Ernie Davis whom I remember as a kid as the most promising college football player of his time made quite the impact on the world of sports back in the day. But is impact during the Civil Rights era in which he played is equally compelling a story. Both are united here in a wonderful sports film, The Express with young Rob Brown playing Ernie Davis.
Brown plays Davis well as the idealistic young kid who takes as his ideal Jackie Robinson and the significance he had breaking the color line in professional baseball. Black people were already playing professional football at this time also, but the sport was not what it is today or in fact would shortly become starting in the middle Fifties when Davis was in college ball at the University of Syracuse.
A guy who had a lot to do with that was Ernie Davis's predecessor at the University of Syracuse Jim Brown as played by Darrin DeWitt Henson. Brown's place among professional football immortals is quite assured and he came to the Cleveland Browns with the reputation from college he more than lived up to.
In fact it's Brown that Coach Ben Schwartzwalder uses to recruit Davis to the Orangemen of Syracuse. Dennis Quaid plays the coach and he gives one of his best performances in his career. In fact it's right in line with another football film Any Given Sunday where he plays an aging quarterback with heart and guts, but losing a step or two in the field.
The film is about Quaid almost as much as about Rob Brown. The coach learns that he's living in extraordinary times for America, most extraordinary for black America. His players are not separate and apart from the social changes going on, they and the game cannot be kept in a vacuum. Proof of that comes when the Orangemen of Syracuse go south to play West Virginia and later the University of Texas in the Cotton Bowl which was more of a war than an athletic contest.
Ernie Davis beat out Jim Brown in two special categories. He was the first black man to win the Heisman Trophy for Best College Football player and probably earned it by dint of the fact that he unlike Brown led Syracuse to a national championship. It was a fact the Heisman Committee could not ignore.
The football sequences as in Any Given Sunday are done incredibly well, choreographed would not be a bad word to describe them. Davis did in fact say he would let his field exploits do his talking and they spoke loud and clear.
I hope some Oscar nominations are in the future for both Quaid and Brown. The Express will go down in history as one of the best sports films ever done and it goes along way towards keeping the story of Ernie Davis alive for generations to come.
Brown plays Davis well as the idealistic young kid who takes as his ideal Jackie Robinson and the significance he had breaking the color line in professional baseball. Black people were already playing professional football at this time also, but the sport was not what it is today or in fact would shortly become starting in the middle Fifties when Davis was in college ball at the University of Syracuse.
A guy who had a lot to do with that was Ernie Davis's predecessor at the University of Syracuse Jim Brown as played by Darrin DeWitt Henson. Brown's place among professional football immortals is quite assured and he came to the Cleveland Browns with the reputation from college he more than lived up to.
In fact it's Brown that Coach Ben Schwartzwalder uses to recruit Davis to the Orangemen of Syracuse. Dennis Quaid plays the coach and he gives one of his best performances in his career. In fact it's right in line with another football film Any Given Sunday where he plays an aging quarterback with heart and guts, but losing a step or two in the field.
The film is about Quaid almost as much as about Rob Brown. The coach learns that he's living in extraordinary times for America, most extraordinary for black America. His players are not separate and apart from the social changes going on, they and the game cannot be kept in a vacuum. Proof of that comes when the Orangemen of Syracuse go south to play West Virginia and later the University of Texas in the Cotton Bowl which was more of a war than an athletic contest.
Ernie Davis beat out Jim Brown in two special categories. He was the first black man to win the Heisman Trophy for Best College Football player and probably earned it by dint of the fact that he unlike Brown led Syracuse to a national championship. It was a fact the Heisman Committee could not ignore.
The football sequences as in Any Given Sunday are done incredibly well, choreographed would not be a bad word to describe them. Davis did in fact say he would let his field exploits do his talking and they spoke loud and clear.
I hope some Oscar nominations are in the future for both Quaid and Brown. The Express will go down in history as one of the best sports films ever done and it goes along way towards keeping the story of Ernie Davis alive for generations to come.