Football Movie Madness #2: The Express
Tonight’s entry in my quest to watch way too many football movies: The Express, yet another film based on a true story about football players overcoming racial barriers.
One of the first things I noticed were all the beautiful scenes shot on location at Syracuse University. It made me totally jealous; there aren’t any movies about Trojan Football! Why can’t somebody make a cinematic love letter to USC?? (oh, wait, that’s what Love and Basketball is for) But those scenes, as well as all the gameplay involving awesome old-fashioned football uniforms (Kansas in baby blue!), made me realize I have yet to experience East Coast football and really, really old sports programs. I think sometime in the relatively near future I’m gonna have to get myself to an Ivy League game or something else involving a rivalry or stadium nearly as old as the sport itself. Hopefully I’ll avoid the crazy, redneck, beer-throwing West Virginia fans portrayed in the movie, who reminded me a lot of… crazy, redneck, beer-throwing Notre Dame fans. Maybe I’ll watch Rudy next week…
It was in the scene right after that West Virginia game that the movie’s main character, Ernie Davis, was shown with a mysterious bloody nose, and then I suddenly remembered how this story ended in real life – Davis died of Leukemia just a year after graduating from Syracuse. But I was brought back to a much happier place shortly thereafter when the Orangemen were offered two different bowl games, and got to decide through (gasp!) a team vote. Oh, how I long for simpler times.
They of course chose to face off against #2-ranked Texas and their superstar player, supposedly the only other team in America that could bring down our heroes, who had been ranked at the top for the entire season. And then they powered over those jerkoff Longhorns and won the game and the national title outright, and rode off into the sunset, as they rightly should have (what? I’m not projecting or anything).
Well, they did win, but not before enduring something that more resembled hockey, what with all the punches thrown and all. This was because of the three black guys playing for the Orangemen, which didn’t sit so well with all those white people from Texas. Of course the developing civil rights movement was a major theme in this, the movie about the first black man to win the Heisman trophy, but it was maybe even too much to handle, mostly due to Ernie’s totally blatant goal of being a great black athlete and inspiration to all – football’s Jackie Robinson. Not one of those modest, reluctant heroes, oh, no.
But, maybe he was just a man who knew his destiny all too well. He did win that Heisman trophy and get a ton of signing money, got an awesome Forrest Gump-style doctored photo shoot with JFK, and died young to boot – a Hollywood-perfect real-life hero. Come to think of it, why exactly did it take 45 years for this movie to be made?
