Well, you certainly can't accuse the made-for-ESPN movie "The Junction Boys" of lionizing legendary college football coach Paul "Bear" Bryant.
Basically, this based-on-fact telefilm about his first days as Texas A&M's head football coach makes Bryant out to be a monster. A man more concerned with winning than with the lives of his players.
We're not talking about their personal lives. We're talking about the actual life and death of those players.
As is recounted in "The Junction Boys" (7 p.m., ESPN; 9 p.m., ESPN2), Bryant (Tom Berenger) left Kentucky in 1954 for Texas A&M. (He, of course, left A&M four years later for Alabama.) And he wasn't happy with the Aggie players he found in College Station, so he loaded them up and took them to Junction, Texas, for a hellish football boot camp in the midst of a terrible drought.
That he called them names and questioned their manhood is a given. That he forced them to practice in extreme heat with no water breaks; that he forced them to practice despite serious physical injuries (including a broken back); that he physically abused them is shocking.
In one scene, a player collapses with heat stroke. Bryant is so concerned about the kid that he goes over and kicks him.
You can see this coming when the coach fires a qualified trainer to bring on a drunk who bows to his wishes that players should play no matter what.
On the one hand, you've got to admire ESPN for making one of the most unsentimental movies of all time. This is the anti-sports movie in a lot of ways — there is no big game to be won and make everything all right.
(After Bryant chases two thirds of his team away, leaving him with only 35 players, the Aggies go 1-9 that season.)
On the other hand, it's hard to see exactly what the message of "The Junction Boys" is supposed to be. The 60 or so players who didn't stick around and put their lives in danger are seen as quitters when you might easily argue they were smarter than their teammates — and smarter than Bryant.
Plus, the coach's apology a quarter of a century later — while it really did happen — seems to somehow legitimize his reprehensible behavior.
"Junction Boys" is a vast improvement over ESPN's first TV movie, the dreadful "Season on the Brink" that aired back in March. Be warned, however, that this movie, like "Season," is loaded with four-letter words. In this case, it's the repeated use of the s-word instead of the f-word, but it's there nonetheless, beginning with its first use about two minutes into the movie.
Compared to all the other things Bryant does to those poor players, however, swearing at them is mild indeed.
E-mail: pierce@desnews.com