Oscar-winning actor Matthew McConaughey, who played coach Jack Lengyel in the 2006 movie We Are Marshall, is a University of Texas graduate and a devout Longhorns football fan.
He has been a staple at practice at times, and had the chance to address the Longhorns after a practice last week as they prepared to play Kansas.
The message he gave, which was captured by the Longhorn Network, was introspective and inspirational.
"Last night, I was thinking about what I do, and I was thinking about what y'all do. I ask myself this question all the time, 'Why do I do what I do? Why am I an actor?' And I was gonna ask y'all, man, why do you play football," McConaughey said.
"There's no right answer. Ask yourself, man, when you look in the mirror tonight. Just say, 'Why do I play this game? Why am I doing this? Why do I come out and practice? Why am I out here busting my [expletive] in the middle of the heat every day?'
"Feels good going out on Saturday when it's the big show, right? Hell yeah, it does! Feels a whole lot better after a W than it does after an L.
"It's amazing how easy the mind can go up and down, man, so I guess what I'm saying is you gotta ask yourself why you're playing the game. And in there you're going to find the answer of why you play it, whether you win or whether you lose. Some of you may play because you love football. Some of you may play for your grandmother. Some of you may play for your older brother or your dad. Some of you may play for the university. At the end of the day, every single one of you has really only got to be playing for one person.
"It gets a whole lot more fun. When you do well, you feel it and you can look in the mirror and you [say], 'That's right! I did that! I earned it!' When you lay your head down on your pillow at night and you gave it your all and you busted your [expletive] ... If everyone's thinking that, if everyone's looked themselves in the mirror at the end of the night, it's a lot easier to play for the guy next to you. And it's more fun."
A fine find
When eight cans of nitrate film arrived at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., in August, a staffer began a routine inspection to see what sort of physical condition the film was in.
Without even watching the footage, she quickly noticed a headline screaming from one of the newsreels: "SENATORS WIN WORLD SERIES," it said. "40,000 frantic fans see American Leaguers take 12-inning deciding game, 4 to 3."
And when archivists from the Library's Packard Campus for Audio Visual Conservation watched the reel, they found nearly four minutes of footage from the 1924 World Series, film that somehow had remained in nearly perfect condition for 90 years.
"You've got to understand: Nitrate film, sometimes it looks great, sometimes it doesn't. You never know what you're going to get," Mike Mashon, the head of the Library's moving image section told Dan Steinberg of the Washington Post.
The film, which was found "in the rafters of [a] detached and not climate-controlled garage" in Worcester, Mass., is flammable and degrades quickly. One of Mashon's friends from the Harvard Film Archive retrieved the reels and used a hazmat shipper to send them to Washington. It has now been cleaned and photochemically preserved and should be safe for hundreds of years.
Sports on 10/03/2014