A CHANGE FOR GOOD\Texas Western opened doors.

Byline: Eric Noland Daily News Staff Writer

Bryan Shed is an African-American who plays basketball at a junior college in Clarendon, Texas. His talent is modest, but his dreams are big.

Says his father, Nevil: "He told me, 'I think I want to be a Razorback.' " The incredulity rises in the father's voice as he continues, "And I think, 'Oh, man, a Razorback. If I would have ever thought, back in the '60s, that I'd have a kid talking about going to Arkansas - and playing for a black coach!' "

Today, minority kids can do more than talk about it. They can plumb the depths of the South and compete in sports wherever they wish, without raising an eyebrow, much less a hackle.

Nevil Shed has license to feel a profound sense of pride over this, because 30 years ago this month, he and six teammates at Texas Western College - now Texas-El Paso - produced the feat that is credited with prying open the door of opportunity a crack.

On March 19, 1966, at College Park, Md., Kentucky and Texas Western met in the NCAA championship game. Kentucky's entire roster was white. Texas Western's was mixed, but the five starters and two reserves who appeared in the game were African-American. It was the first time college basketball had witnessed so stark a racial contrast in a national final.

And when Texas Western pulled off a 72-65 upset of No. 1-ranked Kentucky, which boasted a then-record four NCAA titles, the pace of change in Deep South sports - and, really, in athletic programs all across the nation - began to quicken noticeably.

"What I like about it," said guard Bobby Joe Hill the other day, "we opened up a door. We definitely wanted to win it, but then you've got a little significance besides winning it. You've got this."

"This" wasn't widely acknowledged at the time. Although the '66 final has since been singled out as a breakthrough event for minority athletes, there was a delay in its recognition as such. The New York Times carried a 24-paragraph game story the next day but never once mentioned the racial composition of the two squads. Neither was it cited by Sports Illustrated, which devoted five pages to the championship game.

Participants on both sides insist it was not an issue with them, either. No trash talk on the court. No locker-room speeches - on either side - invoking race. No crusade-like fervor.

"I didn't have time to think about it," says Shed. "I was hyped up by, 'We're in the finals. Let's go out and beat this team.' "

"I never heard anything about it until 15 years later," says Kentucky guard Louie Dampier. " . . . To be honest, I didn't even know (at the time) their starting lineup was all-black. When we go back to it and look at it, yeah, OK, they were. But at game time, when they were warming up, they had white players on their team. I'm sorry. It just never crossed my mind."

For Texas Western's players, the significance of the achievement began to sink in afterward. "There were a lot of blacks at the game," said Harry Flournoy. "It wasn't until after the game, when they came up to us and started telling us how they felt, that we realized what had really happened."

It was a time of great social upheaval in this country. The game was played 21 months after Congress passed the omnibus Civil Rights bill, which banned discrimination in voting, employment and drinking fountain accommodation, among other things. It was played seven months after the Watts riots ripped Los Angeles apart, and 25 months before Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated.

For African-Americans, college athletics - as with many other endeavors in America - were not exactly bursting with opportunity.

Black athletes had yet to crack major programs in the South, and in other regions there was what minority players viewed as an unspoken quota system.

"They were only going to take so many black players, and the black players they had played; you didn't see black players sitting on the bench," says Flournoy, who lives in the Los Angeles area today and works in distribution of Orowheat products. "If they couldn't star for them, they didn't want them."

As for the prominent schools in the South, forget it.

Shed, who grew up in New York City, said wryly: "Now, Nevil Shed does not sound like the almighty black name, does it? I was All-City-this and All-American. I used to get scholarship offers from Alabama and Mississippi State and stuff. And my mom said, 'Send them off.' I said, 'Hey, they're not going to take no Negroes down there.'

"At the time, they had the ethnic box to check. It was 'white,' 'Negro,' and 'other.' I checked 'Negro' and sent them off. Some of the (schools) were very nice. They sent back these letters: 'Well, uh, we, uh, we feel that, uh, buh, buh, we thank you for your interest, but we don't have a little spot for you.' "

Flournoy tells of the time, during his sophomore year at Texas Western, when the team traveled to Jonesboro, Ark., to play in Arkansas State's holiday tournament. It was felt that the invitation would never have been extended had it been known that Texas Western had five blacks on its team.

Flournoy recalls the crowd growing deathly silent when the team went out onto the floor to warm up. He says the hotel manager tried (unsuccessfully) to put all the blacks in one room. He says the black room-service waiter almost dropped the tray when he brought up lunch, and blurted, "You guys aren't supposed to be in here."

Flournoy says, "I didn't sleep for three days. I couldn't wait to get out of there." He tells of visiting "the black side of town" on the final day of the trip. "It was like the Old West," he says. "Wooden sidewalks and dirt streets. I thought, 'I can't believe people live like this.' "

When Texas Western reached the NCAA final two years later, how did lily-white Kentucky and its hoary coach, Adolph Rupp, regard this opponent?

Well, it's a matter for dispute. History hasn't been kind to the late Rupp, citing his vigorous resistance to integration of his program. But Kentucky athletic spokesman Brooks Downing says this is unfair, noting that in 1962 Rupp and then-athletic director Bernie Shively petitioned the Southeastern Conference to allow blacks to play, but were lambasted by the rest of the members in a vociferous refusal.

Rupp, Downing added, had black players on his teams as early as the 1920s while coaching high-school ball, and, when he couldn't get minority kids into Kentucky, steered them to other schools.

In a '91 retrospective on the Kentucky-Texas Western final, Sports Illustrated, without offering any attribution, reported that Rupp, in a halftime speech to his team, made a disparaging ethnic reference to Texas Western's players.

It never happened, says an incensed Dampier. "And I paid attention," he said. After the magazine piece ran, he added, "I talked to some of the other players, and they said they didn't know where this was coming from, either."

Yet, Flournoy knows what he heard. After Don Haskins, Texas Western's white head coach, returned from a news conference the day of the final, he told Flournoy of a remark Rupp had made away from the microphones and notepads.

Flournoy: "(Rupp had) said that he would never, ever let five n------ beat his team."

(Haskins, still the coach at Texas-El Paso, is recovering from triple-bypass heart surgery and was not available to be interviewed for this story, according to athletic spokesman Eddie Mullens.)

But beat Kentucky, Texas Western surely did. Convincingly. Impressively. Hill, who led his team with 20 points, shifted the momentum inside the final 10 minutes of the first half when he stole the ball twice in 10 seconds and converted both into layups. Kentucky had a smallish team (tallest starter: 6-foot-5) and relied heavily on its quickness. The steals had the effect of slowing down Kentucky's guards.

Texas Western, however, also had muscle inside, notably in 6-7, 240-pound David (Big Daddy D) Lattin. "I remember early," says Hill, "I got a little pass to D and he dunked. That showed them our power. I showed them the quickness later. That let them know that nothing was going to be easy that day."

Dampier and current Miami Heat coach Pat Riley led Kentucky with 19 points apiece, but the Wildcats, overpowered inside, never led after the 9:40 mark of the first half.

Sadly, in the aftermath of the game, Haskins was bombarded with hate mail - from both white racists and black activists. "Big, ol' baskets of letters," says Mullens, whose office was across the hall. "He was either exploiting the blacks or they were saying, 'n----- lover.' "

In later interviews, Haskins insisted that "the black situation had never crossed my mind. I was starting my best five players, who happened to be black. I never once thought about being a pioneer. I was just trying to win a basketball game."

The repercussions of the game, however, were widely felt.

As recently as two months ago, Haskins and the UTEP basketball team were connecting through Phoenix on a return from a game at Fresno State. A UTEP player approached the coach and said someone wanted to speak to him - some guy named Chuck Foreman.

Foreman, the former star running back for the Minnesota Vikings and the University of Miami, approached Haskins and said, "If it hadn't been for you and that ('66) team, I don't know if I would have gotten the break I got."

Shed admits to feeling a chill when he hears such stories. "We were part of history, sir," he said. "This is something that opened the door for minorities to have the same opportunity for success that I had. That's a good feeling. Eventually it would have caught on. But I bet when the Alabamas and the others started recruiting black athletes, they didn't go through hell."

In a twist of irony, Kentucky will enter this year's NCAA Tournament again ranked No. 1, again the favorite - but this time with nine African-Americans a7,mong its 13 scholarship players, and with an all-black starting lineup.

Still, says Shed, as gratifying as the '66 victory and its ramifications are, wounds were opened years after the game when Rupp was quoted in an interview as saying his team had lost the title to "a bunch of crooks." An insulting statement, given the fact the game was played cleanly and all seven Texas Western players - all but two of whom earned degrees - went on to productive careers in school administration, law enforcement, business.

"What hurt was people calling us misfits," says Shed. "I remember at the time, some coach in the South said that anybody can go out on the streets of New York and get a bunch of thugs and win a national championship, but that he wasn't going to do that.

"I get a little perturbed over that. I had a mother and a father. They did everything they could for me, and they would kick my butt if I did anything wrong.

"Hey, I just wanted a chance. Just to play some basketball."

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PHOTO

Photo (1--color) Harry Flournoy, who now lives in the Los Angeles area, was on the Texas Western team that changed college basketball. Phil McCarten / Daily News (2) Kentucky couldn't handle the inside power of Texas Western's David Lattin (42). (3) Kentucky's all-white lineup was no match for Texas Western in 1966. Associated Press