The deadliest football game in American history ended 0-0. Christmas Eve, 1944. 65 Marines played a pickup game on a field of dirt and coral on Guadalcanal. Six months later, 15 of them were dead. That's the true story this movie is based on, and it's worth knowing before you see it. After Pearl Harbor, college football stars enlisted in huge numbers, and more of them picked the Marines than any other branch. By late 1944 the 4th and 29th Marine Regiments were on Guadalcanal training for the invasion of Okinawa, and between them they had All-Americans, five team captains, and close to 20 guys who were either drafted by or went on to play in the NFL. The game itself started as trash talk over beers. Guys from the 29th said they'd kick the 4th's ass if the two regiments ever played. So on December 24 they actually played, wearing T-shirts and cut-off dungarees with numbers stenciled on the front. Around 1,500 Marines stood around the field watching, and the radio broadcast went out to bases all over the Pacific. Three hours of football, a brawl or two, and nobody scored. Then they shipped out to Okinawa, the bloodiest battle of the Pacific. 82 days of fighting that killed over 240,000 people. The casualty rate in those two regiments went past 50%. Tony Butkovich led the nation in rushing at Purdue in 1943 and went #11 overall in the NFL draft. A sniper killed him that April. He was 24. Dave Schreiner, Wisconsin's two-time All-American, had been the #11 pick the year before. A sniper got him too, one day before the island was declared secure. He was the 15th and last player from the game to die there. No single battle has ever killed more American athletes. Buzz Bissinger spent years researching all 65 of these guys for the book this comes from. He wrote Friday Night Lights, and Peter Berg directed that movie too. Those two have spent 20 years turning football into stories about way more than football, so this one ended up in the right hands.