Haskins was a young husband and father trying to support his family by coaching girl's high school basketball. So when the chance came to coach Division I NCAA college basketball, he jumped at it, even though it was for an obscure little school called Texas Western way out in El Paso. The school was so poor that Haskins and his wife and three kids had to live in the boys’ dorm. He had no money to recruit players and no hope of attracting the big name high school phenoms who signed with recognized powerhouses like Kentucky.

Still, Haskins was determined to build a strong team. So he did something unprecedented and highly controversial for the year 1966...he recruited 7 African American players.
Haskins went out and found the best players he could get...basketball naturals with street smarts and street skills...young men who lived and breathed basketball, but who had no hope of ever getting college scholarships or fat professional contracts...because of their race.

He brought the seven to Texas Western and honed their great natural skills with intense discipline and teamwork, teaching his players not only to respect the game of basketball and each other, but themselves.

Haskins had other battles to contend with. He had to fight his players' basic mistrust of white men, and get them to let go of their own prejudices about the game. They didn’t understand the importance of discipline to the game; he showed it to them. Many of them didn’t understand the importance of academic excellence; he showed them that as well. He helped them trade uncertain futures for promising careers, and not just in basketball. Haskins recruited seven highly individual players from the mean streets of New York City, Detroit and Indianapolis, and he had to mold them into a team and teach them how to get along with the white players already on the team.

And what a team he molded. Many of his players went on to careers in professional basketball. something that just wasn’t all that common in 1966. The ones who chose not to play professional ball ended up as influential teachers, but all were revered for their championship run and the quality of their characters.

For those of you who may be yawning and saying, "So what?" you have to remember that in those days, mixing African American players on a team with white players was something that just wasn't done. Racism was that widespread and outspoken. There was nothing secret or even particularly shameful about it. So, even though it's accurate for the time of the movie, the blatant racism on display throughout the film sometimes makes it raw and hard to take. Some of it actually turned my stomach.

Despite the many adversities they faced, game after game, the team overcame bigger rivals possessed of deeper benches. Improbably, they found themselves in the NCAA playoffs, where the racism of the press and opposing teams was blatant. It was especially bad from the Kentucky Wild Cats coach, Adolph Rupp, (played by Jon Voight) who basically sneered at Haskin's team, predicting he would blow them off the court.

He was wrong. The Texas Western Miners won, in what has been called the single most important, most pivotal game in college basketball history. The Miners amazing season (they only lost one game early on) inspired coaches all over the country to lower the invisible color barriers and start recruiting African-American players.

Uber-producer Jerry Bruckheimer didn’t know any of this until he happened to have a conversation with Pat Riley, the Hall of Fame basketball player who had been on the Kentucky team that lost to Texas Western. Riley told Bruckheimer when Haskins defiantly chose to start an all-African American line-up against Kentucky’s lily white one, that one game changed everything.

Josh Lucas does a good job playing Don Haskins, although in some scenes I thought his performance was a little too restrained. Jon Voight struck me as vaguely creepy in the role of the Kentucky coach.

Be sure to stay in the theater for the end credits. The surviving real life players, (now all in their fifties) share their recollections of Coach Haskins and the game. They’re all justifiably proud of the fact that that one pivotal game changed the face of college basketball (and ultimately even professional basketball) completely.

This isn’t a big blockbuster movie. Jerry Bruckheimer put on a full court press of his own to bring the story to the big screen, and the result is a satisfying movie, even if the racism is hard to watch.




Recommended:
Yes