Haskins did the unthinkable not only by integrating his team in a part of the country not known for tolerance, but by fashioning one of men's basketball's most memorable Cinderella stories. (Among other things, the film tinkers with how the final game unfolds.) The screenplay is based on the real-life 1965-66 Miners season, which is considered one of the most improbable in NCAA history. The basketball scenes are believably filmed, and history is given its due in generalities, if not in details. Glory Road is a competently made story of a team with seemingly no chance to win that seizes the opportunity and rides it to the end. Even when violence does not occur, the potential is thick in the air, and first-time director James Gartner does a solid job conveying the tension.įor those who love the genre, there's plenty to enjoy. Not only do we get ugly scenes of players being physically and verbally assaulted (including a bathroom bushwhack and racial epithets scrawled in red on the walls of a motel room), but there's a sense of unease any time the black players enter a "white" establishment. Glory Road is surprisingly hard-hitting for a PG-rated film. It does this better than Remember the Titans. Glory Road's strength is the way in which it blends social awareness into the sports genre. And, for a coach who initially argued that he was trying to win games, not make a statement, his use of his players down in the final game speaks louder than any words he could utter. But the racial hatred in the South results in a series of death threats and incidents that have Haskins and his players questioning what they're doing. The move, initially met with suspicion, skepticism, and hostility, is grudgingly accepted as the Miners rack up an undefeated record deep into the season and appear NCAA tournament bound. What he does shocks the faculty and alumni: he recruits seven black athletes, changing the composition and color of the team. Haskins' lone goal is to win, and he wants the best players he can get with limited scholarship money. The school's underfunded hoops program is no more than a minor irritant, as is the fact that his family has to live in the men's dorms. The Texas Western Miners are a Division I basketball team, and that's all that matters to Coach Don Haskins (Josh Lucas) when he's offered the job for the 1965-66 season. It's this aspect of Glory Road (which takes a more honest approach than the aforementioned Remember the Titans) that elevates the movie above the usual underdogs-win-all motion picture. The film transpires in the mid-1960s in Texas, when skin color was crucial to a person's acceptance. The thing that distinguishes Glory Road is that, like Remember the Titans, it expands the fabric to embrace social issues. With every year, the roster lengthens, and now includes all of the four major sports, plus golf. Sports movies, with all the requisite clichés attached, are a dime a dozen, and no one has done them better in recent years than Disney.
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