My thanks to Deacon, who posted the URL for the interview exposing this movie as anti-white propaganda from the usual sources. Can you imagine the emotions being stirred up in black viewers? Not to mention more guilt for the white audience.
[url]http://www.amren.com/mtnews/archives/2006/02/hollywood_takes _liberties_with.php[/url]
In the middle of the film, there's a devastating sequence of events that begins when one of the traveling Texas Western Miners is brutally assaulted in the restroom of a Southern restaurant by "crackers," beaten bloody and then shoved head-first into a toilet in which we have just seen a man urinating.
Frightened by the incident, their confidence shaken, the Miners shortly thereafter find, in an even more shocking scene, their motel rooms trashed, their personal belongings violated and the slogans "******s Die" and "Coons Go Home" scrawled all over the walls in what looks like either red paint or blood.
From here, the battered team takes a long, solemn bus ride to Seattle for its next game. When they arrive, the mood is so grim that Haskins' assistant wants to give up. But Haskins can't, because it's become a moral crusade for him. "Just THINK of how these boys have been degraded and humiliated just because they're black."
Cut to the Seattle University game, where the fans are booing just like all the rest of the rednecks we have seen. And as a consequence of this abuseâ€â€the restaurant, the motel, the Seattle U fansâ€â€the Miners lose the game: the only loss of their magical season. It's the low point from which they will rise to a thrilling climax.
Now, there are several things wrong with this scenario. First, neither the restaurant nor the motel scenes actually happened to the Texas Miners. This was divulged to me by the film's producer, Jerry Bruckheimer, when I interviewed him a month before the film was released. Those incidents were made up, he said, "for dramatic purposes."
