This in one of my favorite sports movies. It's a mostlytrue story about the integration of a Virgina high school and its football team. The hero is Herman Boone a black man who takes on the unenviable task of coaching a group of young blacks and whites who don't like each other and turning them into a team of people who respect one another... and of course win the state championship. Boone's played by Denzel Washington (a graduate of my grandfather's Jesuit alma mater Fordham). Did I mention that virtually none of the white people in town like Boone and most want him to fail, though he quickly, sort of, wins over the white coach whose job he's taken.
My favorite scene is when a white Marine colonel drives up to practice and tells Boone he wants his son to play for him. "What position does he play. Quarterback. Sir, I already have a quarterback. Why don't you try another school where he can play. You don't understand coach. I have young black and white men fighting together and dying together [in Vietnam]. Those other schools don't have any black players. My son's going to play for you even if he has to sit on the bench." In the end the starting quarterback gets hurt and the colonel's son becomes the hero.
Another good sports movie with a racial bent is Invictus, starring Morgan Freeman as Nelson Mandela the South African President who uses rugby as a vehicle for uniting South Africa.
Father Brooks, the hero of Fraternity, was a saintly man. One thing he was not at Holy Cross was Herman Boone. And Ted Wells, the leader of the Black Students Union, sure as the dickens wasn't Nelson Mandela.
