Tarnished Glory

I have to admit that I’ve been looking forward to the release of Glory Road, the movie about Texas Western’s 1966 national championship win over Kentucky. I’ve read a lot about the game over the years and it seems like a fascinating subject – a team with five black starters knocking off lily-white power Kentucky and their racist coach. Legend has it that that game led to a change in philosophy in Kentucky’s (and other southern schools’) recruiting.
Unfortunately, I didn’t realize that the movie was being produced Jerry Bruckheimer. Great. That’s like hiring Robin Williams to MC a Holocaust conference.
Well, from the sound of things Bruckheimer did as expected and screwed the whole thing up.
From what I’ve read, he got the following things wrong:

  • He ignored the fact that several other teams with black players had won college championships.
  • He ignored the fact that many of the top NBA players were black at that time.
  • The movie has Don Haskins coaching a high school girls team the year before he wins the title. Nice. Not only is that preposterous, but it completely removes all credit that Haskins deserves for actually recruiting those players and building that team.
  • The movie grossly overstates the attitudes about the game at the time. According to many involved (including John Thompson), it wasn’t really until years later that anyone made a big deal about the racial makeup of the teams.
  • The movie’s final graphic says that the win was the greatest upset in college basketball history, despite the fact that Texas Western had lost only one game all year and was ranked #3.

Sad, really. The story is a great one and could stand on its own, but Mr. Aliens And Explosions couldn’t stand for that. Why let the facts get in the way?
BTW, Caulton Tudor has an interesting article up today about how it was very nearly Lilly-white Duke and not Kentucky in that game. The Wildcats beat the Blue Devils by only four points in the semis despite Duke being largely without their best player, Bob Verga.
I wonder how history would look back on that game if it hadn’t involved Kentucky’s notoriously racist coach Adolph Rupp? Of course, Bruckheimer could have just changed that too.


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