2021 marks fifty five years since the most important game in college basketball was played. In 1966, Texas Western College (now known as the University of Texas at El Paso), a little known school in El Paso, Texas, upset the powerhouse University of Kentucky. What made the story of Texas Western--to this day the only Texas school to win the Championship-- unique was not that David beat Goliath (Adolph Rupp's University of Kentucky was a four time NCAA Champion). What made it unique was that Texas Western started 5 African-American players...for the whole the game. I know it should not be shocking that black players started for an entire game, but in 1966 it was unheard of.
Texas Western's coach, Don Haskins, never intended to become a civil rights leader. To his dying day he said he simply played the best players he had. His goal was to win as many basketball games as possible. Still, his decision to recruit and play black players--at a college in the south no less--provoked outrage. After all, black players were thought to be undisciplined and stupid, certainly not good enough to play on the same court as white players. The Washington Post quoted a spectator who witnessed the historic event, "We all just assumed that Texas Western would throw behind-the-back passes and shoot the ball from 25 feet...And when the game got started, we all sat there and watched Texas Western run a better half-court offense than Kentucky, and play better man-to-man defense than Kentucky. There were possessions where Texas Western passed it 10 times before taking a shot. . . . It was beautiful."
Although not his intention, Don Haskins and his team (made up of African-American, Mexican-American and white players) changed the face of college basketball that fateful day in 1966. Adolph Rupp, Kentucky's coach who refused to recruit black players until he was forced to by legal decree and his school's president, always believed that somehow Texas Western had cheated. How else can one explain a group of inexperienced players beating the well honed Kentucky machine? Texas Western's win swung open the door for black players in the north (where the rule was: you play two blacks at home, three on the road, four when you're behind) and certainly in the south. Years later, Disney enshrined the story of the black players who changed basketball in the movie "Glory Road." What of Coach Rupp? Former Texas Western player Harry Flurnoy said it best, "No one will remember him without remembering us and I guess there is a certain justice to that."
