Glory Road: Analysing the Long-Term Effects of Racial Diversity in Basketball

In the 1966 NCAA championship, El Paso’s Texas Western College Miners, a small southern college, accomplished to win the NCAA championship against the four times NCAA champions, University of Kentucky Wildcats. The Wildcats were known to be the strongest basketball team in the nation. This game proved to be more than just a game for the Miners, but a multi-racial team that had joined the NCAA just three years earlier with all-white opponent. The Miner’s unexpected victory demonstrated that African American players had skills to control the game as well as a white team, and even better than the best white team. 'I told them I was making $23,000 in El Paso. They asked me to write down what it would take to get me to Detroit. 'I knew I wasn't going. So I wrote down $80,000... which, at that time, was like a million to me. And they said, ``OK.'

Effect 1

The 1966 Miners consisted of seven African Americans: Bobby Joe Hill(14), Orsten Artis(20), Willie Worsley(24), Willie Cager(10), Nevil Shed(32), Harry Flournoy(44), and David Lattin(43), four White Americans: Jerry Armstrong(52), Louis Baudoin(22), Dick Meyers(40), and Togo Railey(25)), and one Mexican American, Dave Palacio(15). The opposing team had all white Americans, which was not surprising since many African Americans got access to Southern colleges only in the 1960s. But no major white school in the South or Southwest would recruit black basketball players.

'There was a certain style of play whites expected from blacks,' said Perry Wallace, '`N*gger ball' they used to call it. Whites then thought that if you put five blacks on the court at the same time, they would somehow revert to their native impulses.' The Miners’ coach, Don Haskins, recruited the best players, regardless of their skin tone. Adolph Rupp, on the other hand, the legendary coach of the Kentucky Wildcats, admitted he did not seek black players for his team. 'Nine minutes into that game they finally got their first field goal. We were up 34-4. My guys knew they had proved their point, so they just cruised the rest of the night. We only beat 'em 86-68.” “Nevil Shed had 18 in the first half. He was just a great player. He was 6-8 and he could guard a guard. He could guard anybody.”

On March 19, 1966, The Miners arrived in Kentucky for the championship game. The sports announcers and writers expected a win for the Kentucky Wildcats. However, Don Haskins understood the pressure his team faced and sent in his best players which were all the African Americans. At first, Kentucky was winning, but soon the Miners caught up and ended the final quarter with a Miner 72-65 win. According to sportswriter, this victory encouraged other schools to recruit African American players.

'Bobby Joe Hill really struggled. And that's because I wouldn't let him do what he could do. He wasn't trying to be flashy, but it was just natural for him to go behind his back, do things like that. It's the way he learned to play. He was an equal of Nate Archibald. And if I hadn't let him go, we would never have won the national championship in 1966.' 'We played as well as we could play. But you would have thought it was an awful year. I found out what it's like being 22-6 after winning the national championship. 'I ran into a man downtown -- and he didn't mean anything by it -- but he said, ''Coach, sure hope we have a good team next year.' This is after a 22-6 season.'

Long Term Effect

On February 6, 2016, now the University of Texas-El Paso Miners made a reunion for the 1966 players at the Don Haskins Center. Barack Obama was there “by becoming the first team to win an NCAA title with five black starters, the Miners weren’t just champs on the court: They helped change the rules of the game. They didn’t know it at the time, but their contribution to civil rights was as important as any other…” “…Go Miners!” In 2006 a movie called Glory Road was released. It is about how the black players won the NCAA championship.