Against the Tide (2013)

Against the Tide: Directed by Mark Davis, George Roy. With Keith Dunnavant, Don Keith, Dave Ullin. A Showtime Sports chronicle of the seminal 1970 college football match up between Alabama’s Crimson Tide and USC Trojans at Birmingham’s Legion Field. Through interviews with former Alabama legends Joe Namath, John Mitchell and USC stars Sam “Bam” Cunningham, Jimmy Jones and more, this documentary examines coach Paul “Bear” Bryant’s surprising decision to bring a dominant, racially integrated football team onto the field in Birmingham for the very first time and reveals the impact college football played in the struggle for integration.

“I was looking for a good movie to record in the middle of the night and saw just the tail end of u0026quot;Against The Tideu0026quot; showing on one of the ShowTime channels. I did a Info looking for another time to watch it and see what it was about. Imagine my surprise to find it was about the Alabama Crimson Tide Football team and its Coach Bear Bryant. It showed that I had to watch it now or maybe never because there were no oher times listed. The movie was about to end but it gave me the option to start it over again with on demand. So I took advantage of it thinking I would probably cancel out of it. You see, I never played high school football. The coach expected me to be a running back. With most of my forty yard dash times in the 4.6 second range and only one 4.4 seconds (sheer luck)? You gotta be kidding! On my way to getting three college degrees I went to a grand total of three football games because of the wangling of others at the first university. I went to no football games at the second university.nImagine my surprise to find that Coach Bear Bryantu0026#39;s boss was George Wallace, the governor of Alabama. The first half of the documentary was mostly black and white which gave it a gritty realism. Seeing Joe Namath at such a young age in black and white where now I see him hawking some Medicare supplement in color at the end of the 2020 year during the COVID-19 Pandemic was quite a contrast.nDid I exit out of watching the documentary? Well, now that I correctly picked all of the game winners of the top 25 college football teams at the start of the 2019 football season with many correct spreds of said games I continued to watch it. I took up said activities just to prove my college degrees in Mathematics and Computer Science did prepare me to be an excellent analyst. Who are the most important football players? They are both the offense and defense linesmen.nWhat did I learn? Coach Bear Bryant like Coach Dean Smith wasnu0026#39;t just a coach. He had qualities that made him an outstanding human being. If you want to see how a non-racist human being behaves in a racially segregated environment then I encourage you to watch this film. We have an obligation to treat not only other human beings but all living things and even many non-living things with respect and dignity if our life is going to be a success. This film teaches that lesson.”