#you can hate him all you want for leaving harry before & during tribunal but how could he have foreseen all this bullshit would have happen

[cryptiduni]

“white mourning.”

[comm4000]

You carryin’ on like Negroes gon’ be the future of basketball. Can you imagine that?

The bridge that connects high school and professional basketball to each other is a bridge that not many athletes get to cross. Back in the day, it wasn’t a road that many players of color, specifically Black players got to cross. In 1966 when Don Haskins stood on the bridge and decided to build a team that ended up with a starting lineup of five Black players. He took a risk that put him and his team in danger; and that was all because in 1966, African Americans were still fighting for their civil rights. Unlike many of his coaching friends, Don believed that skill was more important than skin color, which is how the story of Glory Road came to be. Against racist coaches, spectators, and teams, the Texas Western University Miners prospered to success, winning the NCAA championship in 1966. Running a total of 106 minutes, Glory Road takes a trip back in time to remind us that the road to what we see now as (somewhat) diverse sports, was not an easy one. A lot of college basketball teams now are white, just like many of the college teams that Don Haskins and his Miners faced. In Division I athletics, most of the spectatorship, ownership, and coaching also belongs to white men. When Don Haskins put seven Black players on his team he was jumping into something that I don’t think he contemplated because he was focused on the end goal which was winning. He set his players up to be harassed and uncared for because of the color of their skin. Glory Road is the visual representation of what crossing the color line means for everybody involved.

Although Haskins’ intentions were wonderful in nature, Glory Road supports the ideology that players of color are looked upon for the labor that they can contribute to a team and how much of their skill can either bring accolades to the people they work under or to them as a gift for the opportunity that they were given. In my opinion, I think that the movie does a very great job at showing the harsh reality of sports culture and that is that racism still lives there and is very comfortable in its place.

In the beginning of the movie, Haskins is out for drinks with friends that are also coaches or belong to coaching staffs and one of the older men asks Haskins why he put seven negroes on his team, Haskins’ rebuttal is that he’s not focused on the color of their skin, but on their winning. And he says the same, adding that skill is also a factor when recruiting his first black player, Bobby Joe Hill. He uses the promise of scholarship to get the parents of the boys he recruits on board with them leaving to come and play, and even uses the parents, like Harry Flournoy’s mother, to scare the players into having good grades. That’s the only mention or focus on grades that the movie really takes a stab at, which relates to the labor that Branch talked about in “The Shame of College Sports” when it was stated that the players weren’t “students at play” but “high -performance athletes [that could be] forgiven for not meeting the academic standards of their peers.

Unlike Haskins, some of the white players he had on his team had never even seen a black player before, and had the idea that they were superior to them. After seeing and hearing the things that their teammates were experiencing, the white players wanted to be correct in how they referred to their own teammates. There’s a scene where one of the white players asks, “is it black or is it colored?” so that he doesn’t make his teammates feel less than or out of place.

When their season started, not even one of the black players that started got an applause from the crowd because spectators were confused about what was going on. People would ask Don Haskins if he was crazy and told him that he wouldn’t be successful with black players getting play time on his team. There is a scene where one of the other coaches for the Miners tells Haskins “You carrying on like Negroes gon be the future of basketball? Can you imagine that?” Little did he know, that would come to be reality.

One of the most important scenes in Glory Road happens later, after many successes of the Miners team. People were painfully aware of the fact that the starting lineup was five black players and they did not like it. The team is standing at their entrance and spectators from the audience are screaming racial slurs, spitting, poring drinks, on throwing popcorn and whatever else they can at the black players and calling the white players “nigger lovers.” Although this wasn’t the first racist incident the black players have faced; Nevil Shed was beaten up in a bathroom at a diner while the team was out for breakfast, and they also had their rooms vandalized with the racial slurs; Haskins urged them to play through the hate, telling them that the only way to shut them up was to win. The black players were ready to quit, because mentally and emotionally they had been destroyed by the overt racism that they were facing at every game. For coach Don Haskins, it may have been easy to tell them to play through everything but he had no clue what they felt like. In discussing the color line in athletics, Beanon states that segregation (although no longer a thing during the rising success of the Miners) “privileged Whites in education, transportation, voting, phone booths, restaurants, and most other components of racial institutions.” The white men that were responsible for jumping Nevil Shed weren’t held accountable, there was no investigation of the room vandalization, nor were any of the spectators that were showing their disdain removed from the game. The racism became a part of the game unfortunately and even as the Miners continued to gain success, the racism just seemed to grow.

I could literally feel the same anxiety the team felt trying to come out of the locker room while watching the movie. I am a manager of a high school basketball team and my team is 100% Black. When we travel to schools where the student, player, parent, and fan demographic doesn’t match ours, it’s almost like a sheet of intensity covers the gym. An immediate feeling of uncomfortability always washes over my boys and I. When we play those schools, referee calls are often miscalled, and we usually travel in groups when walking around those schools. I’ve been the manager of the team since December of 2013, and although Glory Road was centered in 1966, in 2017, the same overt thoughts that existed then are covertly expressed through looks and whispers that happen the moment we set foot in a gym. 

Glory Road is truly a fairytale story seeing as how the team overcame every obstacle and ended up victorious with a history changing victory at the end of their season. However, racism accompanied their story and that takes away the loving nature of the fairytale that could’ve been. In a 2006 interview, Don Haskins said “"I really didn't think about starting five black guys. I just wanted to put my five best guys on the court, I just wanted to win the game." The movie is one story about how racism established a place in basketball and serves as a building block in the blueprint of how racism learned how to cover its face for the sport, while simultaneously showcasing that with athleticism comes with another ism that some coaches and players don’t think about and may not be ready for; racism.

 Sources:

Film: Glory Road. James Gartner. Buena Vista Pictures, 2006. Film.

Beanon, Krystal and Messner, Chris (2013) “Ch 1: The Color Line in Athletics.” Pp. 1-9.

Branch, Taylor (2011). “The Shame of College Sports.” The Atlantic.

Limon, Iliana (2006). “Ex-Miners coach Don Haskins wasn't playing the hero during a racially charged 1966 championship, but Hollywood doesn't seem to mind.” The Albuquerque Tribune.