity party on the flight back to Huntington. No team would have been laughing and talking after a heart-wrenching, last-minute loss. Especially this Marshall team, because Coach Rick Tolley was known for his hard-nosed, no-nonsense attitude.
The movie showed a rescue worker at the crash site finding a slightly charred Marshall playbook amidst the debris. According to the film, that's how it was determined the MU team was in the crash. That's pure fabrication. The truth is, a wallet was found at the crash site. When a rescue worker showed it to Herald-Dispatch reporter Jack Hardin, he telephoned H-D sports editor Ernie Salvatore and asked if the name "John Young" meant anything to him. Salvatore said that, yes, Young was a Marshall tight end. That was how everyone first learned that it was MU's football team involved in the crash.
The movie showed Reggie Oliver paying respects to his dead friends in a church in Tuscaloosa, Ala. There were three caskets. There should have been four. Oliver lost four former DruidHigh School teammates in the crash -- roommate Joe Hood, Bob Van Horn, Freddie Wilson and Larry Sanders. And the services took place in the Druid High gymnasium, not a church.
There is an emotional scene in which Nate Ruffin walks into a meeting of the Board of Governors as they are contemplating not rebuilding the football program. Yeah, right. For starters, a Board of Governors didn't even exist then. Secondly, the part where Ruffin walks to the window and points to all the students gathered below chanting, "We are Marshall" never happened. The entire scene was fictional.
The film implied that Lengyel was the only coach that would take the Marshall job. That's categorically false. Another coach, Dick Bestwick, actually accepted the MU job for two days and, then, backed out.
Former NFL great Sam Huff also lobbied publicly for the job. In fact, I did an interview with Huff and wrote a story for MU's student newspaper, The Parthenon. But Huff wasn't even given an interview.
Interim President Donald Dedmon didn't do half of the things the movie portrayed. Dedmon was a low-profile individual who allowed new athletic director Joe McMullen to ramrod the coaching search. It was McMullen who hired Lengyel. And it was McMullen who coined the term "Young Thundering Herd." The late McMullen was a larger-than-life individual, both physically and figuratively, but the filmmakers conveniently excluded him from the movie.
The movie shows Lengyel asking Dawson who MU has at quarterback. Dawson answers, "Dave Walsh." Then, a small wide receiver throws a long pass. Lengyel asks who that is. Dawson replies, "That's a wide receiver named Reggie Oliver." Lengyel responds that Oliver now is a quarterback.
That scenario never happened.
The truth is, Oliver was a dropback quarterback who wasn't suited for the option offense that Lengyel wanted to install. So, Lengyel actually moved Oliver from quarterback to wide receiver for one week. Oliver was extremely upset over the position change and was moved back to QB.
The film depicts Marshall as having a rivalry with West VirginiaUniversity. That wasn't the case in those days. The film also fixated on Marshall losing recruiting battles to the Mountaineers. That didn't happen, either.
The movie showed Salvatore sitting in the stands with Dedmon, cheering during a game he was covering. No sportswriter ever would do that. "I don't know why we had all those meetings," said Salvatore, referring to fact-gathering sessions with the filmmakers.
Matthew McConaughey's portrayal of Lengyel was way off target. Lengyel wasn't a goofy-acting coach who talked out of the side of his mouth and perpetually needed a shave. On the contrary, Lengyel was an eloquent speaker who exuded class.
The basketball player turned football wide receiver portrayed by former MU basketball star Mark Patton was named Bill James in the film. And, yes, there is a former Herd basketball player by that name who indeed did play football for MU during his one remaining semester of eligibility.
But James didn't play for the "Young Thundering Herd." In fact, he didn't play football until two seasons later. If the film producers knew that James was a basketball player who later played football, then they also had to have known that he didn't play on the 1971 team.
Obviously, they simply didn't care about accuracy. They skewed the facts to fit their film. The perplexing part is a basketball player, the late Dave Smith, actually did play for the "Young Thundering Herd," but the filmmakers ignored him.
During a well-publicized scene, Lengyel walks outside his home and sees fans streaming down the sidewalks toward Fairfield Stadium for the Xavier game. That never would happen. No coach still would be at home that near to game time.
The game-winning play in Marshall's dramatic win over Xavier wasn't a pass thrown into the end zone to a wide receiver named Terry Gardner. It was a short screen pass thrown to a running back named Terry Gardner. The moviemakers also knew that but decided to change the play.
At the end of the film, the narrator noted that Dedmon was fired by Marshall. That's false. He was interim president and when a permanent president was hired, Dedmon simply accepted a job at Radford.
Finally, there is the worst distortion of all. According to the movie, McShane's character had a son, Chris Griffin, who wore No. 29, was Marshall's star running back and died in the crash.
No such player ever existed.
I consider it blasphemy for a movie to be made about the MU tragedy, have a fictitious player die in the crash and still call it "A True Story." That's a sacrilege and an insult to the families that lost sons and loved ones in the crash.
It's an inexcusable breach of ethics.
Not that I expected "We Are Marshall" to be a documentary. I didn't. But I did expect the filmmakers to respect our collective memories and show enough reverence for this real-life drama to portray it as accurately as possible.
This wasn't "The Titanic." It wasn't OK to create 90 minutes of entertaining fiction as long as the boat sank in the end.
This was real. All of this really happened. But not the way "We Are Marshall" told it.