The Road to 'Glory Road'

I was an 11-year-old basketball junkie when Texas Western beat Kentucky for the 1966 NCAA Basketball championship. And as the title of the movie chronicling the game indicates, there was something glorious about it.

'Glory Road' tells, in Hollywood terms, the story of head coach Don Haskins and the five African-American players he started and two others used against Kentucky in the 1966 NCAA final game, billed by many as the most important game in college basketball history.

It didn't start out that way.

All most folks knew about Texas Western headed into that final game was that they probably had little chance against Kentucky, one of the premier teams in big-time college basketball. Kentucky head coach Adolph Rupp had built a reputation as one the best coaches in the land and one of the stauchest opponents to integration. He was going for his fifth national title. His '66 team, known as "Rupp's Runts," a group of all-white players, none taller than 6-foot-5, had compiled a 27-1 record and headed to the final game as the No. 1 team in all of America.

I thought Texas Western had no chance. That was until I turned on the TV and saw five players my color walk on the floor as starters. I shimmied up to within four feet of my family's black & white TV and turned up the volume. Even at 11, I knew this was going to be something special. Little did I know.

I was raised in Danville, Va., one of the hotbeds of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, and my father was an NAACP attorney. By then, Danville had seen its share of racial incidents from boycotts, downtown demonstrations and Woolworth lunch-counter sit-ins to intimidations, beatdowns and mass arrests by the local police.

Mass meetings, as they were called, had been weekly occurrences for the black citizens of Danville. In those days, we sang as much 'We Shall Overcome' and 'We Shall Not Be Moved' at my house ­ ­than we did 'The Lord's Prayer.' My mother was on piano. I had been made keenly aware of the racial injustices that took place in Danville and throughout America, injustices that carried over to the playing fields of sports.

This was a year after black AFL players had refused to play in that league's All-Star Game in New Orleans because they had trouble getting a taxi or even basic services at a city restaurant. It was less than a year after the Watts riots in Los Angeles and just three months before James Meredith was shot in Mississippi during a march against racism. Civil rights was slowly giving way to Black Power on the streets and the courts.

Older folks knew that Bill Russell and K.C. Jones had led San Francisco to back-to-back NCAA titles in 1955 and '56. They knew Wilt Chamberlain had been the Final Four's most valuable player for Kansas in 1957 and Elgin Baylor took the same title in 1958 while playing for Seattle. The University of Cincinnati had four black starters on national championship teams in 1961 and '62 and on another Final Four team in '63. UCLA's Walt Hazzard won the MVP award in '64.

I had watched Cazzie Russell, Bill Buntin and Oliver Darden off the great Michigan teams of the mid-60s beat Duke and lose a heart-breaker to UCLA in the 1965 championship game. But for me, most of those accomplishments happened before I was old enough to know about them, and for the latter ones, there was no place to see them. In those days there was no national telecast of the Final Four or the NCAA championship game. There were only four channels, no cable and no ESPN.

Maybe if a team from my part of the country was there local TV would carry the game -- as happened in 1964 and '66 when Duke made the Final Four. Perhaps it was Kentucky, ably representing the Old South, that got the game on in Danville and throughout that region. However it happened, I was glad to see it, and knew I had just become a big Texas Western fan.

The names of the Miners' players are etched in my mind, partcularly, Bobby Joe Hill, who was like me, a point guard. Willie Cager ­ what a name for a basketball player (basketball players used to be called "cagers") ­ Neville Shed, Willie Worsley, Harry Flournoy, Orstein Artis and the center, David 'Big Daddy' Lattin were all the players Haskins used in the championship game.

The Kentucky team featured all-American guard Louie Dampier, Pat Riley, Thad Jaracz, Larry Conley and Bob Tallent, players whose names are also etched, in one way or another, in American basketball lore. Hill and Lattin produced the game's most memorable plays. Hill, cleanly swiping the ball from the Kentucky All-American early in the game and again later, and gliding in for layups, provided the grace. Lattin, with three monstrous dunks over the helpless "Runts," provided the thunder. Between those highlights, the Miners put on a basketball clinic, never relinquishing the lead and playing with a cool confidence on the way to the shocking and relatively easy, 72-65 win.

Experts say the Texas Western/Kentucky game ranks as one of the greatest upsets in college basketball history. It's not even close. North Carolina upset Wilt's Kansas team en route to the title in 1957. North Carolina State pulled a buzzer-beating upset of Houston in 1983. Villanova upset Patrick Ewing's Georgetown squad in 1985. In 1966, Texas Western upset college basketball. In racial terms, it was the ultimate showdown.

After Texas Western's win, not only did Kentucky's lily-white Southeastern Conference (SEC) integrate the following year, but so did the Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC) and the Southwest Conference. It was a landmark decision that truly went forward with all deliberate speed, unlike another decision from the nation's highest Court.

The movie doesn't focus on the impact the game had on America, then and now. 'Glory Road' focuses on a coach and a team just trying to win a game.

That's fine, but it doesn't tell the whole story.