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As always, a quick recap of the material we’re working with.  Flashback to Texas in late 1965: a scrappy team from Texas Western (now UTEP), coached by future Hall of Fame coach Don Haskins, goes from preseason anonymity to a spot in the NCAA Tournament, all while fighting racial division in the locker room and violence on the road.  The team perseveres, and after a few overtime victories, faces off against all-white, and heavily favored, Kentucky in the tournament finale.  Addressing the racial issue head on, Coach Haskins plays only his African-American players against the all-white Wildcats, resulting in a first-ever championship for the Miners.

If it sounds like a great metaphor for the racial unrest throughout the South (and indeed, nation) in 1966, you’d be right; Scoop Jackson provides solid, if incomplete, context for that viewpoint over at Page 2.  And oh, if only the movie had been that - this column could be lauding Disney for taking on a really tough subject with sports.

But that’s not the movie that Disney wanted to make.  In case you haven't noticed, Disney likes feel-good, not controversy, in no small part because feel-good makes for easy profit: IMDB estimates that the Mouse made over $80 million on Remember the Titans and probably another $30 million on Miracle, even before DVD sales.  Make no mistake, there is plenty to feel good about in this story, but on the other hand, there is just as much that we should think about afterwards. This movie could have been a lot more.  So instead of a smart historical piece (with some good basketball), we get a mix of those two movies (in another column, Scoop quotes Jerry Bruckheimer, who produced both, as saying just as much.)  And in searching for another Miracle, Disney fell way short.

Let’s make one thing clear – this wasn’t the actors’ fault.  Josh Lucas does an admirable job as Don Haskins, even if his Oklahoma accent fades in and out and he weighs approximately 572 lbs. less than the real man.  Jon Voight continues the Lane Smith legacy of playing an effective, even likable, evil geezer in sports movies, showing Adolph Rupp as a great collegiate coach he unquestionably was while striking a nice balance between the positive and negative (even racist) images that have clouded Rupp’s legacy.  And known professionals, led by Antwone Fisher’s Derek Luke (Bobby Joe Hill) mix with of long-time ballers, first-time actors like Schin A.S. Kerr (David Lattin) to make the Texas Western team seem genuine both on the screen and the court.

It’s too bad we didn’t get to see more of them on the court, though. The producers cut the basketball down to six games – the regular season opener against Eastern New Mexico, a key midseason matchup against Iowa, a game against a racist team and crowd at East Texas State, their only loss to Seattle, and the two key NCAA Tournament games against Kansas and Kentucky.  Having just typed it out, that reads like a lot of basketball.  

Trust me, it’s not, and it’s not enough.  

Despite pressing the point, perhaps too hard, that the black players for Texas Western allowed them to play a different style than their opponents, we didn’t see enough on-the-court action to verify this for ourselves.  It’s a movie, folks; we need to see it and hear it.  Show the other teams running set play after set play, then show the motion and dribble penetration that Texas Western rode to success.  It doesn’t take that long, we promise.  You can even use a montage.  I swear we won’t mind.

What we do mind, however, is changing the story to make for a better movie.  Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know, that's why they say "based on a true story" instead of "truth".  But the makers of Glory Road took liberties that Bill Clinton wouldn’t dream of with an intern under his desk.  They imply that 1965-66 was Haskins’ first season at Texas Western, when it was indeed his fifth.  They claim that Haskins brought the first black players to the South, even though he inherited three from his predecessor, including former Arkansas coach Nolan Richardson.  They oversimplify, saying that the winner of the “first round” NCAA tournament game between Texas Western and Kansas (each had already won two games) would play for the National Championship, when instead the winner would play Utah in the Final Four. 

The producers got all those facts right on the movie's website, but committed one far greater transgression: before the final game, they show Haskins as he explains to his players that, in order to make a point, he’ll only play his black players against Kentucky.  The problem is, Haskins himself says he didn’t think about race before choosing his lineup for the game, and the stats are on the coach’s side – his least productive black player, reserve forward Willie Cager, averaged three times as many points and rebounds a game as his most productive white player, and only center David Lattin (whose backup, Nevil Shed, was also black) got into foul trouble in the championship tilt.