HOT CORNER

A consumer’s guide to the best and worst of sports media and merchandise. Ground rules: If it can be read, heard, observed, viewed, dialed or downloaded, it’s in play here. One exception: No products will be endorsed.

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What: “The Junction Boys”

Where: ESPN, Saturday, 6 p.m.

Paul “Bear” Bryant held a 10-day summer training camp in the tiny Texas town of Junction in 1954, his first year as coach at Texas A&M.; It was so tough that 65 of 100 players who tried out quit the team. Day-long workouts were held in temperatures that often reached 114 degrees, and Bryant worked his troops until they dropped -- literally.

This much-hyped, independently produced original movie, adapted from a best-selling book by Jim Dent, tells the story of that camp. A plus for “The Junction Boys” is the job Tom Berenger does portraying Bear Bryant.

However, as is customary in Hollywood, the producers chose to stray from the facts. Bryant is real, and so is his crusty, hard-drinking trainer, Smokey Harper, aptly played by Nick Tate. But three of the key players -- or in this case, survivors -- are fictional. Skeet Keeler, Claude Gearheart and Johnny Haynes never existed. The producers call them composite characters.

Dennis Goehring, Jack Pardee and Gene Stallings are among the real Aggie players who went to that camp, but their names are never mentioned.

Another problem that hurts the movie’s credibility: The movie opens with Bryant headed to a 25-year reunion of that 1954 team. While flying to the reunion, he has a flashback to the training camp.

At the end of the movie, it’s 1979 again and Bryant has arrived at the reunion. Keeler, Gearheart and Haynes are there, but the actors portraying them barely resemble those who’d played them as young men.

It would have made more sense to have the original actors simply appear 25 years older. One has to wonder just how much of this fact-based film is fiction.

-- Larry Stewart