June 19, 2006
Glory Road and Basketball History Posted by Allen Barra at 10:45 AM EST In 1965 Don Haskins, the men’s basketball coach at an obscure university, Texas Western (now the University of Texas at El Paso), decided to level the playing field, so to speak, by tapping into a new source of talent: black players. In 1966 his squad became the first all black team to win the NCAA championship. That their opponent was Kentucky, coached by the very symbol of white domination of the sport, Adolph “The Baron” Rupp, almost seems to be something out of fiction. In fact the whole story, like that of nearly every inspirational sports movie, from Remember the Titans (which, like Glory Road, the film based on Haskins’s team, was produced by Jerry Bruckheimer) to Friday Night Lights, seems to be something out of fiction.
Glory Road, which has just been released on DVD, gets most of the known facts right but never quite succeeds in illuminating them. Played by Josh Lucas—beefier here than as Reese Witherspoon’s amiable beer-swilling husband in Sweet Home Alabama—Haskins is a decent, dedicated man who never becomes self-conscious about his role in sports or social history and who is merely intent on fielding the best team he possibly can. Very good. Affirmative action does not work in sports, and there is no reason why a coach should consider starting a player for any other reason than his ability.
Surely there was some steel and fire to Haskins that made him the first coach in the south to face the inevitable storm of scorn and protest that he knew would follow his decision, but the script, by Chris Cleveland, Bettina Gilois, and Gregory Allen Howard, never begins to deal with this. Nor does it seem to have a clue as to how Haskins inspired and united his boys in the face of such adversity. Recalling their coach for Frank Fitzpatrick’s 1999 book, And The Walls Came Tumbling Down: Kentucky, Texas Western, and the Game That Changed American Sports, Haskins’ players invariably recalled hating him at the time for his unrelenting toughness.
It might be interesting to see how a white Southerner hammered discipline into young black kids, most of them from New York and other urban areas, back in the era of segregated sports. Instead we’re spoon fed big doses of tough love washed down with platitudes such as “It’s not about talent, it’s about heart!” and “The dignity’s inside you!” (Where else would it be?)
Glory Road isn’t shoddy, and it isn’t offensive—except perhaps for the shamelessness of the title, which links it to the greatest movie about the American Civil war, Glory. But it’s so respectful of its major characters that the ironies and complexities of their story never really come alive. Only Derek Luke, who stood out in Friday Night Lights, makes a sharp impression among the players as an unapologetic urbanite plunked down reluctantly in a rustic Texas setting.
The film leads the viewers step by step through Texas Western’s season, telling us not only when to cheer but who to boo, especially John Voight, as a caricature of Adolph Rupp, who, to be fair, is deserving of much scorn for the ungracious remarks he continued to make over the years about the team that defeated him. Voight, in the typical actor’s affectation, plays Rupp with an unnecessary prosthetic nose, an obvious attempt to bring verisimilitude to an underwritten role. Glory Road’s political simplicity may help to make it a hit with the teen crowd that needs its politics and history spelled out on flash cards; it probably also won’t hurt that the basketball scenes are edited with an MTV-style rhythm, as the one-thing-at-a-time style of basketball that was played in the mid-sixties would probably have kids laughing in the aisles today. (Like the big title fight between Jim “Cinderella Man” Braddock and Max Baer, Texas Western’s title game with Kentucky was supposed to have been a snooze, so the director and editor supply the dramatics that history neglected.)
Directed by a first-timer, James Gartner—who has, on the evidence of this film, no discernible style—Glory Road has one truly memorable sequence, a documentary segment at the end with the real Haskins and Pat Riley, who played for Kentucky in the 1966 championship game, reminiscing and laughing about the game’s significance, that has all the genuine warmth, humor, and rough edges that have been combed out of the movie’s account of the story.
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