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PROVO — Richard Hatfield has been going to BYU football games since 1975.
That year wasn’t remarkable; it was one of the early years of legendary Cougar football coach LaVell Edwards, and the Cougars finished with a middling 6-5 record under first-year starting quarterback Gifford Nielsen.
But Hatfield was hooked. He signed up for season tickets a year later, joined the Cougar Club, and has been a member ever since — with the same seats, only expanding as his family grew. It wasn’t just a way to cheer on the Cougars, but also helps him bond with his son Harlan and the rest of his family.
"It would be hard to move now," Richard Hatfield said. "It would be like moving neighborhoods.
"We know our neighbors. We love our neighbors."
That’s one of the stories behind the film "Tradition," a documentary by Brandon Crow and James Terry with Jack Merst as director of sound that was recently nominated for best documentary feature by the Utah Film Festival.
"Tradition" follows three families through decades of BYU football traditions, including the Hatfields; Brian and Lori Lewis, who took their love of BYU across multiple states before returning to Utah; and Verle and Colleen Tolley, the patriarch and matriarch of the clan who have had the same seats for 27 years.
Even Verle Tolley's traumatic head injury that led to a miraculous recovery couldn’t keep the family away, a surprise situation that unfolds across the final moments of the approximately 45-minute film.
"Tradition" is about more than BYU, more than football, and more than sports. It’s about family.
"Sports is a backdrop. But every single person has stories like this," said Crow, who grew up a fan of UCLA basketball and currently does play-by-play work for Utah Valley University. "They can watch this and take away something from this — namely, that family is what lasts the longest. Sports teams come and go, players come and go, but family and those relationships are what last. If you believe in the afterlife, that’s what goes with you in the afterlife.
"There is no stronger emotional facet than family."
Family is the central tenet of the film, which follows the three families tied together across generations by their love of football.
It includes Lewis and his wife Lori, both of whom grew up BYU fans. When Brian Lewis enrolled in school, he wanted to be as close to the field as possible. So he took a job as a student groundskeeper and spent much of his career putting the final touches on the field that would become central to his life.
"I thought I died and went to heaven," Lewis said in the film. "I spent my freshman year working on the football field every day.
"I still have sideline passes from the 1984 national championship season."
Lewis took a job in California after graduation, but his love of BYU football continued. Life eventually brought him back to the Beehive State when he moved his family to Logan.
And every Saturday of a home field game, his family would drive from Cache Valley to Provo, keeping the tradition alive.
"You can watch the games on TV," Verle’s daughter, Jan, said. "But it’s just not the same as being there."
After two years of production work, the documentary feature finished wrapping this spring and has been shown to limited audiences in Vineyard, on campus at BYU, and with the BYU football team.
Head coach Kalani Sitake was a fan of the film, as was athletic director Tom Holmoe, Crow said. The crew is currently working on a wider release — but part of that release will be aided by the recent nomination by the Utah Film Festival, joining "Making Coco: the Grant Fuhr story," "Black, White, and US," "Unraveling Athena," "Building Center," and "50 Summers" on the shortlist for the year’s best documentary feature.
It's the culmination of a lot of work by Crow and Terry, two childhood friends who reconnected over Provo City high school sports broadcasts and filmed the documentary in their free time while juggling family and other full-time employment.
"As a passion project — we just wanted to get it off the ground," Terry said. "The families and their stories were motivating for us to put it together. We started cutting it and seeing the parallels, and we realized that even though everyone is different there is still one thing that remains the same — tradition.
"Going to games, being together as a family, and that became the focus."
