Remembering Burt Reynolds: 50 years after ‘The Longest Yard’
Part 1 of 2 — Excerpted from the book, ‘Against All Odds’
In the fall of 1973, Burt Reynolds and a cast of former NFL stars and the Augusta Eagles semi-pro team filmed the blockbuster movie, “The Longest Yard” at Reidsville Prison in Georgia. The state’s then-maximum security prison, located a 100 miles south of Augusta, which has since closed its doors. Still, five years after Reynolds’s death and a half-century after the production, the movie and the man behind it continue to resonate. The following is an excerpted from Stan Byrdy’s ‘Against All Odds’ book.
Born at the family home in Lansing, Michigan, on February 11, 1936, Burton “Leon” Reynolds was destined, it seems, for life in the spotlight, in equal measures of times both good and bad.
At age five, the Reynoldses moved to Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri for two years when his father was drafted into the Army. When his dad packed off to Europe in World War II, the family initially moved back to Lansing, then to Star City, a flyspeck of a town in north central Michigan where his mom was born and his grandparents owned a farm.
The Reynoldses took up residence in the small, family-owned cottage across the road from his grandparent’s house. A ghost town today, this tiny township…
