`Glory Road' underscores progress.

Byline: Ron Bellamy / The Register-Guard

From a critic's standpoint, I don't know that "Glory Road" is a truly great film, in terms of Oscars and artistry and all that, but it's great that someone made a compelling movie about the Texas Western team that won the 1966 NCAA basketball tournament.

The Miners were the first team to win the national title with five black players in the starting lineup. (The two Texas Western subs who played that night were also black.)

More in retrospect than at the time, the game is considered a milestone in the history of race relations and athletics, in part because Texas Western defeated an all-white Kentucky team, coached by Adolph Rupp, then a giant in the business, who had won four national championships and who was still several years away from having a black athlete on his team.

"It certainly inspired African-Americans in college basketball and everything else," Oregon coach Ernie Kent said. "I don't want to say it opened up the door, but it certainly was a bridge to recruiting athletes of color. It definitely revolutionized the game."

The movie was released Friday, and Kent saw it Sunday; he hopes his team can see it on the weekend road trip to the Washington schools.

"You talk about young people in this day and age, for them to get a history lesson, and understand some things," he said. "Here is an opportunity to really understand something that affects their sport, and something that had such a profound impact on the sport."

Consider that a black man, Tubby Smith, now coaches Kentucky. Consider that when the Ducks and Huskies play Saturday in Seattle, the game will feature two black head coaches, and, at times, 10 black players on the floor.

"Nobody will think about it at all," Kent said. "But from where it came from to get to this point is just incredible to me."

The Disney film portrays the championship season of Texas Western, now Texas-El Paso. It takes some liberties with the facts:

In fact, the Miners won the title in coach Don Haskins' fifth year, not in his first. There were already several black players there when he arrived. Haskins and Rupp didn't cross paths in an airport, and Haskins didn't make the cover of Sports Illustrated.

In fact, Kentucky fans weren't waving Confederate flags behind the UK bench. The Miners weren't forced to rally in the second half; they took the lead midway through the first half and won 72-65, though the movie accurately portrays two key steals by guard Bobby Joe Hill, the turning point of the game.

Furthermore, Haskins has said repeatedly that he wasn't making a statement about racial equality that night at Cole Field House at the University of Maryland, as the movie depicts. He simply played the guys he thought gave him the best chance to win, regardless of skin color.

Which, in that era, took courage.

"Some of the things really happened," David Lattin, the center on that team, said recently. "Some of them are just a movie."

It's a movie worth seeing. Look for Haskins in an early cameo as a gas station attendant, and stay through the credits, for interviews with Haskins, former Miners and Miami Heat coach Pat Riley, who played for Kentucky.

And remember that the bitter essence of "Glory Road" - how hatefully black athletes were treated and regarded in that era - is absolutely true.

By fate, Oregon State was almost part of the Miners' story.

In 1966, the Beavers won 21 games and won the Pac-8 title. (UCLA would win the next 13 league titles and, after Texas Western, seven straight national championships.) After a first-round bye in the NCAA Tournament, Oregon State upset Houston, and stars Elvin Hayes and Don Chaney, in the West Regional semifinals.

If the Beavers had then defeated Utah, in the regional final, they'd have met Texas Western in the Final Four, but Utah prevailed, 70-64.

Jimmy Anderson, then an OSU assistant coach, saw the Miners play Oklahoma City in a first-round game in Wichita while scouting Houston at the same site, and reported back to coach Paul Valenti.

"I told Paul, `I think I saw a national championship team tonight,' ' Anderson said. "I thought Texas Western was a great team. ... Their chemistry. It seemed like they had a good player at every floor position, and Big Daddy Lattin was a stud.

"They were quick and fast and talented."

Anderson didn't, at that point, perceive the Miners as breaking racial barriers. "I didn't even think about it," he recalled. "I didn't come back and say to somebody in Corvallis, `I can't believe it, they played five black guys.' I just said, `That's a hell of a team.' '

For perspective, Cincinnati had won the NCAA title with four black players in 1962, and Loyola of Chicago won with four black starters a year later. Two black players, Bill Russell and K.C. Jones, had led San Francisco to titles in 1955-56. However, Southern schools were still fielding all-white teams - Vanderbilt put the SEC's first black player on the floor in 1967 - and that reality wasn't confined to the Deep South.

Oregon State itself didn't have a black scholarship player until the year before Texas Western won the title, when Valenti succeeded his boss, Amory "Slats" Gill - who had coached at OSU since 1928 - and brought in Charlie White, an Army veteran and junior college transfer, for the 1964-65 season.

(A year later, Valenti added another black athlete, Harry Gunner, more prominently a football player. The UO's first black basketball player was Charles Patterson, who endured harassment both at McArthur Court and on the road in 1935-36.)

Valenti said he and Gill had tried to get White to come to Corvallis a year earlier, unsuccessfully; in Valenti's view, Gill was a product of his era. "He wasn't a racist," Valenti said. "He had that philosophy that the first (black player) that we got, we wanted him to be a player. ... Slats didn't want to have a black player sitting on the bench."

In accounts of the 1966 championship game, Sports Illustrated didn't mention that an all-black team had defeated an all-white team; neither did the El Paso Times. It wasn't the prevalent story at the time, but there were aftershocks. Haskins got 40,000 pieces of hate mail; by 1969, Rupp signed a black player for Kentucky.

"It took some time to sink in," Lattin told the Orlando Sentinel recently. "The further we got away from it, the more we realized its significance."

It wasn't that a basketball game changed everything. More that it would symbolize how everything was changing.