Results matching “don haskins”

Don Haskins died today. If you're not a sports fan you might not know how he became an important figure in American society. In 1966 as coach at Texas Western he won the NCAA basketball championship by starting five African-American players against the University of Kentucky's five white players.

He was still coach at the school - now called UTEP - when I was a student many years later. Here's Hollywood's version of the stoy...

And some video of the actual event. That's before I was born, but it's still fascinating to me.

Haskins was a hero and the most admired resident of El Paso right to the end.

Here are related things I've posted over the years.

Update: 'Former UTEP and current Nebraska coach Doc Sadler couldn't remember who told him but he never forgot this description of Don Haskins: "He was the John Wayne of basketball." '

Finally got out to see Glory Road a few days ago. It was an unusual experience, seeing events I've known about, people I've known and watched for a long time, portrayed by actors onscreen.

The movie itself has earned mixed reviews, and I'd grade it a B. Not bad for a sports movie. There were a few nice touches to the story, such as Coach Haskins himself making a cameo early in the film as a gas station attendant.

Some annoying hollywood touches were there, too. Warning: spoilers beyond the break.

Some critics are claiming the contemporary racial implications were minor in 1966:

As to whether the game had social implications for sports and American society, that may well be true, but only in retrospect.

"I did the game,'' Cawood Ledford, Kentucky's legendary radio broadcaster, told the Cincinnati Post, "and in all the press conferences and interviews, I never heard a word about the racial issue. Not a whisper. It wasn't until several years after the game was played that it dawned on somebody that this had been a game of significance.''

"It was supposed to be such a big moment for integration, but that's all just BS,'' Thompson told Einhorn. "The game was in College Park, Md., and I was here at the time and nobody was talking about it as a big deal. Sure, in the black community, we quietly said, 'Good,' but nobody was running around saying how great it was.''

All of which is probably true from their perspective. But Don Haskins received 40,000 pieces of hate mail after the game.

Roger Ebert review here.

NB This may interest you even if you're not a sports fan

-Minor Spoilers-

If you live in the US you can't have missed the TV promos for the movie coming out today. It's called Glory Road, the story of Texas Western, the first all black basketball team to win the NCAA championship.

Texas Western is now known as the University of Texas- El Paso, (UTEP), and that's where I went to school. Basketball did indeed play a part in my decision to attend. During my senior year in high school I made my way down from Wisconsin to watch UTEP beat Arizona over the Christmas break, and I was impressed with the big school atmosphere and the enthusiasm of the fans. I enrolled. Looking back, it still seems like a good reason to pick a college.

UTEP basketball was blessed to have one Don Haskins as a coach. He started his tenure at UTEP way back in 1961 and was still there when I was there in the late Eighties. Haskins (to be blunt) is a redneck from Oklahoma who has lived and breathed basketball from his youth. When he got the UTEP job he was a young and relatively inexperienced coach, and Texas Western was a remote and obscure college. But he was committed to winning, and he adopted an unorthodox strategy to do so. He went to urban areas and recruited black players who received very little attention from major universities at the time. Most schools in the south didn't have black players at all.

It's important to note that culturally speaking, El Paso doesn't have much in common with the South. It's more closely tied to the American southwest, like New Mexico and Arizona. The town is mostly Hispanic, as are most of UTEP's students. The black players were warmly embraced by El Pasoans.

The 1966 national championship game, the subject of the movie, was against #1 ranked Kentucky, a team from the Southeast Conference. The entire conference didn't have a single black player. It was an all black team against an all white team.

Here's where my concerns about the movie start. Haskins is a basketball genius, and he taught his players to play a tactically astute game - tough defense, controlling the tempo of the game, and frustrating the opponent. He coached the thinking man's game of basketball. The ugly stereotype of black players, which persists to this day, is that they win by pure athletic ability, being faster, jumping higher, and such. That's not what Haskin's Texas Western team was about. Considering the context, that's not just a minor bit of trivia.

The film is a Jerry Bruckheimer/Disney production. My fear is they have little concern for such nuance. Of course, I'll reserve judgement until I've seen the movie. I should get to do so some time in the next week, and I'll post my reaction here. The reviews I've read so far have been very positive.

Trivial aside; I knew some of the basketball players when I was there. Tim Hardaway and I wrote a term paper together. I didn't know what a star he was to become.

Here's (already!) a list of historical inacuracies in the film.

A view of the campus. Quite lovely. The architecture is Bhutanese, which blends nicely with the barren desert mountains.

Go Miners!

My Miners won a game.

EL PASO, TEXAS - The UTEP men's basketball team ended the Harlem Globetrotters' 288-game winning streak with an 89-88 victory on Saturday at the Don Haskins Center.

The Globetrotters finished 7-1 on their eight-game 2003 college tour. Earlier in the tour they defeated Michigan State (97-83), Massachusetts (77-68) and defending national champion Syracuse (83-70).

Are they that good? It's almost too much for a fan to hope for. They've been dismal of late, with consecutive 20-loss seasons, but there's a new coach and an impressive recruiting class...

My ol' alma mater has one notable claim to fame. We won the national basketball championship in 1966. Yeah, that's before I was born. Texas Western, now called the University of Texas - El Paso, started five black players against Kentucky and coach Adolph Rupp's five white players in the championship game. Rupp refused to recruit blacks.

Anyway, Disney's making the film, which will called Glory Road. The hero of the story, in both the movie and real life, is coach Don Haskins. Haskins was only in his twenties when he coached the team to the championship. He was a basketball genius, and stayed on as UTEP's coach for over 30 years. The team was frequently in the national rankings and he made a habit of beating bigger schools in the NCAA tournament until he retired just a few years ago. His gruff, bigger than life persona and burly physique earned him the nick-name 'The Bear.' He could berate a player or a game official like no one else. You'd almost never see him smile during a game.

So who gets to play The Bear in the movie?

Ben Affleck. The rather boyish Ben Affleck. Stupid Disney.

This could be the worst casting since the delicately featured Joseph Fiennes played the curmudgeonly Martin Luther.