30 for 30 running thread

Wright Thompson is great. I really look forward to reading whatever he has to offer.
On this particular piece, I think the premise -- that the team could have been ruptured by the events surrounding it -- is a bit specious. If there were factions with different opinions on the topic of integration on the team, I missed that part. (And I did miss a couple of minutes here and there. Please correct me if I'm wrong on this.) I'm not sure how there would have been intense political divisions within an all-white team in 1962. As for the distractions possible in seeing your practice field overtaken by the military, I'll buy that.
In that case, the context of the season is important. Five days after the shooting and the death and tragedy on campus, the football team played its Homecoming game against undefeated Houston and claimed a 40-7 win. I think the film falls a bit short here by failing to mention a couple of facts. One: While undefeated, Houston had, like everybody in those days, only played twice in September. Its wins were over Baylor and Texas A&M, both of which would go on to post losing records. Fact Two: The Ole Miss-Houston game was not on campus; it was in Jackson.
Still a nice win. Just not quite as amazing as portrayed or implied.

As for the season as a whole, the Rebels should be commended for their focus amid turmoil. But the whole truth is that this was a pretty good team and had been for several years. The 1962 club was the fourth straight Rebel squad to begin the season at 6-0. In other words, existing talent probably played a bigger role in another great season than the film suggested it did.
In general, I'm not sold on this as a wonderfully inspirational story, but maybe that wasn't the intent.

Having said all of that, I am impressed that Thompson got a guy to go on camera and admit he threw a Molotov cocktail in the general vicinity of federal troops. There had to be a great deal of resistance on the part of those players to appear in this thing because they had to fear they'd be made to look like apologists for bigotry. It appeared to me that they were treated fairly in that regard.

 

Homecoming was in Jackson, not Oxford? Was that normal back then?

 

Don't know if it was normal. Maybe this was a one-time Homecoming move in light of the controversy. Just would have been nice to know that.

 

It was played in Jackson because of the riots, not just because of fear of more unrest, but because the National Guard was still using many of the athletic facilities as staging areas.

 

Damn, that's a good question.

 

This is what drives me crazy about the 30 for 30s. I set up the DVR to record it on ESPN2 at 2 a.m. and I even set it to record for three hours because I've been caught before... Some game runs late, SportsCenter runs afterwards and then I end up missing the last 15 minutes... So I was prepared... What do I get? Three hours of fucking SportsCenter.

Fuck you ESPN!

 

Why do you DVR the 2 a.m. replay?

 

Because we usually have other stuff going during prime time.

 

Liked a good deal about the piece . . . but that little interlude spoke volumes -- and they can't take it back.

 

Does it matter she's not from the South?

 

It was a horrible thing to put in a yearbook but you do understand that 1983 was 29 years ago?

 

Kinda what I was thinking. I figure that was one dumb frat boy on Halloween rather than the institutionalized racism of 20 years prior.