HUNTINGTON, W. Va. – After a plane crash killed most members of marshall University’s football team in 1970, school principals may have turned to the simple top selection for an unsuccessful wear-and-tear program: abandoning the game altogether.
They don’t. They couldn’t decide to do it.
Apart from the 75 lives lost in america’s worst sporting crisis, the show slowly rebuilt itself and, nevertheless, triumphed Half a century later, those who lived the tragedy, some by chance, others by fateful decisions that seemed mundane at the time: marvel at the feeling that they had to keep playing.
“We thought the boys would need us to continue,” said Ed Carter, an offensive lineman at the time who intended to be on the team plane yet. “We felt we had to get on with the show. “
The team’s long and determined return to good luck was recounted in the 2006 film “We Are Marshall”, a name taken from the songs that resonate in Thundering Herd games. In the first season after the accident, Marshall won only two games. The first winning season did not come until another thirteen years. Then good fortune came here in stages.
“It was special to see how this program evolved,” said Carter, now a minister at Chattanooga.
Marshall won national titles in 1992 and 1996 in what is now known as the Football Championship Subdivision and amassed the top victories of any team in the country in the 1990s, many of which reached the highest point of NCAA football with coach Bob Pruett. The athletic 6-foot-4-inch wide receiver named Randy Moss began an adventure that would redefine what was imaginable in terms of speed, strength and length in position.
Success now continues in football bowl subdivision coach Doc Holliday, who took office in 2010, has a 6-1 record in bowling games and led Thing Herd to a US Conference championship. But it’s not the first time In 2014. This season’s team ranked 16th in the AP Top 25, advanced to 7-0 with Saturday’s 42-14 home win over Middle Tennessee State.
The plane crash redefined returns and helped the public university’s identity serve 13,000 academics in Huntington.
“That’s who we are,” said athletic director Mike Hamrick, who played as a supporter from 1976 to 1979. “There hasn’t been a backs story like Marshall’s football. “
The DC-9 was chartered through Marshall as he was returning from a game in East Carolina on November 14, 1970, when he crashed into a hill in rain and fog just off the Huntington Airport runway. The jet caught fire, leaving a pile of charred trees. concluded that the aircraft was flying too low, either because of a faulty altitude device or because the pilots had not read their tools correctly.
All on board died: 36 football players, the other 39 people were divided among coaches, school administrators, network leaders, team boosters and flight crew.
It happened a month after a plane wearing the Wichita State Shockers football team crashed in Colorado, killing 31 people and adding 14 players. The state of Wichita left the game in 1986.
Those who are not on the Marshall plane have spent five decades dealing with pain, doubts about themselves and unanswered questions about why they were saved. Some team members, including supporter Dennis Foley, were mistakenly indexed with those affected in obituaries and newspaper tributes. to the hometown.
Foley, who was absent in the 1970 season after injuring his ankle playing summer basketball, was one of many injured players who remained in Huntington’s. After a failed attempt to succeed at the destination turn site, he returned to campus. Marcelo Lajterman, he was among the dead. That night, Foley was taken to another student who would be his wife.
Carter had gone to Texas for his father’s funeral. His mother asked him to stay a few days, and Carter was forced to go to East Carolina, however, his call remained on the passenger list and a friend who saw Carter leave. Back on campus he panicked and ran screaming. He ran after her to find out he wasn’t a ghost.
Some injured players were reported at the last minute that the thrusters would take their position on the plane. Cornerback and co-captain Nate Ruffin, who died of leukemia in 2001, never knew who had taken his place.
“To this day, we didn’t know, and we didn’t need to know, who had been added to the trip,” Ruffin told The Associated Press in an interview in 2000.
Instead, players left behind were asked to identify those who suffered the twist of fate through clothing, jewelry, shoes, even scars. Ruffin has become a spokesman for the improvised team, responding to frantic requests from the players’ parents.
There were too many funerals to attend, six players whose bodies were never known were buried in a nearby cemetery and a veil of pain and skepticism hovered over the program, which had a record of perpetual losses in the 1960s and was released on NCAA parole for recruiting rape in 1969.
The university’s interim president, Donald Dedmon, and others temporarily to keep the game going. Jack Lengyel, the coach hired in 1971 to lead Marshall into a new era, said the resolution was “faith-based. “
They’re from scratch. A heterogeneous organization of 3 dozen people without an appointment, former army personnel, a football player, basketball players and transferred academics joined the few returning athletes who were not on the plane. fall due to NCAA restrictions helped the entire team.
Ten months after the accident, in the game at the time of the following season, in what remains the biggest victory in the show’s history, Marshall beat Xavier on the 15-thirteen visit by scoring a landing on the final play. Freshman fullback Terry Gardner hit a Reggie Oliver screen pass and advanced thirteen yards to the finish line.
Fans broke into the field to celebrate.
Lengyel, now 86, lectures the citizens of Maryland’s senior facility where he lives after the film’s screenings (some scenes were shot in West Virginia, others in Georgia) in which he plays Matthew McConaughey.
“Marshall’s other people are like a fist, ” said Lengyel. “They help their sports programs, and they have. At the time of the tragedy, they accumulated like a fist. They believed in the program and recovered it from ashes to glory. “
A memorial fountain on Marshall’s campus is shaped like a tulip and each bar represents one of the 75 victims of the accident. In a solemn rite each and every November 14, the fountain is turned off, each and every spring is lit.
According to the university, the sculptor Harry Bertoia said it was his wish that the source “represent the living, that to death, in the waters of life, ascending, retreating, emerging towards explicit upward growth, immortality and eternity. “
Like Foley, who met his wife in the midst of the tragedy, Carter discovered a purpose for the next five decades: non-religious at the time of the accident, he became a Christian, preached the gospel for decades, and with his circle. relatives started Death Unto Life Ministries in Chattanooga.
“A lot of other people have wondered why this has happened so far,” Carter said of the accident. “I don’t know.
“Why did the Lord make me? Now I know.