Undefeated

With tonight being Oscars night it seemed like a fine time to draw some attention to a football movie that won an Oscar. Undefeated is a 2011 documentary directed by Daniel Lindsay and T.J. Martin. The movie had such a limited theatrical release that by the time I found a theater that had it, I was too late. I've waited ever since for it's DVD release. That finally happened last week and I finally saw it last night. It's terrific. The Academy thought so too as they awarded Lindsay and Martin the Oscar for Best Documentary. I had two years to build up the damn thing and I wasn't disappoint. I knew enough of the movie to find it interesting that it was about a team that was neither undefeated nor finished the season with a championship.

Lindsay and Martin spent the 2009 football season with the Manassas High Tigers in north Memphis. Head coach Bill Courtney and his staff were volunteers. Courtney was a former high school coach turned lumber salesman that volunteered to help a school in a lost neighborhood. He and his fellow volunteers turned a perennial whipping boy into a team that couldn't be defeated. The kids, so used to giving up, learned to never give up. Lindsay and Martin did a terrific job of introducing the viewers to the coaches and a handful of the players. Tackle O.C. Brown's story is unusually similar to that of another huge, talented tackle from the Memphis area. That would be Michael Oher and his better known story told in The Blind Side. Brown was taken in and helped by an affluent white family but his stay wasn't as permanent as Oher's stay. Fellow Tigers lineman Montrail "Money" Brown stole Undefeated for me. Perhaps I could recognize with his partially torn ACL blowing up his senior football season. Perhaps it was his happy personality and self-awareness. He loved playing football but was at total ease with being to small for college football. He knew that high school football was it for him despite his love for the game. He simply wasn't as huge or as talented as O.C. Brown. Still, he was desperate to get back on the field for his final football games. Like Montrail, the film ends with you wanting more football games. You become so used to this miracle moving along that you want it to continue. Manassas hadn't won a Tennessee state playoff game in it's 110-year history. You want them to get that win. For them and for you.

Great flick. The Flea Flicker says check it out.