The Express runs off-track after Times story

You never know when a story will make a splash somewhere else. Or at least a little ripple.

My recent interview with Dick Easterly and Patrick Whelan -- two members of Syracuse University's 1958 national championship football team -- ended up making them temporary media stars. Easterly and Whelan took offense at dramatic liberties taken in The Express, the biography of their late teammate, Ernie Davis.

Davis was the first African-American recipient of the Heisman Trophy, a landmark for racial equality, but apparently didn't face the kind of bigoted backlash the movie depicts. An early death by leukemia before Davis could play in the NFL was one factual aspect of his life that the movie shortchanged.

One sequence Easterly and Whelan strongly disputed involves a Syracuse game at West Virginia where fans and players shower the team with racial epithets and garbage. Due in part to the Times story getting around, even the governor of West Virginia is demanding an apology from the film's producers.

The day after the interview ran in the Times, I got a call from a West Virginia reporter asking for help contacting Easterly and Whelan. No problem. Today I got message from the men, marveling at being contacted by nearly a dozen media outlets including USA Today and a Wall Street Journal blogger, who were nice enough to mention and link to the Times article. ESPN interviewed Easterly. Even Bob Costas raised the subject on his HBO show while interviewing former Syracuse great Jim Brown, who served as technical adviser for The Express.

Easterly said from the start that The Express was really more about Brown than Davis, with regard to the racial angles in the script.

Anyway, Easterly and Whelan called to thank me for getting out the accurate story about Davis, his relationship with head coach Ben Schwartzwalder and racial themes raised by the movie. They've been contacted by other alumni who wanted to pass along the same.

My pleasure, folks.