Projo Sports Blog

By Cedric Golden
Austin American-Statesman

AUSTIN, Texas -- What if you found out someone was playing you in a movie?
Most of us would invite friends and relatives to the theater then urge them to stay for a second screening.

Well, Bobby Lackey learned two years ago that the 1959 Longhorns team he quarterbacked would be featured prominently in "The Express: The Ernie Davis Story." Last month, he received an invitation for a private screening of the film. He promptly declined and headed to the golf course.

"I was told there were some bad scenes and some derogatory things about the University of Texas in the movie," said Lackey, who played in the 1960 Cotton Bowl, which paired Texas against Syracuse. That game is the meat of the story and its blurred events are the reason Lackey is staying away from the red carpet.

"I told the Cotton Bowl people that those things didn't happen, and they were making up stories to try and sell more movie tickets," Lackey said. "I wasn't going to watch any of that."

Lackey isn't alone in his opinion of "The Express," which recounts the college football career of Davis, the first African American to win the Heisman Trophy. The actors are top-notch, and the flow of events is seamless, but the line between reality and fiction has been blurred in the 48 years since Syracuse defeated Texas 23-14 to win a national championship. Certain portrayals of UT players and coaches have drawn the ire of some Texas exes.

Over the course of the 90-minute film, I was supposedly given an idea of the segregation and racial hatred Davis encountered during his college career. Still, there are living figures represented in the movie who have no plans to watch it anytime soon because they disagree with how the state of Texas and the Longhorns are represented.

The team and the state are not exactly beacons of racial equality in the film, and let's face it, Texas wasn't the greatest place for a black man to live in the late '50s.

It was a racially charged time in our history, my dad has reminded me , and "The Express" offers the same lesson.

Some quick research reveals inaccuracies in the movie's script, as the game's biggest plays are moved around for dramatic effect.

The producers get the final score right, but viewers are misled to believe the game was closer than it was.

Two of Davis' teammates at Syracuse, Dick Easterly and Patrick Harbor, told the St. Petersburg Times that a scene showing the team being pelted with garbage and subjected to racial epithets before a game at West Virginia did not happen. Syracuse did not even play West Virginia that season. They met a season later.

Easterly added that the movie depicts some events as involving Davis, when they actually involved his predecessor at Syracuse, Jim Brown.

As if "The Express" didn't have enough twists, the characters who exhibit the most hatred in the movie are played by former Longhorns who played for Mack Brown from 1999-2002. Matt Trissel is cast as Longhorns defensive tackle Clay Taylor, while former tight end Chad Stevens plays Taylor's nasty linemate, Peter Logan.

Stevens said his character is based on the late Larry Stephens, who played for coach Darrell Royal from 1957-59. The Logan character utters racial epithets at a black Syracuse player in the movie, prompting a major brawl in the middle of the field. The fight actually happened, but the question remains: Did Larry Stevens utter the epithets or did Hollywood take some dramatic license to increase ticket sales?

"Larry Stephens was my roommate," Lackey said. "If anything, he was trying to get the guy into a fight so he could get him thrown out of the game because their athletes were so much better than ours. But I don't know a one of my teammates that said anything derogatory. How are you going to say the N-word in a football game and spit on somebody? Coach Royal would not have put up with that kind of behavior."

Chad Stevens has performed as a stuntman in several football movies, including "Friday Night Lights" and "The Longest Yard" remake starring Adam Sandler. Stevens said he wasn't worried about any fallout from playing a Longhorns football player who is depicted as being racist because those who know him can separate him from the roles he's playing.

"Honestly, I've been so far removed from Texas for some years, so it wasn't a big deal," said Stevens, who lives in Houston. "I don't think it would have discouraged me either way.

"Since we made the movie and the reviews came out, some folks from UT have called (Trissel) about (the portrayals), but they haven't called me."

Trissel said no one connected to Texas advised him against taking the role, but he was concerned about how Royal would be portrayed in the film.

Turns out, the Royal character has only one line in the movie. I also was disappointed to hear that one scene Trissel described didn't make it to the screen.

"We spent half of a day shooting a scene where I go up to Ernie after the game, and we shake hands and I tell him, `Good game,"' Trissel said. "Chad is standing right behind me. It was a good scene I wished had made it into the movie."

A good scene that Lackey says actually happened.

"It was a long time ago, but I know we shook hands and told him nice game and that his team deserved to win," Lackey said. "Then we all walked off the field."

The movie also shows a local country club refusing to allow Syracuse's five African American players into a postgame dinner, leading the team to go elsewhere. Lackey remembers differently.

"We went to a party after the game, and Bobby Darin was there singing `Mack the Knife,' " he said. "The Syracuse players were there, too."

Contrary to the movie, the 1959 Texas Longhorns were not an all-white team. Days after the game, Royal called in halfback Rene Ramirez and asked him if he heard any racial epithets during the Cotton Bowl.

"I thought he was talking about me because I was called many names back then, during games and by some of my own teammates in scrimmages," said Ramirez, a Mexican-American. "I told him I heard some things but nothing I hadn't heard before. But that wasn't a racially charged game. It was like any other football game."

That isn't to say there wasn't racism in the United States at the start of 1960, especially in the South. The world was different then. It 's still changing today, for the better, although racism exists.

"The Express" (blurred facts and all) took us back to when the country and college football were adjusting to a turbulent time in our history.

"It touched close to home," said 27-year-old moviegoer Alfonso Castillo, who works with the Boys and Girls Club in Austin. "People back then were set in their ways. That movie is a reminder that you have to know history to not repeat history."

Flashing back to the present, I sat in a theater Tuesday night surrounded by a couple hundred Austinites, some of whom will probably be in the stands at the Cotton Bowl today, when Texas faces Oklahoma.

They clapped when Texas football was described in "The Express" as a religion. They groaned when Logan uttered his epithet.

At different points, the movie made me proud to be a black man and embarrassed to be a Texan at the same time. Embarrassment turned to pride when Davis intercepted a pass by Lackey on screen, and the theater erupted into cheers. Moviegoer Julie Jacobs said she cried.

The portrayal of the events of Jan. 1, 1960, will be debated as this movie picks up steam at the box office, but there was no questioning the authenticity of the audience's cheers and Julie's tears.

Those were real.

 Tags  The Express University of Texas

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