Glory Road To Nowhere

Jerry Bruckheimer and James Gartner’s film Glory Road, which opened this weekend, tells the story of the 1966 NCAA basketball champion Texas Western Miners. It’s a story well worth telling: all five starters on that team were African American, as were the two reserves who played in the national championship game against an all-white University of Kentucky team. It was the first time a team with black players had won the national championship. Because sports plays such a big role in how America understands race, that team and its (white, though this won’t be parenthetical for long) coach, Don Haskins, are responsible for real changes in the nation’s cultural landscape. Glory Road has been getting predictable reviews: it tells the story of triumphs over racism, poverty and adversity, it shows us that men are men and ballplayers are ballplayers, it teaches us about how far we’ve come and how far we’ve still to go, you know the type. I should make clear, here, that I have not seen Glory Road, but the television trailer makes obvious that this film, which tells the story of a significant inroad made towards civil rights and equality, mobilizes racist strategies of representation and narrative. It depends on what it assumes to be its audience’s racism, that is, in order to deliver a putatively antiracist message.

In the trailer, Haskins (played by Josh Lucas) tells one of his players, “it’s not about talent—it’s about heart. It’s about who can go out there and play the hardest.” This is inocuous enough coachspeak, but the very next shot is of the player’s body rising from the floor to dunk a basketball: an image of enormous natural talent in action. If you’ve ever paid attention to pretty much any major US sport (note: hockey doesn’t count, I think), you know that words like “heart,” “guts,” “grit,” and “hard work” are code for white athlete, and words like “talent,” “ability” and “gift” are code for black athlete. That theory is obviously false, as nobody actually thinks that Peyton Manning, Roger Clemens, and Steve Nash aren’t gifted natural athletes, or that Allen Iverson, Barry Bonds, and Donovan McNabb don’t work hard, but it’s how we talk about sports in America, and it has negative consequences when you transpose it to how we think about race: according to the logic of that divide, white people are smart and hardworking, black people talented but lazy and untrainable. When it attributes the first set of ideas to the white coach and the second to the black player, Glory Road reproduces that divide: without Haskins, the film suggests, it would never occur to the players to “play the hardest.”

Indeed, the Texas Western players in Glory Road are so defined by their physicality in the trailer that none of them has a single spoken line. (This is not quite true in the longer theatrical trailer, but it gives the same impression.) They are mute paragons of physical and athletic greatness. In the film, I imagine the players have lines and stories and everything, but this version of the story of the first black players to win the NCAA championship is nevertheless focused on and filtered through its white coach. It’s Haskins’s story. That’s not weird, either: college basketball fetishizes coaches, and probably if you go ask a basketball fan for proper nouns associated with that championship game, he or she will tell you that Don Haskins coached Texas Western, Adolph Rupp coached Kentucky, and Pat Riley (the very same) played for Kentucky. But Glory Road is supposed to tell us more of the story, and instead it continues to silence the minority perspective in favor of a character who wasn’t turned away at lunch counters or hotels, who didn’t score a point or get a rebound, with whom a white audience can identify because, well, he looks like us.

Glory Road appears to do an excellent job recreating the world of the segregated 1960s: the haircuts and clothes are right, the team travels in one of those cool old tour buses that look like airplanes, even the uniforms look tight (they’re not Hoosiers-tight or anything, but still). Against such a carefully rendered historical backdrop, it’s that much more striking that the basketball scenes are anachronistic. The Texas Western team throws behind-the-head touch passes and alley-oops off the backboard, and dunks backwards in traffic—it looks like the And1 mixtape. Now, it’s true that the title game began with a dunk (David Lattin, on Pat Riley), and that Texas Western played an uptempo, fastbreak style of ball to pretty much run Kentucky out of the gym, but the moves they make just don’t look like basketball in 1966. It wasn’t until Connie Hawkins, David Thompson and Julius Erving came along in the 1970s that the slamdunk became the aesthetic endeavor it is today. Ballplayers didn’t dribble through their legs like the Texas Western players do in the trailer until Texas Western changed its name to the University of Texas at El Paso and Tim Hardaway frustrated defenders in the 1980s with the “UTEP two-step,” renamed the “Killer Crossover” when he got to the NBA.

Glory Road suggests otherwise, in a trailer that proclaims, “they changed the game.” They did, too—just not like that. Telling us that Texas Western changed not who played NCAA basketball but how it was played engages a corollary to the idea I discussed above: that black players are flashy and athletic and that well-trained, fundamentally sound, intelligent white players just can’t keep up. Now, I don’t remember basketball before Magic, Bird and Jordan, much less Connie Hawkins and Doctor J, and I love the And1 mixtape videos, but lots of people don’t. They blame it for an elevation of style over substance and individual over team play—which maps pretty neatly onto black over white—that they see plaguing college and pro hoops. Glory Road proposes a nearly precise correspondence between race and style of play, and that the moment the racial barrier came down, the game changed for (most people think) the worse. This gap in its historical sensibility shows an unfortunate truth about Hollywood’s latest attempt to represent the struggle for civil rights and equality in the US: in order to make us feel good about how far we’ve come, it relies upon contemporary racism.

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