Glory Road, directed by James Gartner, is well timed both for the holiday recognizing Martin Luther King, Jr., and the beginning of college basketball season. The movie is based on the 1979 book (by Robert A. Heinlein) and true story of a college basketball team from West Texas College (now the University of Texas at El Paso) that rose from obscurity to achieve an upset victory as the winner of the National Collegiate Athletic Association basketball competition for 1966, a precedent that perhaps weighed heavily on the later desegregation of a high school in Alexandria, Virginia, as depicted in Remember the Titans, which Political Film Society members voted best film on human rights of 2000. When the feel-good movie begins, Don Haskins (played by Josh Lucas) is coaching a girls basketball team at a high school in Fort Worth. A talent scout picks him to coach at West Texas, which has never had a winning basketball team at a college where football is the top sport. After arrival at the college (actually in 1961, but 1965 in the film), Haskins talks his way into more funds for scholarships to attract new players. He then recruits African Americans in the Bronx, Detroit, Gary (Indiana), Houston, and elsewhere, some of whom he spots while they are playing basketball on the street rather than in a high school. Previously, no coach ever fielded a team with more than one Black basketball player in the opening lineup for a home team; two maximum were used on the road, and three only when a team had fallen behind in the score. Haskins, however, dares to start with three, and soon he is coaching an undefeated team that beats fourth-ranked Iowa and goes on to defeat the top-ranked University of Kentucky in the national championships with an unprecedented starting lineup of five African Americans. The film focuses on the personalities of several players as well as the coach and ends with titles indicating their careers afterward, including a National Basketball League star, others who became college coaches and teachers, and Haskins's selection for the Basketball Hall of Fame in 1997. Adolf Rupp (played by Jon Voight) gets recognition as the Kentucky coach who suffers an ignominious defeat to West Texas in the final playoffs of 1966 but nevertheless retires as the second winningest college coach in history; he is succeeded by an African American coach. However, the most important story is how Hoskins inspired and trained his team, and how the African Americans on the team overcame discrimination, including a beating, having their motel rooms ransacked, and having debris thrown on them as they entered the basketball court for a game. Thanks in part to their courage, the color line disappeared in college and professional sports after 1966. Similar to Remember the Titans, the Political Film Society has nominated Glory Road as best film exposé and best film on human rights of 2006. MH
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