The Winning Thing

Couldn’t sleep. Wound up tuning in to this movie. Which I had seen before, but as sometimes happens, it struck me differently this time.

If you don’t know the history, West Virginia’s Marshall University lost its football team in a 1970 plane crash. The movie, with some liberties taken, is about what happened in the next year. A coach from tiny Wooster, Ohio, accepts the job of rebuilding the football team from scratch. He has three surviving varsity players, a traumatized assistant coach, a university president in over his head, and a college town scorched by grief. He succeeds in winning one game. End of movie.

Several things I found riveting this time around, in no particular order.

The traumatized assistant quits after a humiliating first game blowout. He tells the new coach, “We are not honoring the dead players or [coach]. He said ‘winning is everything,’ and all we’re doing is disgracing him and them.”

When the new coach responds, it’s in a chapel, just the two of them. The newbie says, “He was right. Winning is everything. Every coach in every sport forever has always believed that. I’ve said it more times than I can count. I’ve always believed it until I got here.

“But that’s not what this is about. This isn’t about winning or losing or even how we play the game. Right here, right now, it’s about suiting up and getting on the field every week. We may not win tomorrow, next week, or any game this season. But if we keep playing, we make it possible for our teams to win again in the future. If we do our job today, we’ll get back to a day when winning can be everything again.”

Beautifully said. It took more than a dozen years, but Marshall returned not only to winning but to three national championships in their division.

On the other hand, something else I noticed. The big speech occurred, as I said, in a chapel, and there was a camera cut or two to the cross. Without Hollywood’s aversion to religion, a simpler argument might have been to nod at the cross and say, “He lost. He suffered through death. If his brethren had quit, we’d never have heard of him. But they didn’t quit, and he ultimately won two-thirds of the earth.”

Can’t do that in Hollywood scripts, though. Take a look at the critics’ reviews at imdb.com. Cliched, superficial, weak. Really? This is a story that actually happened. The acting wasn’t over the top. The production and editing were up to standard. The script was clever throughout. What’s so bad about the movie? That the critics don’t want to hear about a positive story with Christian overtones that really did happen. Period.

All that aside. What stays with me is the part of the big speech that says we have to keep suiting up and getting on the field. We may not win today or tomorrow.

But if we keep playing, we may one day get our country back. Otherwise, we fall back to being badminton and beach volleyball players, while the big guys romp in the Division I political class.

We are Marshall. As many of us as have the guts.