Producer Jerry Bruckheimer insisted at a recent press junket that this version of events is more accurate than the one the coach and his players recall: “If you ask Don Haskins, that was a basketball decision. If you look into his past, it’s a combination of the two. When he was in high school he played with an African American athlete and they were very close, good friends. He was a much better player than Don [Haskins]. Don got a scholarship to play for Oklahoma State, the other guy got nothing.”
Bruckheimer’s back story is enlightening and may very well be true, but how does it excuse not taking the man and his team at their word? It’s just as likely that Haskins remembered his high school friend, the superior basketball player, when he took his coaching job and wondered if he couldn’t recruit guys like him to win some games.
Bruckheimer gave similar responses when asked why the racial aggression the Miners experienced on the road—which was mostly limited to name-calling and threatening letters in real life—is conflated on film to brutal beatings and property defacement.
“[The Texas Miners] constantly faced a barrage of racial epithets and we couldn’t show everything they went through so we had to build it. And the best way to do that was have two moments that represented a lot of what happened.”
As mentioned earlier, most audiences will accept the time-crunch reasoning, but it still doesn’t explain why Bruckheimer and his crew didn’t simply depict a few genuine instances of bigotry the team endured rather than inventing two out of whole cloth.
It also doesn’t explain why he and director James Gartner chose to insert racial tension where none existed-—between the team members themselves.
In the film, the shouting match between the black and white Miners in the locker room after their only loss creates a tense, dramatic moment, pitting team member against team member by the color of their skin. It would be a fascinating study in 1960s race relations if it had ever happened. In reality, the only person shouting after the Seattle defeat was Haskins, upset by what he saw as his team’s tendency to coast.
As a point of fact, Haskins recently asserted as he always has, that his players rarely mentioned race.
In nearly every instance, the alterations made to the true story of El Paso’s “Glory Road” are made to increase the film’s social agenda rather than its story-telling one.
Yes, it is true the team endured racist verbal and written attacks that each man chose to rise above. And it is true that the group of five black starters forever laid to rest the idea that African-American athletes needed a white player on the floor to act as leader.
But most of all, it is true that the victory they achieved was accomplished not through some strategy to increase civil rights but through their intense drive to win, to show the world that they were the best.
It was Don Haskins’ desire to win—as he has consistently maintained over the last 40 years—that led him to recruit and start the best players he could find, black or white. And it was the desire of other college coaches to win that led them to follow his example and begin color-blind recruiting as well.
By suggesting that Don Haskins chose his NCAA championship starters out of a sense of social conscience rather than his determination to triumph, Disney takes something important away from the accomplishment of those black athletes and lays it instead at the feet of their white coach.
It also takes something important away from their story: the truth.