As times have evolve, stories regarding the struggles of many minority athletes have been used to motivate different sports teams. Football players watch Remember the Titans to realize the power of selflessness while being on a team, while basketball players might watch Coach Carter to remind a team that practice makes perfect. However, many that view these movies fail to realize that as much as directors and producers try to accurately portray these stories of hardships and overcoming adversity, there is still a degree of falsity when translating these films from reality to a moving picture. Pride is a movie starring Terrance Howard who portrays Jim Ellis, a swim instructor, once was a competitive swimmer, in which he sees potential in an old abandoned recreational swimming pool in the inner city of Philadelphia, so he renovates and reopens the pool establishing a new predominately African-American swim team. Ellis constantly goes back and forth with the city of Philadelphia fighting demolition of the very facility that holds their practices. Facing racism, violence and a hostile city official, Ellis struggles to prepare his novice swimmers for the state championships. This movie envisions determination, belief in oneself, surrendering to the misconceptions of society, becoming an example to youth, and repentance for mistakes are all contributors to a moral lifestyle. Pride accurately portrays the glorification of discrimination within race driven sports cinema. Although racism has been deemed illegal through the Civil Rights Act of 1964, there still seems to be racism issues in modern society especially referring to professional sports. With basketball becoming a popular sport in the United States, it was no surprise to see that institutional racism is still prevalent. In 2014, he most widely discussed case in the National Basketball Association, or NBA, was that of Donald Sterling, the former owner of the Los Angeles Clippers. Although Sterling 's racist comments were not news to many, given his past, hearing the shocking words on the audio recording was enough to have him removed as owner of the team, a fine, and handed a lifetime ban from commissioner Adam Silver (Golliver, 2014). These remarks came as a surprise to the public because the team that he owned and operated consisted mostly of minority players such as Chris Paul who identifies as African American, and Blake Griffin who identifies as biracial. During the Sterling scandal, we saw Clippers players take a stand against their racist owner by turning their jerseys inside out during warm-ups and even threatening to sit out playoff games. How these players dealt with racism within their sport leads to future generations seeing how racism should be dealt with rather than using violence or other forms of retaliation. Situations such as those in professional sports also happen on the colligate level. A Texas Tech "super fan" allegedly called one of the country 's best college basketball players, Marcus Smart of Oklahoma State, the N-word and told him to "go back to Africa," though the claims were never confirmed (Lapchick, 2014). Most cinematic depictions of historical accounts of overcoming racism unfortunately do not capture the entire focus of that period of time. For example, The Express is about Syracuse University running back Ernie Davis who, in 1961 became the first African-American to earn the Heisman trophy (Schultz, 2014, p. 29). Set against the Civil Rights movement, his moving story is one of triumph, courage, and social change, with all the trappings of an affective sport film. Just after its release, critics charged filmmakers with
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Remember the Titans represents the story of the newly integrated T.C. Williams High School and its undefeated football team that won the 1971 Virginia State AAA Championship. Already at a boiling point, racial tensions threaten to erupt when the school board names Herman Boone, an African American, as head coach, passing over local favorite Bill Yoast, who is white. In the film, it appears as though federal mandate forced two schools, one white and one black, to consolidate, which created the Alexandria school in 1971. In reality, T.C. Williams opened in 1965 with an integrated student body. Yet the opening voiceover tells viewers, “up until 1971 in Alexandria, there was no race mixing,” which further heightens its inaccuracies (Schultz, p.
Remember the Titans represents the story of the newly integrated T.C. Williams High School and its undefeated football team that won the 1971 Virginia State AAA Championship. Already at a boiling point, racial tensions threaten to erupt when the school board names Herman Boone, an African American, as head coach, passing over local favorite Bill Yoast, who is white. In the film, it appears as though federal mandate forced two schools, one white and one black, to consolidate, which created the Alexandria school in 1971. In reality, T.C. Williams opened in 1965 with an integrated student body. Yet the opening voiceover tells viewers, “up until 1971 in Alexandria, there was no race mixing,” which further heightens its inaccuracies (Schultz, p.