Leonardo DiCaprio has a new movie coming out soon called
“The Reverent”. In summary, it looks bad ass. At the end of the trailer it says
“Based on true events”. That inspired me to do some research.
The movie is roughly based on the events surrounding Hugh
Glass, an American fur trapper from the early 19th century (if
you’re wondering how this connects to school spirit just keep your pants on
I’ll get there). Hugh, in general, was a badass. No one knows much about his
early life but we do know he was of Irish and Scottish origin. But now to the
important stuff.
Hugh was a part of an expedition up the Missouri river.
After being attacked by Native Americans and being shot in the leg, he decided
that it would be a good decision to get off the river. They did that and while
hunting he came on to a bear. He was attacked by the bear, knocked unconscious,
mauled, and half dead. The party he was with was unable to support him and knew
he would die, so they left two men behind with him to wait for his death, then
bury him and catch back up. However, they left him far before his death and
took all his weapons and equipment, leaving him with nothing more than the
cloths on his back and the fur of the bear that wounded him (which he fatally
wounded before getting knocked out).
Now comes the bad ass part. He woke up, in the middle of
nowhere, surrounded by nothing but wilderness and unfriendly Indians, and 200
miles away from the closest American settlement. He had a broken leg and his
back was so badly mauled his ribs were exposed, it was also infected. Oh, and
did I mention it was winter?
So what do you do? For Glass the answer was simple, survive.
He set his own leg and started crawling. Stopping every now and then to eat
some berries or roots and to lay is back on rotting logs to get fresh maggots
that would eat away his rotting flesh. Eventually he made his way to a river,
constructed a raft, and floated downriver.
After he made it to shelter and made a full recovery he
caught up to what was left of his expedition. The two men that had abandoned
him we no longer a part of the group. He found them though, to seek revenge and
to get back all of his stuff. He found one in another group, and spared his
life because of his young age. He found the other and sparred him because he
had joined the army and the penalty for killing a soldier was death.
Hugh Glass is one bad ass motherfucker. Now I’m going to
connect this back to Kennedy sports. Sometimes, you’re going to get fucked up,
bad. You’re going to be in the worst possible situation. But you gotta keep
going. Even if it looks pointless, even if it is impossible, even if you know
you can’t. You still have to try.
Tomorrow, we face Dowling. They are the two time
defending state champions. But I know, the cougars a going to crawl and fight
and scrape and survive and win. Because that is what we do and that is how we
are. We’ll win, even though the newspapers say we can’t. Even though it might
look impossible from the outside, we, on the inside, know that we will get
through this,
