‘Titans’ worthy of remembering

2000 release is more than just a football movie

When Barack Obama spoke in front of 240,000 people in Chicago’s Grant Park on Nov. 4, 2008, his victory speech brimmed with idealistic optimism about working together to build a more perfect union.

As he ended on a “Yes, we can” crescendo and the crowd roared, a swell of music burst from the speakers around the first Black president-elect of the United States. It wasn’t Bruce Springsteen or perennial Obama favorite “Signed, Sealed, Delivered (I’m Yours),” by Stevie Wonder. It was the instrumental score from the 2000 Disney film “Remember the Titans.”

More than just adequately presidential in tone, composer Trevor Rabin’s “Titans Spirit” carried the weight of the beloved movie and the story of how a high school head football coach Herman Boone (played on screen by Denzel Washington) and assistant coach Bill Yoast (Will Patton) came together to fight racism and lead the newly integrated T.C. Williams Titans in Alexandria, Va., to win a 1971 state championship.

Rabin, a progressive South African who grew up during apartheid, had no idea that Obama planned to use his music that night and got “teary eyed” watching it on TV. “A fellow composer called me and said, ‘Hey, man, that worked better than in the film,’” Rabin said.

In fact, every NBC Olympics broadcast since 2002 has incorporated the score into its closing credits montage. And just days before Apple co-founder Steve Jobs died in 2011, he invited his successor, Tim Cook, to his home, where they watched “Remember the Titans” together.

“I was so surprised he wanted to watch that movie. I was like, “Are you sure?’ “Cook recalled in Rick Tetzeli’s “Becoming Steve Jobs” memoir. “Steve was not interested in sports at all.”

But the enduring appeal of “Titans” 20 years after its release on Sept. 29, 2000, lies precisely in the fact that it isn’t a traditional sports movie. As Washington said on the film’s media tour, “I don’t think it’s a football movie. I think it’s a movie about the potential of the human spirit.”

Part history lesson, part action, part heartwarming family drama with a killer soundtrack, the film transcends genres.