Herman Boone was completely misrepresented in Remember the Titans

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Not long after the release of Remember the Titans, the uplifting 2000 blockbuster about the integration of the T.C. Williams High School football team, former coach Herman Boone ceased to be the Titan his players all remembered. Instead, in public appearances, he began to play the role of Herman Boone playing Denzel Washington playing Herman Boone.

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Apart from the name, little about the celluloid Boone rings true to Paspatis. The Boone of the movie is an inspiring leader whose righteous efforts unified a community that, until he showed up, had been divided along racial lines. But Paspatis has long argued that Boone was an egalitarian only in one sense. "Herman Boone treated everybody horribly, no matter what race," says Paspatis.

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But screenwriter Gregory Allen Howard couldn't cull enough material from T.C.'s dominant state championship run in 1971 for the parable he wanted to tell. So he recast Alexandria circa 1971 as Birmingham circa 1963. And he posed the 1971 consolidation of Alexandria's high schools, which turned three full-sized high schools into one giant high school, as the racial integration of the city's schools, though in reality all three schools had been racially integrated years before their merger. The real record shows that T.C. had black and white students when it opened in 1965.

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Paspatis has never quibbled about the greatness of that Titans team, which destroyed opponents all year long, going 13-0 and posting a 357-45 scoring differential, with nine shutouts. He asserts to anybody who'll listen, though, that the greatness was a function of numbers and existing talent, not anything Boone cultivated. The merger of three full-sized high schools gave T.C. by far the biggest talent pool in the state. In a 1972 story in the Washington Post, Thomas Boswell wrote that there were 4,427 high school students in Alexandria, meaning the total number of potential athletes at T.C. was "more than double that of any other" school in the region.

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The 1971 Titans' best player, linebacker Gerry Bertier, had been a starter two seasons earlier for the regional champion team from Hammond High, one of the consolidated schools. There was no state tournament that season. (Bertier's 1971 numbers, via Paspatis's record-keeping, seem the stuff of fiction: In 13 games, he had 42 quarterback sacks and threw opposing backs for 432 yards in losses. Bertier was paralyzed in an auto accident after the 1971 season, and not, as Howard's script led viewers to believe, before the state championship game.)

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