Leading Marshall’s rebirth

Published 12:28 am Sunday, December 24, 2006

In football, Red Dawson was a winner.

He starred on the 1960 state champion Valdosta High football team. He was a star on the 1964 Florida State team that went 9-1 and won the Gator Bowl. He then played in the old AFL for the Boston Patriots.

But Dawson’s greatest victory in football didn’t come on the gridiron, and wasn’t reflected in the scores of the games. But now you can see it played out on the silver screen.

Dawson was the assistant coach who took on the task of helping to rebuild the football program at Marshall University after what is considered the greatest tragedy in American sports history, the plane crash that wiped out the 1970 Marshall football team.

Together with new head coach Jack Lengyel, Dawson helped rebuild Marshall’s football program and put a team on the field in 1971.

Dawson’s exploits are shown in the recently-released movie “We Are Marshall,” a film about the Thundering Herd’s rebirth after the crash. The movie is playing locally at Valdosta Stadium Cinemas.

Dawson himself was a special advisor for the film. In the movie, he is played by Matthew Fox, a former Columbia University wide receiver. Matthew McConaughey plays Lengyel, who became the new coach after the tragedy.

The love of football

Like most boys growing up in Valdosta, Red Dawson grew up playing football.

He proudly wore the black-and-gold of the Valdosta Wildcats, playing for Georgia high school coaching legend Wright Bazemore on the 1960 state champions. In the final game of his Valdosta career, he led the Wildcats to a 20-14 victory over Avondale in the state championship game.

That success he had at Valdosta High earned him a chance to wear the garnet-and-gold of Florida State from 1962-64. He would become known as “The Other End,” because he started at receiver opposite future Hall of Famer Fred Biletnikoff (whose name now adorns the trophy given to college football’s top receiver each year). Still, he was pretty good himself — good enough to be an honorable mention All-American and later was inducted into Florida State’s Hall of Fame (his younger brother Rhett also played for the Seminoles and recently joined Red in their Hall of Fame).

After that, he played tight end for the Boston Patriots of the old AFL. Both the Patriots and the Los Angeles Rams drafted Dawson (the NFL and AFL held separate drafts until the leagues merged in 1970), but he chose to join the Patriots.

From there, Dawson got into coaching. In 1968, Dawson was hired as one of Marshall’s assistant coaches. He was 25. By 1970, he had become the Thundering Herd’s defensive coordinator.

Marshall was a bad football program in those days. And in 1968 and 1969, the program was on probation for recruiting violations. Even when it cheated, the team still couldn’t win.

But new head coach Rick Tolley and his staff seemed to be slowly turning things around. Then, in an instant, it was all gone.

On Nov. 14, 1970, Marshall took its only plane trip of the season, a flight to East Carolina. The school usually took a chartered bus to away games; this was only the second time the team had ever flown to a game.

That plane, a Southern Airways DC-9, was approaching Huntington’s Tri-State Airport, but was flying too low. It clipped some trees less than two miles from the airport, crashed into a hill, and exploded. There were no survivors.

The DC-9 wasn’t just carrying the Marshall football team and coaching staff. It was carrying many of the school’s biggest boosters, and many of Huntington’s most prominent citizens. Marshall’s athletic director was on it, as were four physicians, a city councilman, a state legislator and several prominent businessmen. When the plane crashed, it didn’t just devastate a university; it devastated an entire town. Everybody in the close-knit Huntington community knew someone who was on that plane.

In all, 75 people lost their lives in that crash. That included 37 players, five coaches, seven university staff members, a five-person flight crew, and 21 boosters. That night, 70 children lost at least one parent; 18 lost both. Offensive lineman James Adams died seven days before his daughter was born.

Red Dawson normally would have been on the plane. But after a difficult 17-14 loss to East Carolina, Dawson and graduate assistant Gale Parker drove back from North Carolina in the car that Dawson had been using for a recruiting trip. There was a linebacker in Virginia named Billy Joe Mantooth that Marshall’s coaches desperately wanted, and Dawson and Parker were going to visit him on their way back to Huntington.

Dawson and Parker made their trip to see Mantooth, and were driving back to Huntington when a news bulletin came across the radio telling them that their team’s plane had crashed. They found a pay phone, called home, and their worst fears were confirmed.

“We knew it was serious, but it didn’t sound devastating,” Dawson told Rivals.com last week. “We had hope. So we stopped at the closest pay phone to call our wives, and once we had talked to them, we found out the truth.”

“The worst,” Dawson told Yahoo in another interview. He had to stop for a few seconds. “I mean devastating.”

The crash scene was horrible. Co-captain Nate Ruffin, who was injured and didn’t make the flight, and helped identify the bodies of many of his teammates, had nightmares about it for the next few years. Also horrible were the subsequent funerals — all closed-casket, three or four every day until the last victim had received their last rites.

The day after the crash, Dawson told The New York Times, “No one can believe it. No one can believe that all these great boys were wiped out.”

It was predictably hard on Dawson. He had lost his colleagues on the coaching staff. He had lost many of his friends. He had lost his players, whose parents he’d promised he’d take care of.

Red Dawson was a big, tough man, a 6-foot-4, 250-pound football coach, and the kind of man that fit well in Huntington, a city of hardened coal miners and mountaineers.

But there is no man on earth tough enough to endure a tragedy like that without pain. Dawson wanted to cry; he needed to cry.

But Marshall University needed Red Dawson to be strong. There were devastated families he needed to be there for. There were 75 funerals to be held, and he needed to be at just about every one of them. One week, he attended 27 funerals. And if there was going to be a Marshall football team in 1971, the school needed Red Dawson to help bring it to fruition.

“If you tried to walk across campus, just get some air in your lungs, just to get away for 10, 15 minutes, everywhere you looked there were people crying,” Dawson said. “It was complete devastation. I mean, it was just awful.”

Dawson, like many people who avoid or survive a tragic accident, suffered from survivor’s guilt for a while. Survivor’s guilt is a psychological condition defined as a kind of remorse felt by people who manage to survive a tragic event involving much loss of life, especially the lives of friends and loved ones or other people commonly associated with the survivor.

“I did not understand,” Dawson said. “I had an awful guilty feeling. Then somebody (years later) – I didn’t have any counseling – said, ‘Hell, it was shame.’ And it was. It was shame I was feeling. I was almost ashamed I wasn’t with the other coaches.

“I can’t explain it. It was somewhere between guilt and shame.”

Mantooth, the linebacker Dawson had been recruiting, didn’t end up going to Marshall. Instead, he was talked into going to West Virginia by a young Mountaineers coach named Bobby Bowden — who, ironically, had turned down the Marshall head coaching job two years earlier. Yes, the winningest coach in Division I football history could easily have been on that plane, and one of the greatest coaching careers ever could have ended almost before it ever started. Instead, it was Bowden who reached out to Dawson and the Marshall coaches, and helped them install the veer offense they would run the next season.

After the crash, it was the 27-year old Dawson who took on the task of starting the painful process of rebuilding the program, giving the team a leader until Lengyel was hired as Marshall’s new head coach in March. Dawson stayed on as the receivers coach in 1971.

As the movie indicates, Dawson, Lengyel and the rest of the staff faced a monumental task. All that remained of the roster were three varsity players who hadn’t flown to East Carolina (two were injured and lineman Eddie Carter was in Texas for his father’s funeral) and 24 members of the 1970 freshman team.

The NCAA did not allow freshmen to play Division I football until 1972, but they made an exception for the Thundering Herd, so the school could field a competitive team. That helped Marshall put a team on the field in 1971, and the allure of immediate playing time attracted several players to the program.

When the 1971 Marshall team walked onto the field in Morehead, Ky. for their season opener against archrival Morehead State, the crowd immediately rose to its feet to give the Young Thundering Herd a standing ovation. Morehead’s quarterback, Dave Schaetzke, would later say it felt like the entire crowd was rooting for Marshall, despite the fact they were at Morehead.

A week later, in its first home game since the crash, the Herd scored on the final play of the game to upset Xavier 15-13. Dawson called the play on the winning touchdown, a bootleg pass from Reggie Oliver to Terry Gardner.

It was one of two games Marshall won that year. Given the circumstances, winning two games was an incredible feat.

But the pain of what happened on that November night in 1970 was immense, and after the ’71 season, Dawson gave up coaching. He needed to get away from Marshall football and move on to something else. It’s hard to blame him.

He wound up starting a construction business in Huntington, one that has been very successful. He has become a prominent figure in Huntington, both for his link to Marshall football and as a businessman. He also ran for sheriff of Cabell County, W. Va. in 2000.

The Marshall football program rose from the ashes, and in the 1990’s, became one of the country’s top mid-major programs, led by future NFL first-round picks Chad Pennington, Randy Moss and Byron Leftwich. It also won Division I-AA national championships in 1992 and 1996. No college football team won more games in the 1990’s than the Thundering Herd.

Dawson has long been embraced by the Marshall football program and its fans. Former head coaches Jim Donnan and Bob Pruett particularly embraced his presence. To them, and many others at Marshall, he will always be a connection to the school’s darkest day and a symbol of the team’s rebirth.

In 1997, Pruett made Dawson an honorary coach for the Thundering Herd’s first game against West Virginia since 1923.

“We lost 42-31, even though we had the lead after three quarters,” Dawson told Time magazine shortly thereafter. “Coach Pruett later said that he let me coach the fourth quarter. But I had a great old time on the sidelines. I was yelling so loud that I thought the referees might penalize me. Never thought I’d be yelling on the sidelines of a Marshall game ever again.”

Every year, on Nov. 14, Marshall University holds a memorial ceremony remembering its worst day. There is the Fountain of Life memorial fountain on campus, whose waters are turned off on that day at 7:58 p.m. (the exact minute of the crash), not to be turned on again until the next spring.

Dawson has long had an invite to speak at the annual ceremony. Until this year, he has declined, simply because it has been too painful (“Before, there was no way I could get through it.”). Every year, he has been there, but has stood in the background, quietly, under a sycamore tree.

But the making of the movie has been healthy for Dawson. He’s talked about it, and was there to watch many of the scenes being filmed. It has been hard on him at times, but he has endured.

This year, Dawson finally chose to speak at the memorial. It was hard — he knew it would be — and at one point, he got choked up and had to stop for a few moments. But he got through the speech.

“I strongly believe in trying times the Old Master will show us the way,” Dawson said. “The way was to work hard, so you knew you could sleep. But sleep never came easy.”

When Fox got the role in the movie, he invited Dawson to meet him in Hawaii (where he was in the middle of filming the television show Lost; Fox had no way of going to Huntington at that time). Dawson has rarely gotten on airplanes — how unbelievably hard must it be for him? — but he accepted Fox’s offer, and flew out to meet him.

“I anticipated him not wanting to come, and I obviously understood,” Fox told Sports Illustrated. “He has not done very much flying for 35 years. I was asking a lot of him, and I was blown away when he decided to come.”

Dawson and Fox talked in great deal as the actor prepared to play the ex-football coach. Dawson had some difficult moments talking about the tragedy, but was as strong and gracious as he could be. Fox came away with immense respect for the man he was about to play.

“Ultimately, the only person I cared about liking this movie and feeling his part was done justice is Red Dawson,” Fox said.

Dawson gave his approval of Fox, both in Hawaii and in later days.

“It’s a strange feeling,” Dawson told The Huntington Herald-Dispatch as he watched filming. “He has some of my mannerisms. He’s a super guy. The red hair looks good. He might be on to something.”

“It’s been an amazing experience,” Fox recently said in an interview on CBS. “The friendship I’ve developed with Red Dawson, the character I play in the film, has just been amazing. I couldn’t be prouder of it.”

Dawson has also given his stamp of approval of the movie.

“(Warner Brothers) promised us what they were going to do, but I’ve had promises before that weren’t backed up,” Dawson said. “But I can truthfully say that they have done everything they said…. They backed up everything they first said they were going to do. It’s very positive and of high quality.”

Parts of the movie, including the crash and some of the football scenes, were shot in Georgia, in the Atlanta area. And the Peach State’s governor also has a cameo in the movie. Sonny Perdue, who played football at the University of Georgia, plays a coach from East Carolina in the pre-crash game at the start of the movie.



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Millions of people will watch “We Are Marshall.” It will be a difficult movie for many to watch; tragedies always are. But Dawson, one of the people for whom it’s probably hardest to watch, has already seen it. In November, Warner Brothers rented a motel room in Huntington for Dawson to watch the movie alone, in privacy, as many times as he chose to watch it.

He probably cried until he could cry no more. It probably conjured up old memories, and the nightmares may have returned.

“It was very tough to watch the movie, which is why I insisted on watching it by myself,” Dawson said. “I’ve seen it twice by myself and there was a lot of improvement in my behavior the second time. So I think the third or fourth time, I might even be able to watch it in public.”

He also hoped for some healing through the movie.

“I’m going to be O.K.,” he said in November. “I’m going to be O.K.”

Thanks to the work of people like Red Dawson, the Marshall Thundering Herd are O.K. as well.