The best football movies
focus on high school. The players still possess a raw idealism and capacity for
self-sacrificing commitment. This visceral passion infuses the game with social
power and camaraderie. High school teams are still anchored in real communities
where people know your name. These loyalties and sacrifices erode at higher
levels. High school players exhibit the devotion and attention to authority
that makes 16-20 year olds ideal soldiers. High school movies rule supreme for
capturing the power and complexity of football.
Undefeated, an academy award winning documentary, follows the
Manassas high school Tigers in North Memphis for one season. The moviemakers
earned a level of trust and invisibility that opens windows into the compelling
stories and tropes that give football such a unique and compelling American
narrative. While the documentary can sometimes feel like Blind Side and sometimes like Friday Night Lights, it follows the true and serendipitous story of a poor and
downtrodden football team that had not won a game in 15 years and not won a
playoff game in mover 100 years. The story unfolds neither as fairy tale or
nursery lessons, but as an abiding portrait of what football can sometimes accomplish
through community, authority and challenge to the characters of young men.
North Memphis exists as an
independent character. Roving cameras and inside homes reveal a profoundly
broken community abandoned by its job generator Firestone. Dilapidated and
abandoned houses, cracked streets and left behind people populate the
background and foreground. The young men slouched in a team meeting when we
first meet them are cast offs with no future and seldom a real family.
Mansassas coach Bill Courtney announces at the meeting:
“ Starting right guard shot, one linebacker shot, two players fighting
right in front of the coach, star center arrested for shooting someone in the
face with BB gun. For most coaches that would be pretty much a career's worth
of crap to deal with. I think that sums up the last two weeks for me."
When the team meets with an
ex-NFL player Aaron Hayden and he asks how many of you have two parents who
went to college, no hand go up. When he asks
“how many have a relative in jail” every player raises their hand.
Welcome to North Memphis.
Six years ago Bill Cartney shows
up as a volunteer coach. He throws himself into coaching and trying to save the
young men of the Manassas team. He loves coaching; this is clear, and would
gladly give up his successful wood products business to do in it full time. His
passion drives him at home, and interviews with his resigned and exasperated
wife and a few shots of home life with his kids reveal how consuming and costly
his coaching obsession can be. One of the film’s untouted strengths is its no
nonsense revelation of how hard on family committed coaches can be. I watched Cartney
struggle with his own sense of not being there for his own kids. Cartney reflects
on how his own father had not been there for him and his coaching other
fatherless men help to redeem that absence. I am also reminded of associate head
coach telling me, “I spent 22 years being a better father to my players than my
kids.”
His coaching extends who he
is at work and home. His blunt, outspoken tough love drills through to the
abandoned and cast off players of his team. By accident he has become the only
caring male model in their lives. He knows it and feels the responsibility
deeply. So deeply it starts to undermine his responsibilities to his family.
When Courtney started
Manassas had only 17 players. Although the school is brand new replete with state
of the art security and metal detectors, the sports facilities are a weed
spotted afterthough. A local reporter points out how the real money has flown
to the private schools and suburbs, so none of the public schools, despite new
buildings, has any real resources to face their massive task of rescuing
generations of minority students left behind and cast aside by society.
The only way the team can
finance itself is to sell itself to play fodder games with richer schools. They
travel hours to go get a payday of 5,000 dollars to support the program. Just
like an underfunded FCS team, they make themselves a punching bag for rich
suburban teams for the money. After several early season slaughters, the team
is usually broken physically and psychologically before playing their district
games.
No external motives, no race
fairy tales, not story of black white reconciliation here; just a committed guy
who loves football and loves coaching.
He spends hours with the team and spends
his own money and recruits other white well off assistant coaches to drill and
plead for discipline. He organizes fund-raisers to get the team off the
treadmill of early season games. He and his cadre of white assistant volunteer
coaches truly believe that if the students let it, “football can save your
life.” It sounds like the worst form of paternalistic coach-speak. But, in this
case, football provides an identity, place of safety away from streets, sense
of efficacy and above all male authority figures to young men who have none of
the above.
When Courtney and his coaches
lose a player, they believe they also lose a soul.
This infuses the football
quest with a sense of urgency that all the best high school and college coaches
carry—they “to build a platform of character” from which the young men have a
chance to forge a life. Courtney and the film prove what players have known
forever, what sounds like clichés to outsiders, becomes truth to insiders. Good
leaders create mantras and repeat and model them endlessly until they become
truths for the players and the coach. In Courtney and the team’s case:
"Young men of character and discipline and
commitment end up winning in life. Football doesn't build character. Football
reveals character."
It takes time, patience and
endless passion pouring into what can seem like a black hole of emotional
apathy and resignation in the team. But Courtney has been at this for five
years now. He has a core of seniors who stayed with him and slowly committed
and grew to trust this large passionate white guy from far away.
The team possess O. C. Brown
a large easy-going and very talented player who could earn a scholarship. OC
lives with his grandmother and as he says “I’m not very smart…Football is my
way out.” But he struggles with grades and above all the dreaded ACT. Almost
without noticing it, the film points out how he ends up moving in part time
with an well off white assistant coach where he gets tutoring. In the end after
failing the ACT once, he squeaks by with
the minimum 16 and earns a scholarship to Southern Mississippi. It felt eerily
like scenes from Blind Side without
the fairy tale aspect. The coach is direct and to the point, “if I were a piano
teacher and found a great talent, I’d try to help.”
I kept expecting the black-white
dynamic and subtext of the idea of well off white guys plying their coaching
passion with a bunch of underprivileged black kids to dominate the story and
reveal the insidious racial paternalism that this could represent. Courtney
feels absolutely authentic with the kids. Certainly his blunt language and his
“us” against them motivation about how the kids have to overcome the rep of
inner city teams who “quit” drives home. We see him visiting the kids in their
homes and hugging, cajoling, demanding and helping them keep together during
the craziness of high school years.
In the case of Chavis Brown,
a talented but troubled young man, the coach suspends him for attacking his own
teammates. But Courtney literally chases Chavis to stay with the team and
endure a suspension. Chavis does and in one of the profound and wrenching
scenes complete with subtitles to help with the kid’s thick north Memphis
accents apologizes to the team and gives the teams coveted “uncommon man” award
to his teammate Money Brown.
Money is an undersized player
who succeeds because of his “mental toughness.” He has a 3,8 but no money to
get to college. Worse he injures himself and in scenes reminiscent of every
football injury film ever shot. he meets with caring and honest doctors who
tell him he cannot play but has a chance if he can rehab.
Money despairs and struggles with
losing football and facing the inability to get into college for lack of money.
He quits coming to school. Again Courtney’s mantra, “you can’t quite because
you are frustrated,” matters. Courtney goes to his house and literally drags
him back. Courtney demands and models to them all that “character is revealed
in failure.” He knows there are not second chances in North Memphis, if the
kids quit, it is all over not just for the team but for their futures.
Character and discipline and
team before self. He desperately screams, yells, cajoles and loves them to
internalize this in the hopes they can
carry that beyond the high school. At the end it all comes out in football
where he yells, “Please remember discipline. Please remember character, and
let’s go kick their ass.”
At the end the coach knows he
has to leave coaching at the school for the sake of time with his family. His
solution, ironically, is to coach at his son’s school and coach his kid’s
teams. The documentary really reveals how coaches really are coaches. Coach-speak
grows from deep inside and what people may consider clichés, remain deep truths
when spoken by a passionate and smart and caring coach to young men struggling,
“Success does not reveal character. Character is revealed by failure.” We all
hear this ten times in the movie. The coach lives it and the players struggle
with it and now and then understand and live it when Chavis returns and Money
gets to college and plays in the last game. The team hears it after the first
defeat in their first game.
Courtney believes that one
way to cut through the apathy and despair is to “reach hearts through something
you love.” In this case football is all
he and these young men have. The coach never stops demanding that the
kids “get their heads on right” and pay attention to “character” and put “team
before individual.” It slowly sinks in to the reluctant and cynical, no cynical
is to optimistic, resigned team and to those of us who watch. The coach and
team capture the real lesson of football at this level. In a close game,
Courtney looks at the team and exhorts them to act with “mind with heart and bodies.
Let’s finish this thing.”
The team loses the first game
of the season. The team loses the last game of the season in the playoffs to
one of the teams that used to pay them as mercenary punching bags. In between
they win nine games and OC garners a scholarship; Chavis begins the journey to
becoming a functional person and Money rehabs and plays in his last game.
The title reminds us that
losing a game is not the same as being defeated. One’s heart and mind and
spirit can remain unbroken and undefeated even amid defeat. The coach and
players learned the lesson so dear to Courtney’s coaching heart—character
endures. To repeat, the true test of character is “not success, but failure.”
Character endures, character gets back up, character continues to work and
achieve after set-backs.
For Courtney and the
committed coaches of high school and college football, that remains the abiding
truth, the end for which football is but a means. One hopes the kids when they
leave and face that bleak unforgiving neighborhood can remember.
