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Carole Mikita ReportingAs basketball gets underway, we often talk about 'Cinderella' teams. Back in 1966 just such a team changed the history of the sport. That story is now a major motion picture with Utah ties.
The mid '60s were a time of racial turmoil in America. It was then that the basketball team of western Texas, now UTEP, gained national fame. The coach always insisted his all-black team wasn't about changing anything, it was just about winning.
A former girl's high school basketball coach who recruits players no one else wants, it is the true story of Don Haskins and his 1966 team he took all the way to the NCAA championship. It shocked the nation.
The film's director, Jim Gartner, grew up in Detroit and remembers the prejudiced thinking back then.
Jim Gartner, 'Glory Road' Director "Blacks were thought of as not being leaders, they were kids that played street ball. They had no discipline. They could not win ballgames. The expression was, regarding blacks, 'you would play one at home, two on the road and three if you were behind,' and that was kind of the thinking back then."
This story has Utah connections. Texas Western played the University of Utah in the 1966 Final Four. One of the players met first-time film director, Jim Gartner, for a KUER interview; Gartner, a former Utahn, spent 15 years as a commercial director here for Bonneville.
Jim Gartner: "What I'd like audiences to take away from this movie, from this story, is where we were and the doors that came falling down because of this team and this coach. The significance of that game and that team and that season really was not apparent until many years later."
'Glory Road' opens in theatres here and around the country, this Friday.
