Football is a sport of teamwork and emotion. If a team doesn’t coalesce, if it’s plagued by racial divisions or loyalties holding over from schools, it won’t win games no matter how much bigger or more experienced its players. At training camp, the 1971 Titans did come together. They dominated league play from the first game and had only one close game during the regular season. The state championship was a cake walk and the season ended with the Titans ranked second in the country. The sports story told by the film, of an underdog team that played a cliffhanger championship, is the least accurate part of the film.

The film accurately portrays the dynamic of the personal and professional relationship of coaches Boone and Yoast. These are remarkable and impressive men who were able to bridge the racial divide, serve their students, and become good friends.

1970 was Herman Boone’s first year as an assistant coach at T.C. Williams. His previous job had been in North Carolina where he had a reputation as a “race man,” i.e., a man who stood up to racially prejudiced whites. (There was an incident in which Boone had fought some members of the Ku Klux Klan; he bears a scar on his head from this encounter.) Boone left North Carolina when he was passed over for a head coaching job in favor of a less qualified white man.

Boone’s coaching style was “in-your-face” and he demanded a full effort from all of his players. His goal at the training camp was to give the boys, black and white, something in common: the shared experience of being put through a tremendously rigorous training regimen under a coach who was very tough on everyone. Coach Boone tolerated no dissension. He pushed everyone very hard. His motto was, “Miss a block, and you run a mile.” He believed that life was tough and that to help his players mature he needed to be firm, even harsh at times. He tried always to be fair and applied the same very tough standards to everyone.

In 1970 Bill Yoast was head coach at the all-white and affluent Hammond High. He had coached in Alexandria for many years. Under the seniority system then prevailing in Alexandria, Yoast had the right to the head coaching job at T.C. Williams. Initially, Boone turned the job down because he believed that the position rightfully belonged to Yoast. Of the coaches in the city who could do the job, Yoast had been working there the longest. Boone changed his mind when black leaders in Alexandria begged him to accept the post for the good of the black community. Only later did Boone learn that the school board never intended him to succeed. The plan was to fire him and give the job to Yoast on the first loss of a game.

Bill Yoast had taught his players, including Gary Bertier, for years. He had coached Bertier since junior high. When Boone was tapped for the head coaching job, Yoast looked for coaching positions elsewhere and tore up the petitions the boys had circulated to protest Coach Boone’s elevation. By the time Yoast accepted Boone’s offer to coach the Titans’ defense, Yoast had received 11 offers for other coaching jobs. Yoast’s decision to swallow his pride and work as Boone’s assistant was motivated by Yoast’s deep affection for the boys he had trained for years and his initial fear that Boone would not treat white players fairly. Yoast is a religious man who had seriously considered becoming a minister but thought that it was the kids who didn’t go to church who needed help the most. Yoast states that his religious beliefs helped him deal with this situation.

As shown in the film, Yoast’s coaching style was laid back and quiet. In that way it was different than Boone’s boot camp/drill sargent approach. However, both men saw coaching as, first and foremost, a means of teaching students lessons about character, accomplishment, and life. Both men cared deeply for their students; both possessed moral courage; and both wanted to win. These similarities were the bedrock fundamentals of their coaching styles and allowed them to work together despite other, less significant but perhaps more obvious differences.

Yoast’s reservations about Boone fell away as he realized that Boone treated every player, black or white, in the same tough manner, that Boone lived and breathed football, and that he knew what he was doing as a coach. For most of the season, Coach Boone was afraid that Yoast was after his job. As shown in the film, every time an opposing team would get a few touchdowns against the Titans, Boone would threaten to take over the defense. By the end of the season, however, the two men had developed respect for one another and were friends.

Other specifics concerning the coaches:

• As shown in the film, when the team was boarding buses to leave for training camp, the boys segregated themselves by race. Coach Boone ordered them off the buses. He required them to ride as teams, defense on one bus and offense on the other, sitting white and black together. At camp, Coach Boone required whites and blacks to room together. He also made the players get to know each other and learn about their families. The team did take a tour of the Gettysburg battlefield but it wasn’t at 3:00 a.m. and the inspirational talk was made by an elderly tour guide, not Coach Boone.
• Many of the teams the Titans played against were integrated. Their opponents didn’t appreciate the fact that the Titans had an advantage in having only seniors and juniors at the school. No coach called
• Coach Boone a “monkey” nor did Coach Boone give another coach a banana when he refused to shake hands after a game. There was one coach who refused to participate in the custom of trading team films and who made a comment to the effect that a little dog had wandered onto his field and looked like a T.C. Williams player.
  Coach Boone knew that if he didn’t win the state championship he’d be fired. But this was not only a matter of his race. Just about any high school coach in a community that was obsessed with football would be replaced after a very short time if he wasn’t a winner. For Coach Boone, the first black head coach of an integrated team representing the best players in the entire city, this pressure was extreme. There were many people who wanted the experiment to fail. We have not seen evidence of a specific conspiracy against Coach Boone as shown in the film, nor was there a dramatic situation in which Coach Yoast took specific actions to shut down such a conspiracy. The episode shown in the film is a dramatic way in which the filmmakers sought to describe Coach Yoast’s daily, morally courageous response to the situation. (Yoast points out that coaches always object to calls by referees. All of the referees for the games played by the Titans were white. Coach Yoast has been quoted as saying that if he had been Coach Boone, he would have been very suspicious of the reasons behind any incorrect call.)
• As shown in the film, Coach Boone vomited before the first game. In fact, he vomited before every game.
• Yoast’s daughter never went to the Boones’ home. Their daughters had met and were friendly but not as friendly as shown in the film. Yoast’s daughter was extremely angry that her father was passed over for head coach. She was very interested in football, although not as interested as the character portrayed in the film.
• It wasn’t a rock that was thrown through Coach Boone’s window; it was a toilet filled with human excrement. Coach Boone was enraged by this incident, but he didn’t go out on his porch with a gun. He didn’t own one.
• When Coach Boone came to Alexandria, he moved into a previously all-white neighborhood. His neighbors offered to buy him out, telling him, “We don’t want you here.” Coach Boone declined and lives in the house to this day. See Learning Guide to “A Raisin in the Sun.”
• In 1971, there were more than just three assistant coaches in the T.C. Williams football establishment. There were eight. After a victory in one big game, Coach Boone chartered a plane for the team’s trip home. Football at T.C. Williams in 1971 was big business.
• The character of the other white coach is fictional, an amalgam representing all of the white racists who initially pinned their hopes on Yoast. Yoast lost his relationships with many of them when he acted honorably toward the team and Coach Boone.
• In 1971 there was no Virginia High School Football Hall of Fame. An organization by that name does exist today.
• Coach Boone did tutor students to help them get into college. Coach Yoast didn’t use profanity (the film character does), but it was another story with Coach Boone.
• Coach Boone and Coach Yoast have hit the lecture circuit.

Fortunately for the team, not only did it have two extraordinary men as coaches, it had several extraordinary boys as players. Gary Bertier and Julius Campbell were two of them. Bertier was in his senior year and appeared destined to play professional football. Bertier was a conservative who initially didn’t appreciate either integration or the black players. Julius Campbell was a year younger than Bertier and was interested in black power. He, too, was a gifted athlete, becoming an All-American the next year. Since Bertier was older and already revered in the city (and perhaps because he was on the white side of the racial divide, we don’t know) it was Bertier who made the initial overtures to Campbell.

Forced by Boone to room together at training camp, these boys, initially hostile, became best friends. Their friendship was one of the key factors in bringing the team together and lasted throughout their lives. The story of the players, like the story of the coaches, rings true and closely follows the facts.

Other specifics about Bertier and Campbell:

• Bertier was even more fierce, strong-willed, and aggressive than is shown in the film. He was 6’2″, weighed 220 pounds, and was extremely fast. At first he tried to intimidate Coach Boone and demanded that a certain number of positions on the team be set aside for Hammond players (read that white players from affluent families). Coach Boone refused.
• Bertier was not injured before the last game of the season. The accident occurred after the last game while he was driving home from the awards presentation. He lost control of his car on a snowy road. In the hospital, Bertier asked to see Campbell before he asked for his family. As shown in the film, Bertier’s mother told Campbell before he went into the hospital room, “Tears won’t make my baby walk.” The hospital scene shown in the film is accurate. Campbell and Bertier’s mother remained friends after Bertier died.
• Bertier is reported to have been upbeat after he was paralyzed and tried to cheer everyone up. The only person to whom he expressed sadness, to our knowledge, was Coach Yoast, who told Bertier about the wheelchair Olympics. Bertier had excelled in the shot put while in high school. Coached by Yoast, he went on to become a prominent wheelchair athlete, winning two gold medals in the wheelchair Olympics. Bertier was killed by a drunk driver in a second car accident in 1980.
• The character of Bertier’s white segregationist friend who intentionally allowed Rev, the black quarterback, to be tackled is fictional. This character in the film, as well as the character of Bertier’s girlfriend, are meant to represent whites with racial prejudice with whom Bertier parted company as his relationship with the black members of the team grew. (As to kicking the white segregationist player who purposefully missed the block off the team, Coach Boone would listen to his team captains on personnel matters. But in reality, there were several captains and Bertier, as captain of the defense, would not have authority over a member of the offense.)

The movie ignores the two other major divisive factors facing the team: that students from rival schools now played on the same team and that many former starters or players who had expected to be starters would not be starters for the Titans. However, from everything that we have read or heard, none of these divisive factors were as serious as race. Certainly, no divisive factor other than race could find any support in the general community.

In addition to Bertier and Campbell, the team was blessed with other players who helped bridge the racial divide. The film focuses on Louie Lastik and Ronnie Bass, but there were probably others. Lastik had lived in an integrated section of the city and got on well with black kids. Ronnie Bass, nicknamed “Sunshine” by his teammates, had come from California. He, too, had no trouble relating to black students. In his free time Bass was often at the Berg (then a black area of town) playing basketball. Sunshine won the starting quarterback position from Jerry “Rev” Harris by impressing Coach Boone, not because Harris got injured. Coach Boone applied his racially neutral attitude across the board and if a white boy was a better player than a black student, he got the position. (Coach Boone’s “veer” offense was basically a running attack. It was Bass’ passing ability that made that offense especially effective because it drew defenders off the running game.)

What is discussed, but not shown, is how much the team and its winning season meant to the city of Alexandria in a racially tense year. In 1971 there were race riots in several U.S. cities. A shooting had raised tensions to the boiling point in Alexandria. However, racial hatred is difficult in a town busy celebrating the winning ways of its integrated football team with its integrated coaching staff. People in Alexandria gave a large measure of credit for the town’s progress in race relations to the Titans.

Other specific incidents involving the team are:

• In 1971, Alexandria was not wracked by protests over integration. The scenes of the demonstrations are fictional, the filmmakers’ way of showing racial tension. Alexandria is adjacent to Washington, D.C. and, in 1971, it had many urban characteristics. Still, it was primarily Southern and high school football was the dominant sport.
• The 1971, Titans sang more than most teams, and many of the songs they sang had been popularized by The Temptations. They also sang and chanted as part of their pregame warm up although they didn’t do a choreographed dance as shown in the film.
• The fights at the beginning of camp are underplayed in the movie. They were not only racial, but between students of the same race who were from different schools. When the team came back from camp, there was an obvious difference in their racial attitudes. As shown in the film, some of the parents thought their kids had been brainwashed. In fact, their children had grown and matured in a short time under the tutelage of a master teacher, Coach Boone.
• Team members backed each other up. Shortly after training camp Bertier was jumped by a group of black students in the school parking lot. Campbell saw the fight and came to Bertier’s rescue. It was at this point that Julius made the comment, “Well, Bertier, I don’t guess you’re Superman after all.” During tense racial times at the school, team members would patrol the halls wearing their team jerseys.
• The “Yo Mama” scene, at least according to one member of a racially-united Titans team in the 1980s, was exactly his experience.
• Some of the 1971 Titans players have commented that race was not uppermost in their minds, but that they were concentrated on football. That’s just the way the boys should have felt, but given the racial tension in the town, it was due to the hard work of the coaches that race was made irrelevant.

This film was released in 2000. The irony is that the T.C. Williams Titans of the 1990s were much different from the Titans of 1971. T.C. Williams’ record for the 1990 – 2000 period was 30 wins, 70 losses. The last winning season was 1995 and the last trip to the state playoffs was in 1990. While the 1971 Titans had 38 white players and 31 blacks, the 2001 Titans had 36 black players and only 6 white. (Alexandria’s population in 2001 was 60% white.) At that time, if white families in Alexandria could afford it, they usually sent their kids to private schools. In 2000 the football team was starved for resources while the T.C. Williams crew team, which is predominantly white, had lavish facilities funded by private contributions. The story of what happened to the Titans in the 1990s shows that if a community doesn’t have a plan in place and isn’t willing to work hard to keep integration functioning, the community will become resegregated.

How did this happen? The racial composition of the city changed as middle class white families left and community support for football declined. In 1971, T.C. Williams was 77% white. In 1991, it was the only public high school in the city and only 27% of the students were white. In addition, in the mid-1980s, long after Coach Boone had retired, drug use was rampant on the team. (One player claims that seven members of the 1984 team were dealing drugs.) Another potential cause is a rule implemented in Alexandria requiring that students in the sports program keep a minimum C average. (Under Virginia High School League rules, athletes can play with a D average.) In addition, the facilities had deteriorated due to lack of funding.

While racially-united teams persisted at T.C. Williams into the mid-1980s, by the late 1980s, white players reported that the team “belonged” to the black players. White kids at T.C. Williams report that the school is internally split, and the races don’t mix socially or academically despite the fact that they go to the same school. This section drawn from “Does Anyone Remember the Titans?”, Sports Illustrated, October 15, 2001, pp. 72 et seq.

1. What events in the film show that “sometimes life is just hard for no reason”?

Suggested Response:

The two automobile accidents that Bertier was involved in. The first accident paralyzed him and the second killed him. These are real events.

2. Is the story of the Titans unusual for what occurred in the South during the time of the Civil Rights Movement from 1954 on?

Suggested Response:

Yes and no. Yes, in that it was so dramatic. Yes, because in a crucial year, this football team was led by two phenomenal coaches and two amazing players. Yes, in that during a year marked by racial violence throughout the nation, an entire town took its cue from the football team and remained calm. It’s not unusual in the sense that during this period many courageous black men and women, like Coach Boone, took risks to change society. Black young people, like Campbell, let go of their rage and forgave. Courageous white people, like Bertier and Coach Yoast, realized what was really important to them (in this case the team) and took principled but unpopular stands. This happened all over the South, perhaps haltingly at times, with backsliding often, but ultimately the actions of people like Boone, Yoast, Bertier and Campbell improved the lives of many people in that region.

The four questions which follow relate to rites of passage.

3. Define the term “rite of passage.” Tell us in your answer the difference between a “passage” and a “rite of passage.”

Suggested Response:

A rite of passage is a ritual or ceremony which marks the transition from one stage of life to another. The most common rites of passage related to birth, attainment of adulthood, initiation, marriage, and death. The difference between a “passage” and a “right of passage” is that people all have transitions in their lives. Rights of passage celebrate, formalize and regulate those transitions.

4. Give some examples of rites of passage that are used in our society, and describe their benefits.

Suggested Response:

These include birth (and its associated rites such as a christening or bris), becoming an adult (a Bar Mitzvah or a Bat Mitzvah, Quinceanera), marriage (a wedding), death (a funeral or memorial service). These help people to celebrate and adjust to the rights and duties of their new situation in life.

5. Does our society provide a rite of passage to mark the transition from adolescence to maturity? If so, what is it?

Suggested Response:

There is no one agreed upon right of passage to adulthood in modern Western Society. There are some near misses. Graduation from high school or from college can serve this purpose in some families. But there is no agreed-upon ritual or occasion for a rite of passage from adolescence to maturity.

6. Some people believe that sports provide young men in our society with some of the advantages of a rite of passage which are not otherwise available. Do you agree or disagree?

Suggested Response:

It can. But again, there is no society-wide agreement that this is a rite of passage. Some of the concepts to be discussed in a good discussion of this question are that the rite of passage is not universally recognized and only affects those involved in sports. There is no one ritual and its value can depend upon whether the team wins or loses, whether the team is well managed or not, whether there is cheating or steroid use, etc.

7. List, in chronological order, if you can, the key incidents in this film that show racial barriers being broken down.

Suggested Response:

There is no one right answer. The purpose of this question is to lead students to think about the plot of the film as it relates to the theme of racial integration. A good discussion would include some of the following incidents: Lastik’s actions in the cafeteria at the training camp; the argument between Bertier and Campbell when they trade accusations about Campbell not trying and Bertier being a bad leader (this established communication); the episode at practice when Bertier and Campbell hit each other on the “right side” etc.; the scene in the locker room in which the team sings together and tells “Yo Mama” jokes; the comments at the first day of school, the scene when the players break up a racially motivated fight at the school, etc.

8. What is the proper role of the desire to win in high school and college sports?

Suggested Response:

The desire to win sets a context in which the true beneficial lessons of sports can be taught. Those lessons include: the ethical precepts contained in the ethical principles of Trustworthiness, Responsibility, Respect, Fairness, Caring and Citizenship; helping the students mature; allowing young men a field of endeavor in which they can achieve something; providing rites of passage from adolescence to maturity for some adolescents.

For more questions, see TWM’s Standard Questions Suitable for Any Film That is a Work of Fiction.

Students can be asked to do the following:

• “Remember the Titans” holds together very well as a work of fiction. Ask the class whether it is important to them that most of the story, particularly the interaction between the coaches and between Bertier and Campbell, closely follows the facts? Have persons for each position explain their position and start a discussion of the different views.
• Find three adults who grew up during the late 1950s and 1960s who lived in the South (or areas in the North with racial tension such as Boston) and interview them about their experience. At least one of the adults should have taken some action to support the Civil Rights Movement (attended a demonstration, took a personal action). At least one of the adults should not have been active. Interview them about the time and their reaction to what was happening.
• Write a paper answering any one or a group of the Discussion Question set out above.
• Give a class presentation, singly or in groups, responding to any of the Discussion Question set out above

See additional Assignments for use with any Film that is a Work of Fiction.