Glory Road - I'm Taking It Personally

NB This may interest you even if you're not a sports fan

-Minor Spoilers-

If you live in the US you can't have missed the TV promos for the movie coming out today. It's called Glory Road, the story of Texas Western, the first all black basketball team to win the NCAA championship.

Texas Western is now known as the University of Texas- El Paso, (UTEP), and that's where I went to school. Basketball did indeed play a part in my decision to attend. During my senior year in high school I made my way down from Wisconsin to watch UTEP beat Arizona over the Christmas break, and I was impressed with the big school atmosphere and the enthusiasm of the fans. I enrolled. Looking back, it still seems like a good reason to pick a college.

UTEP basketball was blessed to have one Don Haskins as a coach. He started his tenure at UTEP way back in 1961 and was still there when I was there in the late Eighties. Haskins (to be blunt) is a redneck from Oklahoma who has lived and breathed basketball from his youth. When he got the UTEP job he was a young and relatively inexperienced coach, and Texas Western was a remote and obscure college. But he was committed to winning, and he adopted an unorthodox strategy to do so. He went to urban areas and recruited black players who received very little attention from major universities at the time. Most schools in the south didn't have black players at all.

It's important to note that culturally speaking, El Paso doesn't have much in common with the South. It's more closely tied to the American southwest, like New Mexico and Arizona. The town is mostly Hispanic, as are most of UTEP's students. The black players were warmly embraced by El Pasoans.

The 1966 national championship game, the subject of the movie, was against #1 ranked Kentucky, a team from the Southeast Conference. The entire conference didn't have a single black player. It was an all black team against an all white team.

Here's where my concerns about the movie start. Haskins is a basketball genius, and he taught his players to play a tactically astute game - tough defense, controlling the tempo of the game, and frustrating the opponent. He coached the thinking man's game of basketball. The ugly stereotype of black players, which persists to this day, is that they win by pure athletic ability, being faster, jumping higher, and such. That's not what Haskin's Texas Western team was about. Considering the context, that's not just a minor bit of trivia.

The film is a Jerry Bruckheimer/Disney production. My fear is they have little concern for such nuance. Of course, I'll reserve judgement until I've seen the movie. I should get to do so some time in the next week, and I'll post my reaction here. The reviews I've read so far have been very positive.

Trivial aside; I knew some of the basketball players when I was there. Tim Hardaway and I wrote a term paper together. I didn't know what a star he was to become.

Here's (already!) a list of historical inacuracies in the film.

A view of the campus. Quite lovely. The architecture is Bhutanese, which blends nicely with the barren desert mountains.

Go Miners!