Pre-El Paso Inaccuracies

Rating: Null/10 (30 October 2011)

The movie makers here seem to want to just make up history rather than tap into it. This movie is a whole lot more fictionalized than, say, Moneyball (2011), almost to the point of ridiculousness. Various IMDb reviewers have pointed out inaccuracies about Don Haskins' tenure at Texas Western, the movie's characterization of certain games during the Miners' 1965-66 season, and the use of African-American players at Texas Western and elsewhere before and during Haskin's term as coach. Besides all that, the movie makers in the first few minutes, in the part about Haskins' high school coaching, have made little effort to learn anything from the Texas Film Commission or from the state's long-time association for public school athletic competition, the University Interscholastic League (UIL). Haskins coached at Benjamin, Hedley, and Dumas, all UIL school systems. He departed in 1961 for Texas Western, rather than in 1965 a mere year before the Texas Western national championship. The movie opens with a 1965 girls' state championship game being played in Fort Worth. State championships both boys and girls were, in the 1960s, played in Austin, not Fort Worth, and still are played in Austin. Neither Benjamin, Hedley, nor Dumas placed a girls' team in a state championship game until 1980, Dumas didn't even have a girls' high school basketball team in 1961-1965 because schools in the two largest enrollment-size classes were late coming to the sport. Dumas certainly didn't and doesn't have the type of hill or butte topographical relief the movie depicts on the outskirts of town. This resembles Days of Heaven (1978) which incongruously had mountains on the horizon near Amarillo and The Buddy Holly Story (1978) which incongruously had mountains on the horizon near Lubbock. So the film early on pretty much wipes out any patience on the part of viewers who have the slightest clue about Texas high school basketball or Texas geography. Which is a lot of viewers, because girls' basketball is big in Texas and fans have to drive through Texas geography to go from game to game.