Remember the Titans
Walt Disney Pictures (PG)
Name: ______________________
Task:
Complete the question attached after viewing the film “Remember
the Titans”, using the attached Scripture passages as reference
points for you discussion.
Minimum requirement:
Two typed pages, 1 ½ spacing, 12 font maximum
Remember the Titans
Walt Disney Pictures (PG)
This is a movie about seeing beyond what the world sees.
At a time when people thought they knew everything there was
to
know about a person by the way they looked, there was a group who was forced to break the rules,
and who in the process discovered what it means to be human; a child of God.
Based on a remarkable true story, "Remember the Titans" follows the explosive dramatic events
that took place in Alexandria, Virginia in 1971 when African American football coach Herman
Boone (Academy Award-winner Denzel Washington) was hired to guide an integrated but racially
polarized high school team—the T.C. Williams Titans. Angry, stubborn and a rigid task master,
Boone faces a cool reception from the team's players as well as an awkward relationship with
assistant coach Bill Yoast (Will Patton), a local white coach with seniority and a tradition of
winning who was bypassed for the job. As the two men learn to overcome their ignorance and
bigotry and realize that they have much in common—integrity, honour and a strong work ethic—
they work together to transform a group of angry unfocused players into a dynamic winning team
of responsible young men. In the process, they also unite a divided community and ensure that
Virginia will always "Remember the Titans."
At the beginning, the players don’t want to be together. The white players resent having to give up
their coach, accept a black coach, and try out for their positions against black players. The black
players appreciate having a black head coach, but they think it will help them gain all of the
starting positions on the team. The black players want to have a black team, and don’t like the
integration any more than the white players. This film is about how the team comes together in
spite of (or maybe because of?) everything that is working against them.
Questions
1. How do the ’71 Titans start to become a team?
2. What do you think Coach Boone meant by “play this game like men”?
Did he mean to be macho, to simply be respectful to one another, or to
be mature in their relationships?
3. How much does the way you act toward other people influence your
attitudes about them, even despite the way you feel?
4. How did you feel when one player said to the other, “Back to the real world—we’d have been
better staying where we were.”
5.
How much do the opinions of people around you influence you and your actions?
6. What changed for Coach Yoast over the course of the ’71 football season? Have you ever
stood up for what you believed was right, even though others didn’t approve of your stance?
Have you ever taken a stand even though doing so would cause you to lose something
important to you?
7. What happened between these two people to cause such a close connection? How had they
both changed from the beginning of the story? How did you respond to Gary’s chastising the
nurse: “Alice, are you blind? Don’t you see the family resemblance? That’s my brother!”
8. Do you pay attention to how you communicate or just what you say?
9. What can the story of the ’71 Titans tell us about our world today, especially in relation to
race relations? How are Aborigines treated in Australia? How are people from other
countries treated? Consider the treatment of refugees who arrive in Australia without visas
(the government calls them ‘illegal immigrants’). What about Asians (Japanese, Indians,
Chinese, Vietnamese, etc), people from the Middle East (Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, etc), Italians
or Greeks if your group is mostly white? If you are of a different ethnic race, how are white
people treated in your context?
Questions and Answers
10. How do the ’71 Titans start to become a team?
(They come together as a team at the training camp. They have to get
away from everything else [friends, family, news, etc.]. Even
this doesn’t work at first—they’re still fighting at camp. They have
to start to get to know one another as individuals [remember the
assignment at camp, learning specific things about members of the
other ‘race’ before they can become a team.)
11. What do you think Coach Boone meant by “play this game like men”? Did he mean to be
macho, to simply be respectful to one another, or to be mature in their relationships?
Coach Boone tells the players, “I don’t care if you like each other, you will respect each
other… and maybe play this game like men.”
12. How much does the way you act toward other people influence your attitudes about them,
even despite the way you feel?
13. How did you feel when one player said to the other, “Back to the real world—we’d have been
better staying where we were.”
The team comes to another crisis when they arrive back in town from training camp. School
is just starting, and for the first time, T.C. Williams High School is integrated. There are
hundreds of protesters at the school when the black students arrive, and much melee at the
school entrance. The Titans are dumbfounded because they’ve changed during training
camp, but their town hasn’t.
After a few games, the team was losing some of what they had gained at camp. One even
says to another, “The world tells us they don’t want us to be together and we just fall apart.
14. How much do the opinions of people around you influence you and your actions?
15. What changed for Coach Yoast over the course of the ’71 football season? Have you ever
stood up for what you believed was right, even though others didn’t approve of your stance?
Have you ever taken a stand even though doing so would cause you to lose something
important to you? Coach Yoast lost the vote that would have put him in the Hall of Fame,
because of how he supported the team instead of the people who wanted Coach Boone to fail.
Early in the film getting into the Hall of Fame was really important to him. At the end, though,
when he found out how the vote went, it didn’t seem to faze him too much.
16. What happened between these two people to cause such a close connection? How had they
both changed from the beginning of the story? How did you respond to Gary’s chastising the
nurse: “Alice, are you blind? Don’t you see the family resemblance? That’s my brother!”
When Gary was in the hospital after he got his by the truck, the only person he wanted to
see was Julius.
At the beginning of the film, before training camp, we hear the line, “He’s just another
blessed child in God’s loving family.” At the end of the film, we are told to “Trust the soul
of a man, not his look.” Both of these are good sentiments, if they are spoken with sincerity.
However, in the film, the first is spoken sarcastically.
17. Do you pay attention to how you communicate or just what you say?
18. What can the story of the ’71 Titans tell us about our world today, especially in relation to
race relations? How are Aborigines treated in Australia? How are people from other
countries treated? Consider the treatment of refugees who arrive in Australia without visas
(the government calls them ‘illegal immigrants’). What about Asians (Japanese, Indians,
Chinese, Vietnamese, etc), people from the Middle East (Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, etc), Italians
or Greeks if your group is mostly white? If you are of a different ethnic race, how are white
people treated in your context?