Nguyen’s power, perseverance on full display in documentary
COLLEGE STATION — One of Texas A&M’s top timeless tales has hit the quarter century mark, and along those memorable lines, the Aggies have done a solid job of filling a football void for fans in July.
Call ’em the Dat days of summer, thanks to A&M’s release of “All American — the Dat Nguyen Story” on, appropriately, July Fourth.
“It’s truly a unique story in the history of Texas A&M athletics,” said Andy Richardson, the Aggies’ associate athletic director for 12th Man Productions, which is responsible for the documentary.
The background of Nguyen, an All-American linebacker in the late 1990s, is so incomparable that it’s a unique story in the history of America, as well.
“A living personification of the ‘American Dream,’ ” the documentary’s epitaph reads as the swift moving, nearly hour-long film reaches a conclusion. “In the history of college football, Dat is the only unanimous All-American of Vietnamese descent. He also is the only VietnameseAmerican to be selected in the NFL draft.”
A handful of media members were treated to an early showing of “The Dat Nguyen Story” on Tuesday at Kyle Field, where Nguyen developed into a legend and led the Aggies to their last league title — 25 years ago, when A&M competed in the Big 12 prior to moving to the Southeastern Conference in 2012.
“Dat was surprised that we would want to bring a spotlight to this,” Chris Sabo, the documentary’s writer and director, said of Nguyen’s humility that he’s retained from the time he was growing up on the Gulf Coast in Rockport as the son of a shrimper. “(But) when you have a good story, tell it and get out of the way.”
Nguyen, 47, is A&M’s all-time leading tackler with 517, 62 more than Johnny Holland’s 455 from 1983-86, a record that stands a good chance of never being broken in College Station. That’s not his most impressive feat, however, by a long shot.
“The athletics stuff is just cherry on the top,” Sabo said of the Nguyen family’s harrowing exit of South Vietnam just in front of the invading Viet Cong in 1975, when Tammy Nguyen was four months pregnant with Dat. “It was a chance to really go into and explain why his family was in danger. It wasn’t just, ‘We’re going to leave town.’ It was, ‘If we don’t leave, we’re going to die.’
“It had that type of urgency.”
The documentary is extraordinary early in two aspects: showing in vivid detail the dire nature of the Nguyen family’s escape from Vietnam, and the challenges faced by Vietnamese people who wound up settling along the Texas Gulf Coast in continuing their work in the fishing and shrimping business. Dat was born in a refugee camp in Arkansas prior to the family moving to Rockport.
Nguyen, in happily discovering a rugged game Vietnamese people did not play, excelled as a playmaking tackler at Rockport-Fulton High.
“Football took up my time and kept me out of trouble,” Nguyen said. “I couldn’t do anything else but football and school, and that kept me out of trouble. That was really a turning point in my life.”
Nguyen’s starring role for the Pirates of Rockport-Fulton in the early 1990s also served as a salve between Vietnamese people, who were still relatively new to the Gulf Coast, and the locals, whose families had spent decades fishing the region, as the documentary dives into.
“If this helps a single person, it’s more than worth the work that went into it,” Sabo said of Nguyen fighting through obstacles to first star at Rockport-Fulton, then A&M and finally with the Dallas Cowboys as a third-round NFL draft selection in 1999. “It drips America and everything it’s about. That’s what you live for, to tell the stories that really, really matter.”
This story matters not only to A&M, but the country, and the timing of its release could not be better.
“That seemed very apropos,” Richardson said with a smile of the Independence Day debut.
Richardson, a 1987 A&M graduate, covered Nguyen as a videographer for Aggies athletics in the mid- to late-1990s.
“You may not realize in the moment how special it is,” Richardson said of witnessing more than 500 tackles and Nguyen’s exceptional approach to the game and life, “but as time passes you truly appreciate it.”
Nguyen and his wife, Becky, have five children, and Sabo gets a kick out of the idea that one of A&M’s all-time icons is still young and vibrant enough to appear to have a few more tackles in him if needed.
“Here’s a guy who’s still a young cat, he’s got kids in grade school,” Sabo said.
Nguyen, who lives in the Dallas-Fort Worth area where he was an All-Pro linebacker for the Cowboys in 2003, owns a Chick-fil-A restaurant in Fort Worth’s Montgomery Plaza. The documentary, which features some funny scenes from Nguyen’s interaction in the restaurant, will be available at 12thman.com/ dat and on the 12th Man TV OTT via Apple TV, Roku and Amazon Fire Stick on Tuesday.
“We’ve had a long history of great linebackers at Texas A&M,” former A&M coach R.C. Slocum once said of Nguyen, his tackling prowess and the attention to detail that’s led to a successful career after football. “Dat really outperformed all of them.”