Glory Road (2006)

by Tristi Pinkston | More from this Blogger

21 Apr 2008 04:00 PM

I'm going to state right from the beginning of this blog that I'm just slightly tired of all the movies that have been made about school teams that are in trouble, and then along comes a coach who tries something different, and the team makes it, and everyone is happy. That being said, and with the full disclosure that "Glory Road" is, indeed one of those films, I will proceed to also say that I did enjoy it more than most of those "other movies."

Josh Lucas, who always seems to play a background role or a sidekick up until now, is the star of the show, playing Coach Don Haskins, who coached at Texas Western College (now UTEP) in 1966. Haskins has just taken over the men's basketball program at the college and doesn't have much money to recruit new players, so he decides to do something a little radical - he decides to recruit the very best players from wherever he can find them, regardless of their race. In the 1960s, in Texas, this was a very gutsy move, and no one was happy about it, not the parents of the white players, the white players themselves, and the school administration was less than thrilled. But Haskins wanted the chance to try.

Finding young men who were particularly adept at streetball, he pulls his team together, trying to teach them how to work together not only as a basketball team but to see past color. As the practices go on, it's clear that the black players are the best on the team, so Haskins puts them first in the lineup, a move which leads to his family being threatened, a player being badly beat up, and other forms of racist terrorism.

Haskins doesn't give up, and neither does his team. In fact, they go on to win the NCAA Championship, the first team in history to win that prize with an all-black starting lineup.

There is a bit of violence and language in this film, as we see the treatment the black players underwent. Some of this was aggrandized for purposes of the film and was not based on actual events. This film was rated PG.

Related Blogs:

Facing the Giants

Dreamer

High School Musical

Learn more about Tristi Pinkston

I've been a blogger for Families.com since August of 2006.

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