Glory Road 0

Apparently, the movie Glory Road played faster and looser with the facts than is usual even in Hollywood.

NPR had a story on it yesterday that’s well worth a listen:

Weekend Edition – Saturday, January 21, 2006 · Hollywood sports films often ignore facts in favor of plot, and the new hit Glory Road is no exception. Chicago Sun-Times columnist Ron Rapoport and John Ydstie talk about basketball movies.

And today George Will takes aim at it:

A decade before the game that supposedly changed basketball, the undefeated 1955-56 University of San Francisco team won the NCAA championship with a team that played four blacks — Bill Russell, K.C. Jones, Hal Perry and Gene Brown. In 1958 the coaches’ All-American team was all-black — Wilt Chamberlain of Kansas, Oscar Robertson of Cincinnati, Bob Boozer of Kansas State, Guy Rodgers of Temple and Elgin Baylor of Seattle. In 1962 the University of Cincinnati started four black players when it won the NCAA championship, and Loyola University of Chicago started four when it won in 1963. Frank Deford, a distinguished writer, covered the Texas Western-Kentucky game for Sports Illustrated and did not mention the fact of five black starters. Neither did the New York Times or The Post. Already the ascendancy of blacks in basketball was such that the four best players in the NBA were Chamberlain, Russell, Baylor and Robertson.

And a personal observation: I was paying close attention to the news at that time. Race and Civil Rights were big stuff and they were changing lives; it was that year that the first black student was enrolled in my public school. I certainly remember no splash of publicity about the NCAA championship making social history.

This was before the NCAA playoffs became the carnival they are today. They were certainly important–after all, they were the championship–but they had not yet become March Madness. Indeed, the NIT, which then existed simply as a post-season tournament, was almost as important as the NCAA.

Then I noticed it’s a Disney movie. Disney has always been at its best with fantasy.