Review of My All American (2015) by Andrew W — 12 Nov 2015

I have some problems with 'My All American' - I can't go see the movie. It just hits to close to home. Some of the named characters in the movie were friends of mine. I'd see Fred Steinmark on campus almost daily. Most notably after he'd begun chemo therapy, lost all his hair and took to dressing like a pirate - bandanna around his head, eye patch, crutches in lieu of a peg leg. And before anyone assumes I was intimate to his situation. I was merely, a fly on the wall, existentially observing. But, like every other Texan, I was laser focused on the 1969 Texas football team. I could have been in Dime Box or Midlothian. I just count myself lucky to have been in Fayetteville on our St. Crispin's Day, December 6, 1969.

I've attended two Summer Olympics, four college football national championship games, two Super Bowls and two World Series. And in my sixty-seven years nothing in my sports lifetime compares to that three and a half weeks between the Arkansas and Notre Dame, Cotton Bowl games.

Too, 'times were a changin'. 1969 was a watershed moment in American social history: the Vietnam war, the recent murders of the Kennedy brothers and Martin Luther King, Jr., were a pall on our national psyche. And in many ways the Arkansas and Notre Dame games, and Steinmark's tragic and herioc story gave us all something a little brighter, more noble to look up to.

So, in seeing "My All American", remember this is not a story "based on a real life situation".

"My All American"is as true to the facts as any sports movie you will ever see.