We Are Marshall

http://www.usatoday.com/sports/college/football/2006-04-30-marshall_x.htm

Marshall tragedy finally comes to film

'WE ARE MARSHALL'

REMEMBERING THE TRAGEDY

Reflections on the Marshall University football team's 1970 plane crash, which killed 75 people, the worst sports-related disaster in U.S. history:

By Tom Weir, USA TODAY

HUNTINGTON, W.Va. — Dressed in DayGlo green socks, a plaid jacket that looks straight off the Goodwill rack and a lime green tie as wide as it is loud, actor Matthew McConaughey hardly looks like People's Sexiest Man of the Year as he steps onto the movie set.

Anywhere else in America, McConaughey's outfit would send onlookers' thoughts back to laughable moments of the 1970s. But this population-50,000 college town needs no props to go there because not a day goes by without eerie flashbacks to Nov. 14, 1970.

That was the rainy, fog-shrouded Saturday night when the Marshall University football team, having lost to East Carolina and completing a road trip aboard a charter jet for the first time, crashed into an Appalachian hillside near Huntington's Tri-State Airport.

All 75 people aboard the DC-9 — including 37 Thundering Herd players, five coaches and several prominent citizens who were boosters — died in what is still the worst sports-related disaster in U.S. history.

McConaughey, 2005 best actor Oscar nominee David Strathairn (Edward R. Murrow in Good Night and Good Luck) and Lost series star Matthew Fox spent three weeks in Huntington in April, filming We Are Marshall. It chronicles the crash aftermath and is scheduled for a December release.

Everyone stresses this isn't a movie about running off tackle but one about a steel mill community and its university climbing back on track after falling into unfathomable sorrow.

"They could have just shut down the program. They talked about it, but they didn't," says McConaughey, who portrays the coach who took over at Marshall, Jack Lengyel. "The moral of this story isn't about winning and losing, not even how you play the game, but that you do play the game."

The program went on to become the nation's winningest in the 1990s.

Remarkably, until Warner Bros. and Legendary Pictures undertook We Are Marshall, the story went untouched by sports-minded Hollywood executives who instead have given us a cross-dressing basketball player in Juwanna Mann, Whoopi Goldberg coaching the Knicks in Eddie and Neil Simon whiffing badly with The Slugger's Wife.

"What struck me is that it's this amazing, untold story," says We Are Marshall scriptwriter Jamie Linden, who became aware of the tragedy six years ago.

Linden, then a Florida State marketing major, read a brief article about the 30th anniversary of the crash in the school newspaper. The more he researched, the more he was intrigued.

He learned that tackle Eddie Carter wasn't on the plane because, while at home for his father's funeral, his mother kept insisting the plane would crash. Carter didn't believe her but agreed to skip the game. He later turned down a chance to sign with the Dallas Cowboys, instead becoming a prominent Baptist evangelist.

Linebacker Nate Ruffin, who missed the flight because of a shoulder injury, became the leader of the team Lengyel pieced together in 1971 with basketball players and walk-ons.

Defensive back Felix Jordan was on the team bus, waiting to leave on Friday the 13th for the ill-fated loss at East Carolina, when coaches forced him off and said it would be better to stay home and rest his sore ankle.

"It's a story that's so rich, and it's slipped through the cracks," says Linden, 26. "The story is there. Our job is just to not screw it up."

Sticking to the story line

Ten days ago the crew was filming a scene where surviving players confront then-Marshall president Donald Dedmon, played by Strathairn, demanding they be allowed to play the season's final game, against Ohio University. The president tells them no, there are 75 funerals to attend, and there will be time for football later.

Watching the scene appreciatively with his wife and daughter is Rick Meckstroth, a linebacker who didn't make the 1970 trip because freshmen weren't eligible then.

"That's exactly how it was," Meckstroth says. "This is as genuine as it gets. These are actual things that happened, and they're doing a great job of sticking to it."

Meckstroth remembers pulling mattresses out of dormitory rooms and setting up a triage area after news broke that the flight had crashed.

"We thought there were just injuries, but no one came," he says of the all-night vigil. "But the hardest part was being on that floor (of the players' dormitory) when their parents started coming in to get their belongings."

For about two weeks, Meckstroth got up and put on the only suit he owned and went to another round of funerals.

"We were talking," Meckstroth says. " 'Do we transfer? Do we stay as a group?' "

They stayed and played for a team in 1971 that, Meckstroth says, "took everybody and anybody."

The low point of a 2-8 season in which Marshall was shut out five times was a 66-6 drubbing by Miami (Ohio).

"That was uncalled for. It burns a hole in your heart," Meckstroth says. "To this day, people here still hate Miami with a passion."

School, community in lock step

Lengyel would become familiar to many fans during tenures as athletics director at Navy, Missouri, Colorado and elsewhere. But in 1971 he was as obscure as Marshall's players, a Division III coach from Ohio at the College of Wooster, the third person offered the job in Huntington.

"I thought I was rebuilding a football team, but as soon as I got there I realized it was much more than that," says Lengyel, now retired in the Phoenix suburb of Surprise.

"That university is that community, and that community is that university. I've had about 12, 13 college jobs, and I've never seen any other place that has an affinity like Huntington and Marshall."

After the NCAA readily agreed to let Marshall make freshmen eligible in 1971, Lengyel altered the team's name to "The Young Thundering Herd."

He was hired in March 1971, and the lack of recruiting time left him without an experienced kicker.

"I put an ad in the school paper and said, 'Free room, board and tuition for anybody who can be our kicker,' " Lengyel says.

About 15 students showed up; none of the first 14 showed promise. The last kid on the field was wearing a soccer uniform and soccer shoes, had scraggly hair and a beard and said he had never played football.

" 'Ba-wump!' " Lengyel says. "He kicks the fricking ball. You know that sound when a kicker hits it just right?"

Lengyel kept moving the kicker back, and the ball kept flying through the uprights.

"I said, 'Son, shave, get a haircut and you got a full scholarship,' " Lengyel says. "He showed up the next day, all clean, spanking new."

The student was Blake Smith, and, like a good movie, we'll save his best scene for last.

Never a day without memories

While doing movie publicity, Lengyel has talked for the first time about a ritual he had with the team in his four Marshall seasons, when he went 9-33. Before the first home game, he took the team to the Spring Hill Cemetery, to see the memorial to the players and the six blank tombstones that mark the graves of players whose bodies couldn't be identified.

On the first trip, he told them, " 'These are your teammates, these are the players and coaches and trainers who went before you.' "

He ended the talk with, " 'The funeral ends today. We have to begin on the future.' "

The funeral never did end for Red Dawson, an assistant coach who hated to fly and instead used the drive to and from East Carolina to recruit. Although he had played a season in the AFL and football was his passion, Dawson coached just one year under Lengyel, then quit the game forever.

"I just needed to work hard and think less," says Dawson, who took a job laying sewer pipe in ditches. "You'd walk across campus and you just might lose your emotions at any time, and you might pass by somebody who was doing the exact same thing."

Even now, he says, "Sooner or later, every day, something will make you flash back on it."

The torment of losing his colleagues and recruits is made clear when Dawson is asked whether, despite everything, he feels blessed that he wasn't on that flight.

He shakes his head, rubs his chin and says, "You know, believe me, I've debated that question many times."

Dawson is portrayed by Fox. To help Fox prepare for the role, Dawson swallowed his fear of flying and went to Hawaii where Fox was filming Lost episodes.

Addressing Dawson's "survivor guilt," Fox says, "You have to realize the guy recruited a lot of those players. He sat in their homes when they were 17 and 18 years old and convinced their parents they should go to Marshall and he would take care of them. For that kind of guy, a promise is a promise, even if it's not in your control."

Moving forward, at last

Although little was in The Young Thundering Herd's control during the 1971 season, the movie ends with the team's enduring moment of glory, in the second game of the season, its home opener. The team had just made that first trip to the cemetery and left determined to end the funeral as it took the field against Xavier as a three-touchdown underdog.

Moviegoers likely will leave the theater thinking Hollywood yet again rewrote history for the sake of a happy ending. But Marshall truly did manage to run 10 plays in the final minute and 18 seconds and really did win 15-13 on a last-second touchdown pass called by Dawson.

Looking at it another way, the margin of victory had hinged on a 31-yard field goal delivered in the first half by that cleaned-up kicker, Blake Smith, who had a question for his coach after the winning touchdown.

"Everybody came onto the field, and Blake wanted to know if he had to kick the PAT," Lengyel says. "I said, 'No, Blake, the game's over.' "

Lengyel adds: "We threw our priest into the showers. And when we came back out an hour and a half later, the stands were still full, 15,000 people, because everybody up there knew somebody or had a friend on that plane."