Winning Isn’t the Only Thing, but It’s Everything

It may sound odd, but the thing that bothered me most about “We Are Marshall” is the name of the director. Billed only as McG, the name given him at birth by his parents was Joseph McGinty Nichol, McGinty being his mother’s maiden name. That’s the name of an honest worker who, glad to be known as a member of his own family, is likely to take pride in his workmanship as well.McG, by contrast, is the name of someone desperate to stake his claim to celebrity — and who, in doing so, sees himself and wants us to see him as sui generis, all on his own without forebears or descendants. He’s nothing but a great big shining star, all alone in the firmament and instantly recognizable (he hopes) by those three letters — one fewer even than Cher.Does this matter? I suppose not if this were “Charlie’s Angels” or “Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle,” which are his previous feature credits, or the music videos he directed before that. But “We Are Marshall” is a movie about community, family, memory — the very things that his made-up name denies. How seriously, therefore, can we take what he has to say about them?The question is particularly important because the story he is telling is a true one. On November 14, 1970, while returning from a game against East Carolina, almost the entire football team of Marshall University, together with most of its coaching staff and a number of boosters and supporters, was killed in a plane crash.The rest of the season was of course canceled, and it looked as if football at Marshall was finished, at least for some years to come. But a group of students led by Nate Ruffin (Anthony Mackie), a team co-captain who had been left behind on account of an injury, organized to demand that the university’s president, Donald Dedmon (David Strathairn), take steps to field a team the very next year.According to the movie, anyway, on the other side was the supposedly “composite” character of Paul Griffen (Ian McShane), a local industrialist supposed to have been both a member of the university’s board of governors and the father of the golden-boy quarterback who had been killed.”It wouldn’t be a game anymore, Don,” he says of the proposal to revive Marshall football. “It would be a weekly reminder of what we have lost.”Don, as you might have guessed, goes ahead anyway and hires Jack Lengyel (Matthew McConaughey) as his new head coach. Jack, in turn, persuades the one surviving coach of the old team, Red Dawson (Matthew Fox), to come back for one year to help out, though his own fortuitous escape from the disaster has so traumatized him that he is ready to give up football completely — and he does so after his year as Jack’s assistant.Emotionally, you see where this is going. On the one side, you have the continuing grief of Red Dawson, Paul Griffen, and others, always threatening to drag us down, and on the other you have the gentle and humorous proddings and cajolings of the determinedly amiable Jack Lengyel pointing us toward an uplifting conclusion.In this respect, “We Are Marshall” is like every other football movie that pits an underdog against opponents they supposedly have no chance of defeating, but it’s none the worse for that. In fact, the least original parts of the movie are the most engaging, exciting, and genuinely uplifting things about it. As they say, the old stories are best.But we also see in the film a point of intersection between two contradictory American cultural tendencies: the athletic culture of victory above all and the therapeutic culture that eschews competition in favor of nurturing and self-esteem.Mr. McG seems hardly to have noticed that there’s a conflict there. If grief and pain can be healed, at least to some degree, by victory, where’s the problem?Here it is. It’s a question of relative values. In the too-brief snatch of film before the plane crash, we see the doomed head coach saying to his players after their narrow loss to East Carolina: “There’s only one thing people remember, and it ain’t how we played the game. Winning is the only thing.”If ever there were an invitation to dramatic irony, here it is. In the long term, we see, victory and defeat are merely footnotes. The one thing people remember is the sense of love and community that binds them together and that is so tragically fractured by the accident.And yet the film scarcely bothers to make this point. Under the circumstances, the excitement of putting a team of underdog freshmen — allowed by special dispensation of the NCAA — and walk-ons against a series of much more experienced foes and hoping for victory looks like going through the motions.Also going through the emotions. Though Jack Lengyel claims — in his big inspirational speech to the new Marshall team before the climactic game — that he, like “everyone in this business who’s worth a darn,” believes in the old coach’s credo that “winning is everything and nothing else matters,” the grief they all feel sort of puts this on hold. “Some day we’ll wake up and be like every other team and winning will be everything again.”I don’t know about you, but I find this confusing. Is winning everything or isn’t it? Mr. McG’s own hunger for celebrity suggests to me the crassness of a success ethos like that of Marshall alumnus Randy Moss, now with the Oakland Raiders, who once said that the plane crash “really wasn’t nothing big.” Marshall deserves better.jbowman@nysun.com

Winning Isn’t the Only Thing, but It’s Everything

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