Glory Road

I went to see Glory Road this weekend.

Very entertaining. It’s funny, moving and corny in spots. It is one of those classic Hollywood, last shot in slow motion, good against evil, unknown little guys against the big guys sports movies.

I love those kind of movies.

Glory Road does have an edge to it. And it is based on a true story.

The story is about the famous 1966 NCAA Championship basketball game between Texas Western University (now the University of Texas at El Paso) and coach Adolph Rupp’s University of Kentucky team.

Two decades after Jackie Robinson broke the color line in Major League Baseball, college ball was still a mainly white sport. As one of the characters in the movie says, the unwritten rule was that you could play one black player on the road, two at home and three if you were losing.

In the movie, the young white coach Don Haskins breaks the rule. In the Championship game he plays all five black players against the racist Rupp’s all white Kentucky team and wins. Pat Riley, who played on Rupp's 1966 Kentucky team, called the game the “emancipation proclamation of 1966.”

Well, maybe.

There is a moment in the movie when someone says something like, “Well, black players will never be a major force in basketball.” In the movie theater, the mainly young, racially diverse audience we watched Glory Road with broke up in laughter. This young audience saw whites-only basketball as a million years ago. It was, of course, not so long ago.

This got me thinking about Supreme Court nominee, Sam Alito and CAP. In the Seventies, CAP, the Concerned Alumni of Princeton, was formed to oppose affirmative action and women’s admission to Princeton. Sam Alito was a member. Six years after what Riley called “the emancipation proclamation of 1966,” CAP and member Sam Alito were still organizing to keep Princeton, and other institutions, all white and all male.

The Saturday night audience we watched Glory Road with couldn't dream of living in a world that existed before the events portrayed on the screen.

On the eve of his elevation to the Supreme Court, Alito and his crowd dream of those as the good old days.

The road they want to take us down is not so glorious.