Let me recommend a movie that I haven't yet seen but which will be appearing 
in movie theater near you tonight. The movie is "Glory Road," and it's a story 
about an event that occurred just a few miles from me, when I was an 
undergraduate, in 1966, and it's been a big deal here for a month.

Ordinarily my feelings about college athletics are fairly straightforward: I 
would simply get rid of them. A university environment should be about 
education, not entertainment, and the people who are engaged in athletics are for the 
most part a fraud, completely disconnected from the university, although 
there are obvious exceptions, such as Charley Johnson, who got his Ph.D. in 
Chemical Engineering here at New Mexico State while playing football and who went on 
to play in the NFL for 15 years before returning here to head the Chemical 
Engineering Department. I've felt this way about college athletics for my entire 
tenure as an undergraduate, graduate student, and later staff member and 
ultimately a faculty member at NMSU.

Nevertheless, something extraordinary did happen just 50 miles from NMSU in 
1966 at Texas Western College in El Paso: Don Haskins, who's still there, 
played an all-black starting team, something that simply wasn't done then. 
Basketball was the last bastion of white players, of white gentility and of white 
racism.

The South and its southern ethics runs out at about El Paso and becomes the 
West, and no one here thought much about it, but Texas Western (now the 
University of Texas at El Paso) played Kentucky in the 1966 NCAA Finals -- and 
unbelievably won, and that win changed collegiate basketball forever, in one game, 
and that's what the movie is about.

There are a lot of people here who are very proud of the story, and I'm 
actually one of them.

Wirt Atmar

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