Glory Road: My Story of the 1966 NCAA Basketball Championship and How One Team Triumphed Against the Odds and Changed America Forever
Sportswriter Wetzel confronted an odd kind of problem when coauthoring the autobiography of Don Haskins, Texas college basketball icon and inadvertent civil rights pioneer. Instead of embellishing his story or telling the account of how, as a coach, he single-handedly changed college basketball in 1966 by winning the NCAA championship with five black starters, the comically humble Haskins "pretends it didn't matter, or, most often, that it didn't even happen in the first place." Such is the charm of Haskins, who became a living legend by coaching at Texas Miners College (now University of Texas–El Paso) from 1961 to 1999, but never let the fame get to him (although Haskins is not a saint: he's a vicious pool hustler and a terrorizing coach who wouldn't even let his players have water during practice). Although the book is ostensibly about the 1966 game against the all-white powerhouse University of Kentucky, Haskins's laconic retelling almost renders it anticlimactic. Still, Haskins can't mask the drama of the aftermath: within months of his team's victory, "the floodgates opened" and college teams everywhere started fielding black players.Cross-promotion with the January 13 release of the Disney filmGlory Road. (Dec.)Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.