Entertaiment

Glory Road – A Sports Story with a Twist
By Orson Scott Card

Glory Road is yet another sports movie about a losing team that is suddenly transformed by the intervention of a remarkable coach, and prevails against hopeless odds.

Well, why not?  It’s what we go to the movies for, isn’t it?  And when it’s based on a true story, we trust it a little more, let it draw a little more emotion out of us.

The story this time, though, isn’t just the basketball.  It’s about the beginning of the transformation of basketball into what it is today – mostly black and thrilling to watch.

Texas Western (today known as UTEP, the University of Texas at El Paso) was a hopeless basketball school back in the sixties.  Out in the middle of nowhere, El Paso simply wasn’t a school anybody went to if they had any athletic talent.  Especially not in basketball, which even at Texas Western was ignored, compared to football.

(And that’s just sad, since their football team wasn’t all that hot.  I remember the 1980 game where BYU beat UTEP 83-7, and a commentator was not exaggerating when he said, “Don’t be deceived by those numbers.  The game was nowhere near as close as the score might indicate.”)

The movie begins when Don Haskins (Josh Lucas) is hired away from coaching a girls’ high school team.  He is told that he and his wife and children have to live in the men’s dorm, and his main job is maintaining discipline there.

But Haskins wants to win.  Recruiting is hopeless – he has nothing to offer.  Then he realizes that extraordinarily talented black players are being left on the bench in game after game, and most aren’t recruited at all.

He begins to search among high school and playground players in Detroit, the Bronx, and other places where basketball has evolved into a very different game.  He brings seven black players to El Paso, Texas, and manages to meld them and his farm-raised (and less-talented) white players into a team.

At first he tries to keep the black players from using their playground pickup-game moves – the styling that he saw as being all strut, no performance.

What ends up working for them, though, is a combination of the fundamentals he taught them and some of the surprising (to white players) moves from the inner city ball courts.

Now the problem is the prejudice of other teams.  The unofficial but unbreakable rule at that time was that you could play one black player at home, two on the road, and three if you were losing.  Period.  And when Haskins starts putting three or four black players on the floor at the same time, it is regarded as provocative, especially in the South.

Black players get beaten up; on the road, they arrive at hotels that have been pre-vandalized; Haskins gets death threats.  It becomes infuriating and drives a wedge between white and black players on the team.

All the nonsense about how black players aren’t smart enough or can’t stand the pressure or all the other myths sounds so impossibly stupid today, but those racist ideas were “common wisdom” then.

For kids who never lived in such a time, this movie can be an eye-opener.  People really acted like that?  Yes, Virginia, and this was after things started getting better for American blacks – you know, the idyllic post-lynching, post-segregation, pre-affirmative-action era.

The performances are wonderful.  Josh Lucas (who was so wonderful in Sweet Home Alabama but can’t seem to break through into A-list roles) is powerful and believable as the coach.

But this movie belongs to the actors playing those ground-breaking black players, who create an onscreen camaraderie that is wonderful to behold.

I wish I could tell you their names, but, frustratingly, the Internet Movie Database lists the entire cast in alphabetical order, but most of the leading actors don’t have their character name listed.

For instance, Sam Jones III, whose character gets teased for being the smallest guy on the court, is not listed as playing a character at all, and has no picture!  I only knew his name because he played Pete Ross on Smallville for three seasons.  There’s a publicist at Disney/Buena Vista who needs firing.  It’s just too easy to get the correct, complete information into the IMDB.

Never mind.  What matters is that this is a terrific, emotional movie, not so much about basketball as about how a courageous coach and tough, brave, and talented players forced Americans to see what basketball was like when black players were on the court.