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A Glorious Road: Disney Film Follows Black Basketball Players As They Battle Racism En Route to National Title

Posted on: Friday, 13 January 2006, 09:00 CST

By George M. Thomas, The Akron Beacon Journal, Ohio

Jan. 13--With Glory Road, the Mouse House continues to churn out family-friendly, inspirational sports films that touch a nerve with audiences.

Walt Disney Studios has enjoyed luck mining this genre for the likes of The Greatest Game Ever Played, The Rookie and Remember the Titans. Glory Road shares more with the latter than the others, because like that one it deals with a pressing issue -- racism.

Glory Road follows the story of Texas Western (now the University of Texas at El Paso) basketball coach Don Haskins (Josh Lucas of Stealth and An Unfinished Life), and how he took a bunch of African-American basketball players -- who were still somewhat of an anomaly in Southern college sports -- and molded them into a national championship team, much to the shock of the establishment.

It's almost like two movies in that we're presented a humorous, almost fluffy look at how Haskins assembles his squad from players from Gary, Ind., and the outdoor courts of New York City only for them to have to deal with the realities of what it means to have seven black basketball players on an NCAA Division 1-A team.

Glory Road doesn't sugarcoat what the team has to deal with from outsiders. An attack on one player, who has his head dunked in a toilet filled with an assailant's urine, is presented in great detail, as is the vandalism of the players' hotel rooms on one road trip.

But while writer Chris Cleveland willingly deals with racism and bigotry outside of the school's confines (with the exception of an athletic booster who seems particularly queasy about having so many of "them" around), the movie doesn't deal with the issue that, given the time -- 1966, logically must have existed at the school itself. In that era, it's a bit disingenuous to believe that seven basketball players didn't have to endure racially motivated animosity on a college campus in southwestern Texas.

You can understand why Cleveland and director James Gartner do this. It allows them to set up an us-versus-the-world scenario that will make the audience invest more emotionally in the story, and it works because, for the most part, Glory Road is hard to resist.

Gartner takes those story elements and blends them with convincing basketball play to create a feel-good movie, enough so that you can forget those incongruities. It also helps that Lucas gives a performance laced with charm, humor and a hard-nosed attitude.

Haskins, a girls basketball coach, arrives at Texas Western only to discover a lack of a budget and the inability to compete with some of the nation's premier hoops programs.

His first problem: He's in Texas, where football rules. His second: Who wants to go live and play in the middle of nowhere? He takes what is then a drastic step: He recruits black players and gives them the opportunity to play.

Of course, he and his recruits have to listen to condescending and asinine questions about intelligence and the ability to work as a team. A 27-1 record and a national championship in which Haskins eventually plays a seven-man rotation of only the black players answer those questions.

Could Glory Road have offered more in the way of exploring the social issues of the time with a more balanced perspective? Certainly. However, at least the issue is explored and in a way that entertains without being heavy-handed.

George M. Thomas is the movie critic for the Akron Beacon Journal. He can be reached at 330-996-3579 or gmthomas@thebeaconjournal.com. You can read his blog at http://blogs.ohio.com/moviespotlight.

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Copyright (c) 2006, The Akron Beacon Journal, Ohio

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Source: Akron Beacon Journal (Akron, Ohio)

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