Glory Road: My Story of the 1966 NCAA Basketball Championship and How One Team Triumphed Against the Odds and Changed America Forever

Author: Haskins, Don

Number Of Pages: 254

Details:

Timed to the release of Jerry Bruckheimer's movie, the moving autobiography of Hall of Fame basketball coach Don Haskins and his storied team of players, the Texas Western Miners In 1966, college basketball was almost completely segregated. In the championship game for the NCAA title that year, Don Haskins, coach of the then little-known Texas Western College, did something that had never been done before in the history of college basketball. He started five black players, and in the now legendary game, unseated the nationally top-ranked University of Kentucky. Broadcast on television throughout the country, the Miners victory became the impetus for the desegregation of all college teams in the South during the next few years. Now, for the first time, Hall of Fame coach Don Haskins tell his story. Beginning as a small-town high school basketball coach, Haskins was known for his tough coaching methods and larger-than-life personality. As a child growing up during the Dust Bowl in Oklahoma, he developed a strong set of values and discipline that he would instill in his players throughout his coaching career. With recollections from his former players, including those of the 1966 team, along with Haskins's own Seven Principles for Success, Glory Road is the inspiring story of a living legend and one of the most respected coaches of all time. With a foreword by basketball legend Bobby Knight, and coinciding with the release of the film Glory Road, the story of Don Haskins and his championship team is sure to become a classic for sports fans and historians. From Publishers Weekly Sportswriter Wetzel confronted an odd kind of problem when coauthoring the autobiography of Don Haskins, Texas college basketball icon and inadvertent civil rights pioneer. Instead of embellishing his story or telling the account of how, as a coach, he single-handedly changed college basketball in 1966 by winning the NCAA championship with five black starters, the comically humble Haskins "pretends it didn't matter, or, most often, that it didn't even happen in the first place." Such is the charm of Haskins, who became a living legend by coaching at Texas Miners College (now University of Texas–El Paso) from 1961 to 1999, but never let the fame get to him (although Haskins is not a saint: he's a vicious pool hustler and a terrorizing coach who wouldn't even let his players have water during practice). Although the book is ostensibly about the 1966 game against the all-white powerhouse University of Kentucky, Haskins's laconic retelling almost renders it anticlimactic. Still, Haskins can't mask the drama of the aftermath: within months of his team's victory, "the floodgates opened" and college teams everywhere started fielding black players. Cross-promotion with the January 13 release of the Disney film Glory Road . (Dec.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. From Booklist *Starred Review* Don Haskins was 34 years old when he coached the Texas Western Miners to the NCAA basketball championship in a game that most sports historians agree fundamentally altered college athletics. Haskins' starters and top-two reserves were black--the first time in history that had happened. The Miners defeated all-white Kentucky and its legendarily racist coach, Adolph Rupp, in the finals. In this mesmerizing autobiography, Haskins rejects such labels as trailblazer or social pioneer. He says instead he was simply an obsessed coach who recruited the best players he could get--despite unofficial quotas on black players--and drove them mercilessly. He also says that his university--now known as the University of Texas at El Paso--had integrated its basketball team almost a decade earlier, and the ethnic diversity of the town mitigated most of the racial tension one might have expected in another setting. That's not to say that he and his players didn't undergo plenty o...

EAN: 9781401307912

Release Date: 30-11-2005

Languages: English

Item Note: Great shape- pages are unmarked and sharp.Has a remainder mark. Paperback Used - Like New Ships fast! 2005

Item Condition: UsedLikeNew

Binding: Paperback