A
drama about Texas Western men's basketball coach Dona Haskins (Josh Lucas), the
first to play five black starters in an NCAA title game. Entertaining, though
rarely rising above the formula it employs.
These films about underdog
sports teams seem to come out at regular intervals. Sometimes they’re comedies;
2005 alone brought us Kicking & Screaming and the remakes The
Longest Yard and The Bad News Bears. Sometimes they’re dramas, like Miracle
(2004) and Remember the Titans (2000). In the comedies, the
coaches and players are usually both inept to start with but somehow figure out
how to win (usually aided by a ringer or two). The dramas tend to focus on a
godlike coach. The sport here is basketball. Josh Lucas plays Don Haskins, the
real-life coach of the Texas Western Miners. Recruiting black players when
other southern schools had none gave him an edge that helped send the team to
the NCAA championship game in 1966. Like Titans, set just a few years
later (and likewise produced by slick-meister Jerry Bruckheimer), Glory Road
means to give you a warm-and-fuzzy feeling about the triumph of the underdog
and how far racial relations have advanced.
Except for one brief scene that
name-checks Malcolm X, there’s little attempt to tie the events of the movie
into the larger social changes happening in the 1960s. I’d have also liked to
see the flashback scene, cut from the film, that might have helped explain
Haskins’s willingness to challenge white racists. Lucas is very good in a role
not unlike Kurt Russell’s Herb Brooks in Miracle, but, as written, a
shade less three dimensional. On the plus side, there were only a couple things
that had me thinking, no way did it happen like that. (One is that it appears
as though Haskins is a first-year coach whose black players are all freshmen;
in fact, he’d taken the job in 1961 and inherited an already-integrated team.)
These underdog films go down like slices of pizza, filled with tasty cheese
like, “They can’t take your desire away from you.” Even when they’re nothing
special, they’re still perfectly enjoyable, as the cheers from the crowd I saw
this with suggest.
viewed 1/13/06 at Moorestown
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