What happens at the end of Remember the Titans?
Wondering how Remember the Titans actually ends, and how much of it really happened? Here's the ending explained — the final game, the frame story, and what the real 1971 Titans have said about Hollywood's version.
Twenty-six years on, this film still ambushes people on a Sunday afternoon, and the ending is precisely why. You settle in for an inspirational sports movie, and Disney hands you a funeral. Rude, frankly. Effective, though.
The short version
The Titans go undefeated, win the 1971 Virginia state championship, and desegregate a town in the process — but the film makes you pay for it. On the night the team clinches its place in the final, star linebacker Gerry Bertier crashes his car and is paralysed from the waist down. He watches from a wheelchair as his teammates pull off a fourth-quarter comeback to take the title.
Then the film twists the knife. The whole story, it turns out, has been told in flashback from ten years later — and the event everyone has gathered for is Gerry's funeral. He survived the paralysis, won Paralympic gold in the shot put, and was then killed by a drunk driver. Julius holds Gerry's mum's hand while the old team sings "Na Na Hey Hey Kiss Him Goodbye" over the coffin, and that is where you, a grown adult, quietly fall apart.
What actually happened
The bones of it are true, with some Hollywood rearranging:
- The real Gerry Bertier was injured after the championship season, not before the final — the film moved his crash for maximum devastation, as the '71 Titans themselves have documented.
- He really did die in 1981, in a second crash caused by a drunk driver, and his teammates really did attend the funeral.
- The 3am run to Gettysburg cemetery, the big Boone speech and that locker-room kiss? None of it happened.
The real players have been politely rolling their eyes at the embellishments for decades. Quarterback Ronnie "Sunshine" Bass — the alleged long-haired Californian hippie — put it on record:
"I'll say for the record my hair was never that long."
But even the sceptics don't dispute what that season did for Alexandria. As Bass said years later, "winning solves a lot of problems" — and 13–0 solved quite a few of them.
So: they win, Gerry dies, everyone cries. Left side. Strong side. Pass the tissues.