A new documentary tells the previously unknown story of a star football player from Ypsilanti High School who came face-to-face on the prison football field with a serial killer who had terrorized his hometown just a few years earlier.
In the fall of 1975, Brian Anderson was a freshman football player at Hillsdale College, and one of his team’s first games that year was against the Golden Lions, the team at Jackson Prison.
When Anderson and his teammates got to the prison and took the field for the game, they realized that the prison team’s best player was also the prison’s most famous inmate – John Norman Collins.
Collins was a notorious killer who had been convicted of murdering Eastern Michigan University co-ed Karen Sue Beineman in 1969 and was suspected of five more similar murders in Ypsilanti.
The 1975 game between Anderson’s Hillsdale College Chargers and Collins’ Jackson Prison Golden Lions is one of the central stories in “The Prison Games,” a new documentary by the documentary filmmaking students of Hillsdale College.
The documentary has its premiere at 7 p.m. Tuesday, Nov. 14, at Plaster Auditorium at Hillsdale College. Admission is free and the public is invited.
In the film, Brian Anderson tells the story for the first time of what it was like for him to face off on the football field against the serial killer who had terrorized his hometown. Here’s a clip from the film of Anderson talking about the encounter with Collins:
In addition to the memorable 1975 game between Anderson’s Hillsdale team and Collins’ prison team, “The Prison Games” features a number of other Hillsdale College players from the 1960s and ‘70s telling their stories of playing against the prison team.
“This is such a fascinating story that’s never been told before in any format,” said Buddy Moorehouse, the Hillsdale College documentary filmmaking professor whose class made the film. “It’s not every day that a bunch of 18- and 19-year-old college kids go behind the walls of one of the country’s toughest prisons to play a football game. This was Burt Reynolds and ‘The Longest Yard’ in real life and it happened every year in the 1960s and ‘70s.”
Moorehouse (himself an Ypsilanti native) said that anyone who grew up in Ypsilanti or remembers the John Norman Collins story will find the documentary fascinating. “There’s a lot more in this film that I guarantee people in Ypsi have never heard before,” he said.
