Don’t assume sports docudramas portray the truth

by Frank Fear

We assume screenwriters, executive producers, and production companies will tell a sports story truthfully, refraining from embellishing circumstances with false depictions. Well, that doesn’t always happen, and here are two examples of what I mean.

The Express (2008) tells the story of college football great Ernie Davis, who played for Syracuse University in the late 1950s and early 60s and was the first African American to win the coveted Heisman Trophy. The NFL game plan was to team Davis in the Cleveland Browns backfield with the great Jim Brown, but Davis died from cancer before he ever took a snap. Still, the Browns retired what would have been his jersey number, an extraordinary act for a remarkable football player. At the time, Davis–and Brown before him, who also played at Syracuse in the mid-1950s–were among the few African Americans playing college football in a largely segregated sport. That circumstance, well documented in the film, is embellished to the point of exaggeration and fabrication in at least one case. The fabrication comes during a seven-minute scene set in 1959 as SU travels to West Virginia U to take on the Mountaineers.

How “The Express” fumbled the Ernie Davis Story: Syracuse.com described a scene where “Syracuse University’s racially mixed football team faces an angry white crowd at West Virginia, where fans shout slurs and throw garbage, and even the referees are corrupt.” Syracuse and West Virginia did not play in Morgantown in 1959 - the circumstances depicted in the film did not happen. The production company admitted that fact, but only at the end of the film, in the last visual shown in the closing credits: “Incidents and the location of the game between Syracuse and West Virginia University have been fictionalized.” Fictionalized? Fabricated is a more appropriate word.

Flash forward to today, and a film currently in post-production may never be released to the public. Black Spartans is the story of America’s first fully integrated college football team, the Michigan State Spartans of the 1960s, and the leadership that made it so, including the legendary coach Duffy Daugherty. His teams won multiple national championships, and the 1966 team included five African American players on the nation’s All-America team, Bubba Smith, Bob Apisa, George Webster, Clinton Jones, and Gene Washington.

It is an inspiring story–the real story, that is. But the Black Spartans version has players, their families, and the school up in arms, with lawsuits pending and calls for scrapping the film’s release. Why? While plenty of dramatic and inspiring storylines are associated with why and how MSU chose the integration path at a time when many other schools did not, the film’s executive producers took creative license to embellish what happened back then. For example, Gene Washington said recently, “I am falsely depicted as frequently partying–even drinking “jungle juice”–and offensively portrayed as speaking in broken and crude English.” Bob Apisa, the first Samoan to be selected as a college football All-America, said he is “profoundly dismayed” to be portrayed leading the team in a native dance, attributing the scene to being “nothing more than an ethnic stereotype.” In another scene the players said did not happen, a white player (attributed to being racist) physically attacks one of the African American players and his girlfriend. History is misserved when films like these become part of the public domain because public figures are misrepresented, their reputations unduly tarnished. While it is appropriate for filmmakers to take a critical eye and include scenes in films that people and institutions would rather be kept from view, that did not happen in either of the films. Mischaracterization and fabrication occurred.

Frank Fear, a WVU graduate and professor emeritus at Michigan State University, is also the author of the recently released Band of Brothers, Then and Now: The Inspiring Story of the 1966-70 WVU Football Mountaineers.

THURSDAY, JUNE 8, 2023