Was Gerry Bertier really paralyzed? Remember the True History of the Titans Explained

Remember the Titans is a classic sports movie based on a true story, but some facts, including the details of Gerry Bertier’s injury, are not entirely accurate. Launched in 2000, Remember the Titans is the inspiring story of a football team that sets aside prejudices to play together on the pitch and become friends off it. In Alexandria, Virginia, in 1971, TC Williams High School and its football team were integrated for the first time. Led by coach Herman Boone (Denzel Washington), the Titans become a symbol of unity around which the entire community rallies.

Extremely celebrated, Remember the Titans is an uplifting, funny, and moving story about how sport and empathy can transform a mean-spirited town into a true community. Remember the Titans is based on real-life events, and TC Williams High School, Coach Boone, Coach Bill Yoast (Will Patton), his incredible football streak, and the accident that paralyzed Gerry Bertier are all true to life. However, Remember the Titans also took some important liberties with the truth in its attempts to tell a compelling story.

Gerry Bertier was actually paralyzed in a car accident

The timeline of the accident was distorted in the film

In Remember the TitansAfter the Titans’ victory in the state semifinal, Gerry Bertier is involved in a car accident that paralyzes him from the waist down. It is a huge loss for the team and a tragic incident for Gerry, his family and friends. However, the Titans were able to succeed without the All-American linebacker and defeat George C. Marshall High School for the state title.

Real-life Remember the Titans characters:

In real life, Gerry Bertier was injured in a car accident and was paralyzed from the waist down for the rest of his life. However, the accident occurred after the state championship, in which Gerry Bertier competed, and not before (through ESPN). Unfortunately, Gerry Bertier’s fate in the film coincides with what happened in real life, and he passed away in 1981 after another car accident.

TC Williams High School had no games played

The film sought to make games less one-sided

Almost all games in Remember the Titansat least the ones shown in the film, it’s close, always coming down to the last few seconds or requiring an inspirational speech from Boone or Yoast to secure victory. In reality, the TC Williams Titans were a high school football juggernaut.

Charles Mitchell, a running back for the Titans, said: “There were many times when I genuinely felt sorry for the teams we played.” (through ESPN) The Titans have run up the score on many teams, going 13-0, outscoring opponents 265-31 and being named the second-best high school team in the country (via Northern Virginia Magazine).

Racial tension between players in Remember The Titans was worse than in real life

The Titans played at a time of racial unrest in America

An important theme of Remember the Titans This is how football managed to unite a city plagued by racism, prejudice and hatred. To show this, the film offers many examples of black players and coaches being treated horribly by white residents of Alexandria.

The first scene shows Gerry Bertier and his friends running to yell at the black students entering TC Williams along with a crowd of angry citizens. The fact is that TC Williams High School was desegregated in 1965six years before the Titans won state. At this point, racial tensions were still high, but not as violent as portrayed in the film.

According to Joann Patton, who dated Yoast and taught English at TC Williams, “The children behaved much better than most adults.“In the film, Boone tells the Titans that every team they will face is completely white, which is patently false. Every other team in the league was integrated at that point.

While Remember the Titans embellished some stories for dramatic purposes, this does not mean that racial tension as a whole was exaggerated. Brown v. Board of Education took place just 20 years before the film began in 1951, Rosa Parks refused to get off a bus 16 years earlier, the Black Panther Party was formed five years earlier, and Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated just three years before the start of the Remember the Titans.

The real-life Titans may not have faced the same overt racism portrayed in the film, but in the United States, black people faced prejudice and hatred at every turn.

Sheryl Yoast passed away due to a heart condition

Coach Yoast also had other daughters

Sheryl Yoast (Hayden Panettiere) is Coach Yoast’s precocious daughter who cares more about games like football than dolls. In real life, Yoast had four daughters and none of them, including Sheryl, were particularly interested in football in addition to appearing at games with his father. Although Yoast was frustrated with the decision to portray only one of his daughters in the film, it was his other three daughters who gave their blessing to the choice. It may have been a way to honor his sister who died of an undetected heart defect in 1996, aged 34.

Gerry Bertier’s girlfriend Emma and his best friend Ray are fictional

Fictional characters highlight Gerry’s change

Many characters in Remember the Titans are based on real-life people, but two of the main ones are completely fictional. Emma Hoyt (Kate Bosworth), Gerry Bertier’s girlfriend, and Ray Budds (Burgess Jenkins), Gerry’s prejudiced best friend, are not real people. Gerry’s real girlfriend was called Becky and she was Yoast’s neighbor. Although these are not real characters, they are both important to Gerry’s fictional arc in the story. It’s one thing for Gerry to defend his team’s black players against other schools, but means a lot more when Gerry stands up to his friends.

The trip to Gettysburg was fictionalized for Remember The Titans

The iconic speech was created for the film

The real Titans team took their summer training trip to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, but what happens from there Remember the Titans It’s complete fiction. In the film, several important moments take place on the historic battlefield. But in fact, there was no 3 a.m. runs, no forced team cuts for those who couldn’t “survive” camp, and no inspirational speech from Coach Boone at Gettysburg Cemetery explaining how the white and black players had to come together.

It’s a shame, considering it’s one of the scenes that make Remember the Titans one of Denzel Washington’s best performances. After the film’s speech, the team’s players come together on this training trip, at first hating each other, only to come together on the field. In reality, although many players have admitted that there were fights on the field and in the locker room, they say this was a symptom of hyper-competition rather than racism. With the merger of two schools, only a few players would be able to maintain their starting positions, so there was a lot of jealousy and anger.

A brick wasn’t thrown through Coach Boone’s window – a bathroom was

Boone was the target of racial attacks

In a scene from Remember the TitansSheryl Yoast is visiting Coach Boone, another event that never happened, when a brick breaks her window, scaring her family. It’s a surprising scene that shows how high the tension is in Alexandria with Boone being the coach of the football team. However, the real story is even more shocking. It wasn’t a brick that was thrown at Boone’s window, but an entire bathroom.

Boone talks about this in the DVD commentary, saying:

As much as Remember the Titans takes creative liberties, this incident is a stark reminder that even if the racism presented in the film wasn’t exactly true to its exact story, the daily danger and hatred that Boone and other people of color faced (and still face) in America was very real.

How Remember The Titans Compares to Other True Sports Movies

Remember, the Titans and Rudy share a similar approach to adapting the true story

Remember the Titans is one of the best sports films of all time and continues to be enjoyed by audiences decades after its release. As with the details surrounding Gerry Bertier, there are some aspects of the film that are not factual, as is the case with all sports films inspired by real events. However, Remember the Titans manages to make changes that allow for the more entertaining story, while also remaining true to the message the true story presents.

Invincible is another inspirational sports film starring Mark Wahlberg in a true underdog story. The film features Wahlberg’s Vince Papale as a bartender in Philadelphia who attends an open tryout for the Philadelphia Eagles and makes the team. However, Invincible makes a lot of changes to the reality of what happened to make it all more impressive, including the fact that Papale was already a semi-professional football player and the fact that he never scored while at the Eagles. Such changes may lessen the film’s impact on some audiences.

However, another underdog film that also takes great liberties with its true story but is still able to achieve its purpose is Rudy. Next to Remember the Titans, Rudy is considered one of the most inspiring true sports stories. Sean Astin stars as a small but determined football player who dreams of playing on the field for Notre Dame. The movie shows all the people who refused to give him a chance and felt like his dream was ridiculous only for him to see that dream come true at the end of the movie.

Similar to how Remember the Titans changes the facts about desegregation at the time, Rudy invents obstacles for the determined hero to overcome that did not exist in real life. However, the film understands that what is important to the story is the idea that the heart can go a long way, just like Remember the Titans understands that the ease with which the team won was not as important as showing the team together. Films like this can change the facts and still have the same impact.