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Edited on Thu Nov-19-09 05:32 PM by Are_grits_groceries
Texas Western is now known as UTEP. This is the first part of the story: A Night To Remember If you were in front of the television on the evening of March 19, 1966, you might have witnessed what many have since described as "the most important game in the history of college basketball," Texas Western's 72-65 upset of Kentucky in the NCAA championship final. This was the night in which the Miners' all-black starting lineup (a first in NCAA title game history) and two reserves, also black, toppled coach Adolph Rupp's all-white Wildcats. The story was so compelling that in recent years Texas Western coach Don Haskins received several overtures to turn the tale into a movie before producer Jerry Bruckheimer (Black Hawk Down) persuaded him to serve as a consultant for Glory Road, which opened nationwide last week. http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/vault/article/magazine/MAG1106466/index.htmThe fact that Don Haskins played an all-black starting lineup was radical in itself. To top it off, they beat the powerhouse, all-white Kentucky squad coached by Adolph Rupp. Haskins didn't give a shit what anybody said to him. The movie 'Glory Road' is about this team. However, there is a very important backstory to the beginnings of that team that is less known. It deserves to be. Early Step On The Road To Glory The unlikely genesis of Texas Western's historic NCAA title <snip> But on the eve of a new college hoops season an obscure footnote to that story has surfaced, and it provides a worthy new insight into how a predominantly white school in the old Confederacy came to recruit a bounty of black players, even before passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964. In college in the 1940s, "seven of the top 10 guys on the team were ," says Williams, who as a result got a taste of discrimination: After road games players had to take all-night bus rides home because few motels around the Southwest would accommodate them.
Turns out the answer begins in the spring of 1962 with the friendship of two men, both from the El Paso barrio and neither of them Hispanic: Bert Williams, a white city alderman and former Miners basketball captain, and Nolan Richardson, an African-American hoops player then in his junior year at Texas Western (now known as UTEP). Richardson, who would go on to coach Arkansas to the 1994 NCAA title, was a good enough outfielder to be offered a contract by the Houston Colt .45s, and Williams roped him into ringer duty on his softball team. After a game the two swung by the Oasis, a restaurant owned by former mayor Fred Hervey. Richardson knew exactly how they'd be received, but Williams dared their waitress to deny them service. "She looked me in the eye—she wouldn't look at Nolan—and said, 'I can't serve him,'" says Williams, now 83. "I went into my whole 'Don't be that way, these are different times' mode. Jack Kennedy had just come into office pushing civil rights. She didn't budge. I said, 'I'll be back.'" <snip> Adds Rus Bradburd, a former Haskins assistant whose forthcoming biography of Richardson, Forty Minutes of Hell, highlights the Oasis incident, "This wasn't like Rosa Parks, who had the entire civil rights movement behind her. This was a Power of One kind of story."
Or a Power of One Thing Leads to Another kind of story. As Richardson says, "You could say Pájaro was ahead of his time. And you could say that he was right on time." http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/vault/article/magazine/MAG1162929/index.htmWilliams didn't do what he did for fame or glory. In fact, he took a lot of shit for his attitude. However, he didn't waver from what he felt was right. Don Haskins has become a well known figure in the history of BB and in general. Williams is one of those people you never hear about. He walked the walk though.
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