OK, What’s the straight dope? I watched Glory Road last night, and found a couple of things that seemed odd.
Did clear backboards exist in 1966?
When I played basketball in the 70s we were still using 4 periods (I think). They clearly showed two halves, not four periods? Is this correct?
Just wondering…
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I don’t know about the backboard but I found a summary of the game which implies they used halves and not periods.
link (Scroll down to #7.)
College basketball has always used halves as far as I know. High School and the NBA use quaters.
I haven’t seen the movie yet (and probably won’t) but I’m told that they depict UK as taking the floor to “Dixie” instead of “On, On, U of K.” Any truth to that?
I will see the movie if people swear to me that it’s not 2 hours of “Adolph Rupp was a racist bastard.”
I will swear to you on that. I felt like the movie went out of the way to show that he was “uncomfortable” with black players, but I didn’t think it showed anything beyond that.
A couple of, uh… misdirected truths in the movie… (probably in the interest of time) [spoiler]
Thanks, Omni. I didn’t know that. I just assumed that halves, like the 3 pt line, just came about in the current era of basketball. Sheesh, where I grew up (Oklahoma), girls basketball was still a 3 on 3 affair.
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And yet Kentucky was one of the first SEC teams to integrate, and no one who played for Coach Rupp has said that he was openly racist. It makes me a little angry to see the character assassination that has tainted his legacy. Kentucky didn’t have any black players because 2/3 of the SEC would have refused to play us, and the team couldn’t have traveled together or stayed in the same hotel on the road. Mississippi State’s team had to be smuggled out of Starkville to play in the NCAA tournament one year because they were scheduled to play an integrated team.
And let us not forget that but for the machinations of fate, it would have been an all-white Duke team in that championship game.
I never knew Adolph Rupp, and I’m not psychic, so I can’t judge whether he was a flat-out bigot, a mere pragmatist, or simply a man of his time and place. So, I won’t engage in any name-calling here.
Thing is, though, the idea that black men could play basketball at a high level was old news by 1966! Bill Russell had led the University of San Francisco to the national title ten years earlier, and was dominating the NBA! One would have thought that even the most racist coach could see the handwriting on the wall.
But Adolph Rupp had the same problem as Texas football coach Darrell Royal: he was far too capable a coach and won too many games for his own good!
Texas was one of the last major college football programs to integrate (the 1970 Texas squad was the last all-white team to win the NCAA title). By all accounts, Royal is no bigot, and the black men who eventually played for him all speak very highly of him. But he was so successful for so long with his all-white teams, he either never saw a reason to change things or could never convince the important alumni and administrators that integration was necessary.
Royal PROBABLY figured, “Well, I think it’s time to integrate, but we’re doing so well as it is, and integrating would only tick off some important people… heck, maybe we’ll just make do as we are.” Perhaps Adolph Rupp thought the same way.
The difference is, Kentucky never really suffered for Rupp’s decision. Texas, on the other hand, suffered mightily. Because Barry Switzer was MORE than happy to recruit all the great black players in Texas, players that SHOULD have been Longhorns, but who ended up playing for the Oklahoma Sooners. Even decades after Texas began accepting black players, many black Texans remembered how they’d been snubbed by Darrell Royal, and encouraged their kids to go to Oklahoma, where they were genuinely wanted.