Description:
Fitzpatrick wastes no time making his point in this fertile and compelling story of perhaps the most important college basketball game ever played: "What a piece of history," Arkansas basketball coach Nolan Richardson exclaims in an opening quote. "If basketball ever took a turn, that was it." Richardson may be underestimating. The 1966 NCAA championship final between the heavily favored, all-white University of Kentucky, and the "No Names from Nowhere" all-black starting five of upstart Texas Western (now the University of Texas-El Paso) was a sporting insurrection in a time of social chaos and upheaval. Played out in black and white, everything about this David-and-Goliath confrontation was washed in complex and layered shades of gray. Through strong interviews and contemporary accounts, Fitzpatrick builds toward the ineffable climax, recreated in spirited detail, on a Saturday night in Maryland. He lays his foundation with a contextual chronicle of the turbulent times, emphasizing the importance of white basketball to Kentucky's image of itself. He lays up strong profiles of the universities, their hoop traditions, the players, and the two extraordinary coaches who led them--the Miners' rumpled tactician, Don Haskins, and the Kentucky squire, Adolph Rupp, whose legend is sadly choked by his racist roots. "No one has ever studied the effect Texas Western's victory had on integration, nor would such a thing be entirely measurable," Fitzpatrick observes, but it was nevertheless unmistakable. "The number of black athletes at major colleges surged immediately afterward ... and basketball, which had always been linked with sweet-shooting country boys from places like Indiana and Kentucky, became the 'City Game.'" And for young blacks in America, the accomplishment provided something beyond a national title; it held out a hint of hope. Walls' ultimate achievement--by no means a small one--is not letting us forget that. --Jeff Silverman
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