Seattle U. gave lone loss to Texas Western's storybook team

Purely provincial, of course, I walked away from the movie "Glory Road" wondering what if Seattle University still played big-time college basketball.

Especially with all the talent the Seattle area has produced in the past decade.

"Look at what Gonzaga's done," said Tom Workman, the Seattle U. star who scored the winning points as his team dealt little Texas Western its only defeat of the 1966 collegiate season.

"Gonzaga is playing our schedule."

In one afternoon, I ran into more people who said they were in the old Seattle Coliseum the night Seattle U. won than were sitting in a downtown theater watching "Glory Road."

"It was one of the greatest sports events in Seattle history," said Joe Callero, the current Seattle U. coach.

I really liked the movie, found it inspiring and chilling at the same time.

In 1966, Texas Western, which would later change its name to the University of Texas-El Paso, became the first basketball team to win an NCAA title starting five African-American players.

The Miners beat all-white Kentucky and its imperial coach, Adolph Rupp, 72-65 to win the championship, but only after they lost their final regular-season game and a shot at the No. 1 ranking to Seattle U., 74-72.

To watch the movie, you'd think that before Texas Western, blacks only played for the Globetrotters. Remember, we're talking 10 years after Bill Russell and K.C. Jones led San Francisco to two NCAA titles.

It was after Wilt Chamberlain, Seattle U.'s Elgin Baylor and Oscar Robertson played college basketball.

But it was different in the South. There were no blacks playing in the Atlantic Coast, Southeastern or Southwest conferences.

And even for Texas Western, the first college to integrate in Texas, the early advice was you start one black player at home, and two on the road. Anything more might be political as well as competitive suicide.

Whites were ready to exploit blacks in athletics, but not ready to turn over domination of a team to them.

The Disney movie took liberties. You were led to believe that Don Haskins — played by Gig Harbor High School grad Josh Lucas — coached Texas Western to the NCAA title a year removed from coaching high-school girls, and that he brought the first black players to El Paso.

The reality is that Haskins was in his fifth season, that the Miners had played in the NIT the year before, and that Haskins had inherited three black players upon his arrival at the school, one of them Nolan Richardson who would later coach Arkansas to an NCAA title.

"It's Hollywood, of course," said Steve Looney, a starter Seattle U.

If you believed the movie, UTEP lost in Seattle because its players were in shock following a despicable incident in Waco, Texas, which divided the team along racial lines. The black players wouldn't pass to the white players, the team in an unshakable malaise, in no way helped by a hostile, if not racist, crowd.

"They were intense and physical like they always were," said Workman, whose Seattle team played the Miners five times in two years, winning both games in Seattle.

"To the contrary," said Looney, "they knew they had a chance to be No. 1 (Kentucky had lost earlier in the day) if they won. There was never a hint of any kind of racial issues."

Seattle U. had four key black players against UTEP — Malkin Strong, Elsie Johnson, Jim LaCour and Plummer Lott.

"There were no racial overtones to that game, on or off the court," said LaCour, a retired human resources director, who came off the bench to score 12 points.

After the win, LaCour said he spent time at a party in the Central District with Miners star Bobby Joe Hill.

"He told us we'd be the last team that would beat them that year," LaCour said. "And he was right."

Workman, who owns a tavern in Portland, laughs about the film's version of history that has Haskins, on the eve of the NCAA championship, defiantly pledging to start five black players, ending once and for all the notion that blacks lacked the resolve to win.

"I don't remember a white player starting against us in five games we had with them," said Workman, who scored 23 points in the 1966 meeting.

In many ways Seattle U. was a pioneer the way Texas Western was. The school played the Harlem Globetrotters in 1952 at Edmundson Pavilion in an Olympic fund-raiser when the Huskies wouldn't.

They helped make Baylor one of the celebrated players of his time. They had three key black players on their 1958 team. They brought Eddie Miles and John Tresvant to town.

"When I was growing up and playing for Blanchet," said Workman, who is white, "the good games on Saturday would be at Seattle U., where most of the good players were black.

"For us, the racial thing was zero, although on a road trip to Memphis one year three of us weren't allowed to eat in a restaurant because two of us were black. Only then did I begin to understand."

Seattle U. finished 16-10 and didn't get to the NCAA or the NIT the year it beat Texas Western.

"We had the talent. We matched up well with them," said Looney, "but they played better together as a team. They played hard every night, we didn't."

Roman Miller played on the first Seattle U. teams after World War II. He helped recruit Baylor to Seattle.

"In eight years," he said, "we went from nothing to playing for the national championship.

"People ask me today if we were as good as Gonzaga is. You know, we were better."

Comments to Blaine Newnham: e-mail sports@seattletimes.com