Team work is best

Rating: 10/10 (28 July 2007)

We see more and more of these films and that rejuvenates my heart and my mind tremendously. Here it is about the 1966 NCAA Basket Ball competition in which Texas Western lined up the first ever all black basket ball team in the final game, and the black players were a majority in the team from the very start. The film is decent about the difficulties encountered by the coach who made that choice: make them respect his rule, his rhythm and his life discipline while training and then competing; make them live with their differences inside the team, and with the hostility of many outside the team; make them accept to play a unified game as a team even if some would like to play their own personal games. And there are many others. He managed to keep them united even for the final game when he decided to have an all black team then, the white players becoming privileged supporters. Was he conscious he was setting an objective that went a long way beyond the game itself? How can we know? It is sure today that it was a milestone in the civil rights struggle, at least it became one: the 1966 declaration of independence of black basketball players at the national level. The extremely important dimension of this film is that it is not only saying or showing the blacks are better, because after all they might not be better, but showing that their game, their way of playing is better because they are able to unify their ambitions within the whole team and to integrate their white team mates even when it might be considered like bringing the wolf among the sheep by taking them to an all black party one week-end. The film shows how much the civil rights struggle was an all-race team struggle. Without the support of some whites in the public as well as in the hierarchy the struggle might have been a lot longer and even a lot less successful. That has to be said over and over again and demonstrated with as many case studies as possible. That's what Ralph Ellison demonstrated in his books: blacks are invisible but to become visible to whites it is some of these whites who have to open their eyes and see. Without these white eyes seeing the blacks around them, the blacks cannot become visible, no matter what they do. In fact everything they may do might even make them more invisible or might justify some into making these blacks become invisible by erasing them from the picture. And that attitude, so well illustrated in this film, has to be the model for us to deal with all the groups of people who are different from us, no matter what this "us" might stand for.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris Dauphine & University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne