June 20, 2006
Speaking of Glory Road . . . Posted by Allen Barra at 12:00 PM EST . . . as I did in this space yesterday, here are a few observations about the true story that the movie tells, and about basketball at that time.
—The same year the Texas Western Miners became the first all-black team to win the NCAA title was also the year that the Boston Celtic great Bill Russell became the first black NBA coach.
—The 1965-66 Texas Western game was characterized by the slam dunk, a relatively new play in college basketball. Ten months after TWU’s championship, the NCAA Rules Committee voted to outlaw the slam dunk. The ban would last ten years.
—Despite the style of ball the ’66 Miners helped usher in, their play that season was, according to center David “Big Daddy D” Lattin, “more white-oriented than any team we saw in the NCAA tournament. We played the most intelligent, the most boring, the most disciplined game of all.”
—Kentucky coach Adolph Rupp never stopped berating the 1966 Texas Western team that beat his Wildcats for the national championship. He once referred to them as “a bunch of crooks,” and in an interview years later said, erroneously, that TWU was “placed on probation” for recruiting violations on the ’65-’66 team.
—Despite Rupp’s accusations, the seven black players on the ’65-’66 TWU squad did just fine. Four graduated that year, the other three went back and got their degrees. One of the players died in 2002. The surviving players are all married and have grandchildren.
—The effect of the Miners’ victory in the ’66 NCAAs was electric and immediate, inaugurating what one historian called “the most substantial increase in integration in the history of college sports.” The next season every conference in the Southeast and Southwest had black players.
—Don Haskins had coached girls’ college basketball before accepting the men’s job at Texas Western. He coached the rest of his career there, retiring in 1999 after winning seven Western Athletic Conference titles. In 1997 he was elected to the Basketball Hall of Fame. Among the letters of recommendation he received was one from Pat Riley, who played on the Kentucky team TWU beat in 1966.
—Despite the later recognition of what the ’66 Miners accomplished, there was relatively little sense at the time that history was being made. “I started my five best players,” Haskins would tell an interviewer years later. “That they were all black and that it was the first time five black players had started in an NCAA championship game meant nothing to me.” According to Pat Riley, “As I got into the NBA and players began to speak to me about that game, I started to realize the significance of it.”
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