Matthew McConaughey Drops by Football Practice [Watch]
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It’s no secret that Matthew McConaughey is a serious Longhorns fan. The actor, a Life Member who earned his BS in 1993 and will be crowned a Distinguished Alumnus later this month, has voiced commercials for the university and is frequently spotted wearing burnt orange.
So it doesn’t come as a huge surprise that he recently showed up at a UT football practice to speak to the players before the Sept. 27 Kansas game. The resulting three-minute pep talk is classic McConaughey: a little folksy, a little rambling, and 100 percent enthusiastic and genuine.
“Last night I was thinking about what I do, and I was thinking about what y’all do, and I was asking myself this question all the time,” McConaughey told the team. “Why do I do what I do, why am I an actor? And I was gonna ask y’all, man, why do you play football? No right answer.” He went on to urge the players to look within themselves and find the purpose driving them to play the game. “At the end of the day, every single one of you really only gotta be playing for one person.”
While his 6-year-old son Levi toddled around in a miniature Longhorns jersey, McConaughey also took questions from the team (his favorite movie to make: Mud) before leading them in the chest-thumping chant from The Wolf of Wall Street. He said that the chant is his way of calming his nerves before shooting a scene, and made it on camera only after co-star Leonardo DiCaprio spotted McConaughey doing it.
He must’ve said something right: The Longhorns beat Kansas 23-0.
