As long as I'm going on about "Glory Road," here's the NY Times review of the 
movie. It says all the right things.

Wirt Atmar

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January 13, 2006
MOVIE REVIEW | 'GLORY ROAD'
In Story of Big Game, Sad Chapter on Racism 

By A. O. SCOTT

You could complain that "Glory Road," this season's obligatory inspirational 
coach-centered sports movie, follows a familiar formula, but that would be 
like complaining that a basketball is round. The coach, played with requisite 
intensity by Josh Lucas, harangues his players on the importance of "fundamental, 
disciplined, defensive basketball." It is easy to imagine that the film's 
director, James Gartner, heard similar lectures from the producer, Jerry 
Bruckheimer. 

This is not a genre that demands or rewards novelty. The idea is to take a 
bit of sports history and prune and embellish it into a three-act screenplay 
(credited here to Christopher Cleveland and Bettina Gilois) that culminates in 
the Big Game. Assemble a group of appealing young actors for the team, find a 
leading man with lungs strong enough to sustain many scenes of barking, 
bellowing and bloviation, and a pretty, patient actress for the thankless role of 
coach's wife (Emily Deschanel, in this case), and you're all set. Movies like this 
are rarely great, but when executed properly, they're rarely bad, either. 
"Glory Road" is satisfying less for its virtuosity than for its sincerity, and 
also because it will acquaint audiences with a remarkable episode that had 
ramifications far beyond the basketball court. 

Like "Remember the Titans," which Mr. Bruckheimer also produced (and which 
starred Denzel Washington as the coach), "Glory Road" finds its true story at a 
point where sports history intersects with the struggle for racial equality. 
The annals of postwar America are full of such moments, but few of them are as 
astonishing and consequential as the 1966 N.C.A.A. championship game, in which 
Don Haskins, coach of the Miners of Texas Western (now known as the 
University of Texas at El Paso), sent five black players onto the floor against Adolph 
Rupp's all-white University of Kentucky team.

The film does a good job of showing just how momentous that game was, 
immersing the audience in a world pervaded by racism, both casual and intense. At the 
beginning, Haskins is less a crusader for justice than an ambitious upstart, 
desperate to turn his backwater program into a contender. The college is a 
dusty, shabby place where football is the big sport and where the new coach, 
whose previous job was coaching a girls' high school team in Fort Worth, is forced 
to live in the men's dormitory with his wife and three young children. None 
of the top high school prospects - the white ones, anyway - are interested in 
Texas Western, so Haskins and his colleagues recruit seven talented and 
unheralded black players from places like the playgrounds of the Bronx and the steel 
mills of Gary, Ind.

Nearly 20 years after Jackie Robinson broke professional baseball's color 
line, college basketball was still skittish about accepting black athletes. An 
unwritten rule invoked in the movie held that a coach could play one black 
player at home, two on the road and three if his team was losing.

In the film, Haskins's squad is greeted first with skepticism and 
condescension. Announcers sneer, opponents refuse post-game handshakes, and alumni 
boosters grumble. As the Miners start winning, hostility grows, and their success 
opens an ugly seam of ignorance and hatred. Players are booed, cursed at and 
showered with garbage when they take the court; one is beaten up in a restaurant 
men's room; their motel rooms are trashed and sprayed with racist graffiti.

For his part, Haskins receives hate mail, and is treated by Rupp - a great 
coach but hardly a progressive on racial matters - with icy disdain. As Rupp, 
Jon Voight presents the latest in his series of brilliantly idiosyncratic, 
latex-assisted impersonations of real historical figures. In recent years, he has 
portrayed Pope John Paul II, Howard Cosell and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. How's 
that for range?

"Glory Road" does not spend much time developing its characters, but it does 
tell its story from the team's point of view as well as that of the coach. 
Derek Luke ("Antwone Fisher") is the proud and charismatic point guard Bobby Joe 
Hill, and his performance, like his character's approach to basketball, is 
both stylish and unselfish. Schin A. S. Kerr, as the Miners' fearsome big man, 
David Lattin, and Al Shearer as his timid roommate and backup, Nevil Shed, have 
some strong emotional scenes, as does Demaine Radcliffe as Willie Cager, whose 
heart ailment limits his playing time. (Mr. Gartner and John Wright, the 
editor, cut together handily on-court action sequences that make these fine actors 
look like championship-caliber basketball players). 

Nothing the cast does, however, is quite as moving as the appearance during 
the final credits of some of the real Texas Western players, who reflect, along 
with Mr. Haskins and Pat Riley, a member of the Kentucky team, on the legacy 
of their big game. Their faces, aged but hardly elderly, remind us that the 
events in "Glory Road" did not take place very long ago. That the movie can be 
uncontroversial and even a little corny may be the clearest indication of how 
much has changed.

"Glory Road" is rated PG. There is some racist and otherwise profane 
language, and a few violent scenes.

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