HIM Highlights an Important Team From Real Life Football History Tai Gooden | usagoldmines.com

I nerd about many things, like Doctor Who, plants, and horror movies. But one thing that really brings me joy is when a TV show or film infuses real life history into a fictional world. Whether it is the Match Girls’ strike in Enola Holmes 2 or the travel guide for Black people featured in Lovecraft Country, it is an opportunity to teach viewers something new. In HIM, the football horror movie starring Marlon Wayans and Tyriq Withers, we get a real life history lesson about the Carlisle Indian Industrial School’s impact on the sport. 

In the film, Isaiah gives Cam a quick history lesson about football. He mentions the Carlisle boys and how they dominated college football decades before the sport became a global powerhouse. They would beat white schools with moves that were so clever that the sport tried to say they were illegal, like the forward pass, only for those same moves to become a part of how the game is played today. Of course, their history is largely not included in what most people are taught about football’s origin story. And, that history my friends is the truth. 

The Carlisle Boys From HIM Are an Important Piece of Real Life Football History 

In the late 1870s, the US government started an off-reservation boarding school in Carlisle, PA for Native American and First Nations people. (Yes, I know. I know. Smh.) Less than two decades later, in 1893, the school developed a football team that competed alongside teams from prestigious schools like Princeton, Yale, and Penn State. Their playbook gave rise to many trick plays that are common today like the hand-off fake and overhand spiral throw. Legends like Pop Warner and Jim Thorpe, who played for the Carlisle football team, were a part of its short yet impactful legacy.

Needless to say that people who weren’t Carlisle fans were not happy about this group of Native American players stomping all over white teams. Those wins were a glorious act of defiance and perhaps vengeance against those who had stolen their land while also contending with the abhorrent “savage” stereotypes in a sport that hinges on physical contact. The school eventually closed in 1918 at the end of World War I and mostly faded from history books for obvious reasons. 

Why Justin Tipping Included the Carlisle Football Story in HIM

Now, director Justin Tipping is bringing the story of the Carlisle football team to the masses in HIM. “I did a lot of research when I got this movie,” Tipping told Nerdist. “I had known about the beginnings of the sport being tied to military and Civil War vets coming back and thinking their sons weren’t masculine enough and using war tactics to create this game. But when I kept going farther back when I was doing research, I discovered there are accurate historical facts that back up [that] the Carlisle Indian boys were undersized and they had to come up with creative ways to try to beat the boys at Yale… the hardest part was getting all this information across in a minute…”

He continued, “But Pop Warner was one of the coaches at Carlisle that perfected the spiral forward pass with the Native American boys. And it felt like this film, in terms of taking on an institution or systemic haunting of people that just are going to use you for profit and move you through a commodity, I would be remiss not to include that story and those voices and that perspective because that’s where it was coming from… It’s almost a warning. I think in my mind when I was making that scene, [Isaiah’s] telling [Cam], ‘Don’t be a mascot,’ but also aware that he’s within a paradigm and structure that is inescapable.”  

That small moment is just a drop in the well of how HIM explores so many themes about using athlete bodies in a consumerist manner and why people agree to it. Hopefully, this inclusion of the Carlisle football team will honor their legacy.