Glory Road: The True Story Behind the Film

Rating: 8/10 (16 January 2006)

An upstart all black Texas Western Comes from nowhere to win the NCAA Division One Basketball title in 1966. Glory Road is the story of a seminal moment in American College Basketball.
In Glory Road, Don Haskins (Josh Lucas) is coaching a girls high school team in rural West Texas when the call comes from Texas Western of El Paso. The film implies Haskins started the basketball program at Tex-West from scratch in 1965, the season the Miners went all the way against Adolph Rupp's Kentucky in the NCAA Final.
In reality, Haskins was in his fourth year at El Paso in 1965. He did not initiate the program as the film implies, nor did he draft Tex-West's first black players. He inherited a team with three black players on it, in his first year as coach, 1961.
The movie has Haskins arriving at El Paso in 1965 having just left a high school girls basketball coaching job. The Coach finds he is really being hired to keep order in a college dormitory where he and his wife and two children will be forced to live. Texas Western isn't that interested in basketball.
Haskins is unable to draft first rank white players. In desperation, he sends his assistant to Harlem, and tries to attract black playground players himself in Indiana and other urban settings. In reality, Texas Western was among the first of southern colleges to integrate its sports teams.
Glory Road implies that 1966 was the year integration finally penetrated NCAA Basketball. But the University of Cincinnati won the NCAA with four black players in 1962. Loyola won the title with four black players in 1963. By 1966, not many years after the comic black Globetrotters had beaten the all-white Minneapolis Lakers, the NBA's leading players were black: Wilt Chamberlain, Bill Russell, Oscar Robertson and Elgin Baylor.
So how could the Kentucky-Texas Western Showdown be the moment the NCAA was integrated? It wasn't. It was, instead, the year the mostly southern, Atlantic Coast Conference which had been dragging its feet on team integration, saw the race issue blow up in its face.
Haskins played five black players nearly every game that year, and assembled a 27 and l record, the same record Rupp's Kentucky finished the Season with. Noise about the team kept drifting into the nation's sports pages. But few Americans saw the team play. No one dreamed the upstart black team could challenge the traditional white teams of the ACC.
In the movie El Paso has seven black players and two token whites. The screenplay creates story points out of thin air to create audience support for Texas Western.
The screenplay has Tex-West players doing 180 degree slam dunks, but there was no play like that in the NCAA basketball of 1965-66.
Coach Haskins is shown forcing his largely black players to play the game the 'White Way.' In fact playground basketball technique had not yet become an issue in the 1965 NCAA. A story point in Glory Road has Haskins losing several games, then having to give in and let the team 'play black.' In fact, the Miners played disciplined white basketball.
"Play one at home, two on the road and three if you get behind." This is the supposed comfortable adage about how a coach should use black players in the South. Its a great legendary saying. But integration took place so quickly, there was little time for the saying to take hold and have meaning. Before Brown vs. the Board of Education there were no blacks playing on Southern College Teams. After the NBA integrated, the NCAA followed quickly in its footsteps. In '66-'67, the year after tiny Texas Western won it all, Haskins had no blacks in his starting lineup. By 1969 even Rupp had his first black player.
Don Haskins is a legend, but he never again placed a team in the NCAA Finals. The luck and talent that assembled and trained this great team in 1965-66, did not repeat.
Still the NCAA Final Game between Rupp's Kentuckians and Haskins' black Tex-Wests IS a great drama. Americans and most NCAA Teams had read stories about the upstarts, but few had ever seen them play.
Only one Atlantic Coast Conference Basketball game a week appeared on national TV then. With no previous reputation, Tex-West had appeared not once on television. The team was only seen where they played. The five black men all on the floor at the same time scared some college teams that had not played a totally black team before.
Actor John Voight disappears in makeup to make him look the image of Adolph Rupp. Voight has obviously studied game films of Rupp. His portrayal is like nothing seen from him before. The Rupp on screen is a jowly, elderly man with a load of mannerisms and tics. Voight's performance is a tour de force. This must be close to the way the real Rupp looked and acted.
As the credits rolled at the end the real Don Haskins appears in black and white inset and tells of his experience. A photo of the real Adolph Rupp shows how close to reality John Voight's makeup was. Haskin's remarks crosscut with black and white game footage. Kentucky player Pat Riley then appears and adds a stunning perspective to the events of March, 1966. Riley, now an NBA coach, says he went to the Miners' locker room after he'd recovered some and congratulated the black players.
Riley said no one realized the significance of the game immediately. But as years went by it started to dawn. Riley says it was hard to accept that the black team was that much better than Kentucky then. Over the years he says he has come to see that accepting that was owning up to the dignity and the triumph of their effort.