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11th her ed foreve hejghter-ay thething,I Tie heard th it.”been years, of a Holo-ljamin Hen-Lit theid the ■cover, edged moirs, lior.a two-■rhead •nguin ■cutive Sean ey’s “A louble-lmedi-m thete the nard,”i novel7.tGLORY ROAD’:Historical moment improves sports movie► Continued from Page 13 Haskins and his team wrote theemancipation proclamation of 1966, says coach Pat Riley in an interview during the end credits. He starred on the defeated Kentucky team.“Glory Road tells its story not through personalities but in terms of the issues involved. Ituses the basketball season as abackdrop to the story of how Don Haskins (J0H1 Lucas) inherited a weak, losing team at Texas Western and set out to recruit gifted black players from the schools and playgrounds of the North. Theschool’s administration andsome of the rich boosters were not very happy with him, until the team started to win. Strange how that works, isn’t it?An opening scene is brief but poignant: After Haskins coaches a girls’ basketball team to victory, his players try to lift him up on their shoulders, but they aren’t strong enough.Haskins is offered the head coaching position at West Texas and jumps at it: 'Phis is his chance to coach a Division I team, no matter how weak.Haskins knows he has no chance of recruiting the best white players to come to Texas Western, so he and his assistant coach head find African-Americans who are happy to have scholarships and a chance to play. Chief among them are Hobby Joe Hill (Derek Luke) and Willie (Scoops) Cager(Damaine Raddiff).They play a hot-shot, Globe-trotters-stvle basketball: Hask-ins thinks it is undisciplined and risky, and drills them with his own man-on-man system. There are the predictable clashes between coach and players, but the movie doesn’t linger on them. Instead, it shows Texas Western going on the road with a mostly black team in a South where the teams were mostly white. One player is beaten in a❖“GLORY★★★StarringJosh Lucas, Derek , Damaine RadcliffLuke, Jon VoightDirectorJames GartnerRunning time106 minutesRatedPG (for racial issues including violence and epithets, and momentary language)❖rest room. The team’s motel rooms are trashed in Last Texas. 'Hie white players beginto bond with their teammates who are the targets of such attacks. And then, when everything depends on the BigGame, Haskins announces that he plans to play only black athletes. He wants to make a point.By this time, the white players understand the point and agree with it.Jon Voight plays Kentucky’s Adolph Rupp, one of the most successful coaches in college history. Voight doesn’t have alot of screen time, but he uses itto create a character, not a stereotype.On the sidelines, we watch his face as he begins to realize what’s happening. “This is a special team,” he warns his players during a time-out. He is trying to tell them that ordinary sideline talks are irrelevant; if they cannot rise to this historic moment, they will lose.Director James Gartner tells his story forcefully, and makes a wise decision during the end titles to show black-and-white footage of many of the real people whose lives are depicted in the film. One of his decisionsabout the sound track is strange, but perhaps effective: The play-by-play announcerssomehow simultaneously seem to be the game announcers, so that loud speakers in the gyms carry their commentary and opinions. That works for us, but how would it work with players and fans in real life?“Glory Road” is an effective sports movie, yes, but as the portrait of a coach and team and the realities of administrations and booster clubs in a state obsessed with sports, it’s a shadow of “Friday NightLights” (2004).Where it succeeds is as the story of a chapter in history, the story of how one coach at one school arrived at an obvious conclusion and acted on it, and helped open up college sports in the South to generations of African-Americans. As the end credits tell us what happened in later life to the members of that 1966 Texas Western team, we realize that Haskins not only won an NCAA title, but made a contribution to the future that is still being realized.
Newspaper Details
Jacksonville Journal Courier
Jacksonville, Illinois, US
Thu, Jan 12, 2006
Page 16
Full Page
Clipped by
Canton S.
OK, USA 20 Jan 2022
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