The scoreboard: Xavier 13, Marshall 9. The ball is on the 13-yard line. Ten seconds left in the game and the clock is ticking.
The play: a simple bootleg screen called T213. The Marshall coaches are shouting at quarterback Reggie Oliver to get the ball snapped.
He does, just before the gun sounds, signaling it is the final play. Oliver spots halfback Terry Gardner open in the end zone.
Touchdown!
The Young Thundering Herd wins 15-13.
“It was unbelievable,” says Charles Henry, 35 years after he played in that game.
“It made us believe that maybe we could play some football and it started the healing process for the university and the city.”
The 1971 Marshall University football team was a rag-tag bunch of players, glued and taped together in the aftermath of an airplane crash that killed 75 players, coaches and prominent boosters from Huntington, W.Va., on Nov. 14, 1970.
The movie We Are Marshall, which opened Friday , tells the story of that gutsy 1971 team through the coaches’ eyes.
In the years following the crash, a pall hung over Huntington. I arrived as a freshman in 1972, and you could still feel it in the city that was so closely connected to Marshall.
It was that 1971 Young Thundering Herd team that started the mending.
Some escaped death
Henry was a 17-year-old, 160-pound freshman linebacker who would lead that team in tackles. Henry was chosen for the Marshall Sports Hall of Fame earlier this year.
Now, on the verge of turning 53, he lives in Dania Beach with his wife and son. He’s assistant manager for Crown Wine & Spirits.
He and other incoming freshmen, who were granted special eligibility by the NCAA, were joined by a team of sophomores and three upperclassmen who by fate or injury had missed the fatal flight the year before.
Basketball and baseball players, and other students, joined the team as walk-ons. Even Blake Smith, a soccer player who had never even seen a football game, tried out. After making several successful kicks, the coaches decided they had a kicker, if he would cut his hair and shave.
Felix “Flip” Jordan was a junior defensive back who, at the last minute, was pulled from the bus en route to the airport. Coaches decided to let his sore ankle rest another week and gave his seat to a booster. Jordan has suffered bouts of depression since.
After an eerie dream about a plane crash, Eddie Carter’s mother refused to let him leave Texas after his father’s funeral. That dream saved Carter’s life. Today, he’s a preacher.
Jordan’s and Carter’s stories aren’t told in the movie.
Nate Ruffin’s story is, however. He missed the flight because he had calcium deposits in his arm.
But Ruffin was the emotional leader of that 1971 team. He was a lanky defensive back from Quincy, Fla. He wore a broad smile and always had something positive or uplifting to say.
He was also one of my closest friends and a fraternity brother. As Ruffin became the face of Marshall football, father-confessor to many of us through the years, he was quietly self-medicating himself.
He died of colon cancer in 2001.
The green carpet
The story of the 1971 Young Thundering Herd football team is the kind Hollywood likes to tell:
On the last play of the Xavier game, a team that was given very little chance of winning won.
The Young Herd actually won two games that year, beating Bowling Green in the homecoming game.
But that win over Xavier was something special. It was the first home game since the plane crash.
And although Hollywood altered the game-winning touchdown, for the most part the integrity of that season was kept, according to Henry and Oliver, the quarterback. They were in Huntington on Dec. 12 for a special screening for the 1971 team, as well as a Hollywood-style premiere with green carpet (Marshall’s colors are green and white).
“We just wanted them to tell the story the right way,” Henry said. “They wanted to do a razzle-dazzle play for T213 bootleg. We told them you can’t do that. They said 7 million people in China wouldn’t know the difference.”
Eventually, they came to a compromise.
The moment of the win is forever etched in Henry’s mind.
“Pandemonium! It was pandemonium,” recalled Henry. “I was standing on the sideline thinking, ‘We got a chance to win a game.’ When Terry crossed the goal line, I looked at the officials. I thought they were going to throw a flag and take it from us, take it out of our grasp. The next thing I know, Russell Lee picked me up. I think I hugged the referees.”
Lee was a 6-foot-5 basketball star who would be a first-round pro draft pick. He was on the team with point guard Mike D’Antoni, who now coaches the Phoenix Suns.
People rushed out of the stands, negotiated the long drop to the field and celebrated wildly in Fairfield Stadium, where the Herd played its games then. Even after the team showered and dressed, fans were still on the field, the players remembered.
“That’s how much it meant to the city,” Henry said, referring to the business owners, doctors, lawyers and politicians who died in the crash.
Marshall administrators wanted to discontinue football after the crash.
But Ruffin and Oliver and others argued, “You can’t stop. That would be an injustice to those guys who died,” Henry said.
Marshall University would rise from the ashes of the 1970 plane crash to win more games in the 1990s than any school in the nation. The team would win a I-AA national championship and move on to Division I-A and win bowl games.
Quarterbacks Chad Pennington of the New York Jets and Byron Leftwich of the Jacksonville Jaguars played at Marshall, along with receivers Randy Moss of the Oakland Raiders and Troy Brown of the New England Patriots.
The glory years were made possible by that 1971 team, which began the rebirth of Marshall football.
“If you were at Marshall, or in Huntington, you were part of it,” said Oliver, who now lives in Columbus, Ohio. “You didn’t have to play football to feel it.”
That team and the ones beyond, the students who lived through the deaths, the school administrators and the city residents who cheered for the rebirth, we all are Marshall.
Gregory Lewis can be reached at or 954-356-4203.
