The Bride Wore Crimson and Other Stories (19 page)

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On the night of March 19, 1966, the Texas Western College Miners walked onto a court in College Park, Md., to play the University of Kentucky Wildcats in the final game of the NCAA tournament.

Kentucky had compiled a record of 23 wins and only one loss during the regular season. It was ranked No. 1 in the nation. On the previous evening, in the game that most of the coaches and sportswriters attending the tournament thought would really determine the championship, the Wildcats had beaten the nation's No. 2 team, Duke. If the Wildcats beat the Miners, as almost everybody expected, they would give Kentucky and its legendary 64-year-old coach, Adolph Rupp, their fifth national championship.

The Miners were the “Cinderella team” of the season. Texas Western College—now the University of Texas at El Paso—was a small group of buildings perched on a desert hillside a few hundred yards from the narrow Rio Grande and Mexico. Some 6,000 students were enrolled there. The Miners' 36-year-old coach was in his first college job. A few years earlier, he had been coaching both boys' and girls' basketball at tiny Hedley High School in the Texas Panhandle and doubling as the school bus driver to make ends meet.

Until the 1965-66 season, no one in big-time college basketball had paid much attention to Texas Western. In its entire history it had won only one NCAA tournament game. And at the time it was an “orphan” team, an independent, belonging to no athletic conference. Since none of the major basketball schools had bothered to recruit any of Haskins' players, the Eastern and Midwestern press had dismissed them as “castoffs,” “unknowns” and “nondescripts.”

But the Miners also had compiled a 23-1 record during the regular season, and when the tournament started, they were ranked No. 3 in the country. After an easy victory over Oklahoma City University in their first tournament game, they had nipped Kansas and Cincinnati, both in overtime, and had beaten Utah in the semifinals to get a crack at Kentucky and the title.

They were upstarts. Traditionally powerful Kentucky and the arrogant Rupp, called “The Baron,” were the Establishment. The underdog-lovers of America, watching the tournament on black-and-white TV in living rooms, bars and dormitories, became fascinated with the unknown team from nowhere. But most of the new fans knew absolutely nothing about the school the Miners represented.

“I run into people who remember that game, and they still think I went to an all-black school,” said Willie Worsley.

Of course, Texas Western wasn't an all-black college. Far from it. A large percentage of the small group of black students on campus had been recruited from all over the country for their skills at basket ball, football, and track. El Paso, where a majority of the citizens are Hispanic and Mexico's fourth-largest city lies over the river, had comparatively few black residents. So did the vast, nearly empty desert region around it.

But 11 years earlier, in 1955, Texas Western had been the first all-white college in Texas—indeed, in the entire old Confederacy—to admit black undergraduates. And in 1956, it had recruited its first black athlete—a basketball player named Charlie Brown.

These steps were taken without fanfare and without incident. And, since El Paso is isolated from the other big Texas cities by miles and miles, and since most of Texas Western's athletic opponents were Southwestern and Western schools that never had been segregated, nobody east of the Pecos noticed, and nobody west of the Pecos cared.

“We were so insulated out here in El Paso that we barely knew all that racial stuff was going on in other places,” said David Palacio, one of the players. “We heard about it, I guess, but we didn't think about it.”

Nor were the Miners really an all-black team. Of the 12 men on the squad, five—Togo Railey, Jerry Armstrong, David Palacio, Louis Baudoin and Dick Myers—were white. All had played in games during the season, and Armstrong had been instrumental in winning the NCAA semifinal game, coming off the bench to shut down Utah's star shooter, Jerry Chambers.

They and the seven black players were a close-knit group. “We used to drink wine in the dorm together because we didn't have the money to go out,” Palacio said. “We used to play a lot of cards. It was friendship, pure friendship. I don't remember a single instance of race being an issue or a problem among us.”

But the team's seven best players—Bobby Joe Hill, Orsten Artis, David Lattin, Willie Cager, Harry Flournoy, Nevil Shed and Willie Worsley—were black, and they were the only players who got into the game against the Wildcats, the only Miners seen on TV.

In its entire history, Kentucky had never had a black player. Neither Adolph Rupp nor any other coach in the Southeastern Conference had ever seriously attempted to recruit one.

“It was the first time such a thing had happened,” Coach Haskins said, “and it was against mighty Kentucky and The Baron. Had it been against a team with some black players, probably nothing would have been said of it.”

Midway through the first quarter, with the Miners leading by one point, Bobby Joe Hill stole the ball, dribbled down the court and made an easy layup. As Kentucky was bringing the ball back up the court, Hill stole it again, dribbled down the court and made another easy layup, giving the Miners a five-point lead. The Wildcats never recovered. Texas Western won, 72-65. For the first time, a Rupp team had been beaten in an NCAA championship game.

“They were a bunch of crooks,” he said. “One was on parole from Tennessee State Prison. Two had been kicked out of a junior college in Iowa. Texas Western was suspended by the NCAA for three years after that.”

After the game, the Kentucky players—minus their coach—went to the Miners' locker room and congratulated them. “There wasn't any racial thing as far as the two teams were concerned,” Artis said.

The next day, 10,000 delirious fans turned out at El Paso International Airport to welcome home the only team from Texas ever to win the NCAA Division I national championship. Willie Cager made a speech: “From all of us to all of you, No. 1 was the best we could do.” The crowd went wild. There was a parade through the town.

“It was wonderfully crazy,” Willie Worsley said. “The people of El Paso made us feel very special.”

“It wasn't until later on,” Nevil Shed said, “that we started realizing that this team had opened the doors, not just for blacks but for all minorities, to have an opportunity to play ball at some of the top-notch schools around the United States. What was so beautiful about it was that the very next year things began to open up.”

Eventually even Adolph Rupp would recruit a black player. But he was a sore loser. “I hated to see those boys from Texas Western win it,” he told the press after the game. “Not because of race or anything like that, but because of the type of recruiting it represents.” He hinted that several of Haskins' players had done sinister deeds in the past and that Texas Western had practiced recruiting most foul. A number of sportswriters fell in behind him.

“The title really should belong to Kentucky…” wrote an Iowa columnist. “I have heard that one of the top Texas Western players had been charged with a major crime at one time.” Since Texas Western was an independent, he wrote, they “can do about as they please in recruiting. They can take rejects from other schools and make them immediately eligible. A school with such low ethics should not be allowed to compete for the national title. Rather it should be in the NBA playoffs.”

Rupp's hometown newspaper editorialized that “there is no disgrace in losing to a team such as was assembled by Texas Western after a nationwide search for talent that somehow escaped the recruiters for the Harlem Globetrotters.”

As Rupp got older, his loss to Texas Western seemed to gnaw more and more exquisitely, and his descriptions of his villainous opponents grew more and more lurid. In a 1975 interview he said the biggest disappointment of his long career had been losing to “all those ineligible players.”

“It wasn't even as close as the score indicates,” Orsten Artis said. “At one point we led by 17. Our easiest games in that tournament were the first one, against Oklahoma City, and the last one, against Kentucky.”

David Lattin had transferred from Tennessee State University, not the state prison, and Bobby Joe Hill and a player on the Texas Western freshman team—not the championship squad—had transferred from Burlington, Iowa, Junior College. There were no ineligible players on the team. Texas Western had never been suspended by the NCAA for any reason. Indeed, the NCAA had investigated the allegations after the tournament and had given the school a clean bill of health.

“I didn't like us being called misfits, criminals and convicts,” Nevil Shed said at the team's reunion. “My mother and father worked hard to bring me up, to make sure that I represented myself in a well-mannered attitude. The people who did that to us didn't really know us. If they had taken the time to look into what ‘those seven blacks'
were all about, they would have found some pretty impressive guys.”

Rupp's vilifications dogged Haskins for years. “I would go to a coaching clinic,” he said, “and somebody would come up to me and ask, ‘Did you really get that guy out of the pen?'”

But the most serious damage was done in 1968, when
Sports Illustrated
published a five-part series entitled
The Black Athlete
. Part 3, the centerpiece of the series, entitled
In An Alien World
, was devoted entirely to the University of Texas at El Paso (the name of the school had been changed a year earlier) and its alleged exploitation of its black athletes, including the 1966 basketball champions.

“One might suppose that a school which has so thoroughly and actively exploited black athletes would be breaking itself in half to give them something in return, both in appreciation for the achievements of the past and to assure a steady flow of black athletes in the future,” wrote its author, Jack Olsen. “One might think that UTEP, with its famed Negro basketball players, its Negro football stars and its predominantly Negro track team would be determined to give its black athletes the very squarest of square deals. But the Negroes on the campus insist this is not the case—far from it.”

Olsen went on to describe UTEP and El Paso as a kind of racist hell in which the athletes labored in virtual slavery. The article outraged almost everyone connected with the university. Perhaps El Paso and UTEP hadn't achieved a racial paradise during the turbulent ‘60s, but, they contended, they had come closer than much of the country and many of its universities.

The athletes said that statements attributed to them in the article had been taken out of context and twisted. A flurry of rebuttal whirled through the local press. UTEP President Joseph Smiley ordered an internal investigation of the school's intercollegiate athletic programs. The investigating committee found no major racial injustices, but recommended a few small reforms, most of them having nothing to do with race.

Olsen and
Sports Illustrated
stood by their article, however, and that made recruiting very hard for Haskins. “Every coach in the country had a copy of that article in his back pocket,” he said. “And whenever a black player would indicate an interest in UTEP, they would yank it out and say, ‘You don't want to go to El Paso. It's a
horrible
place.'”

In 1975, Neil D. Issacs, a college professor, published a book called
All the Moves: A History of College Basketball
. Relying entirely on Olsen's article as his source, he cited the 1966 Texas Western team as the best example of the abuse of black athletes in America. “There was little in the way of social rewards for them in El Paso,” he wrote, “none of them was ever awarded a degree from Texas Western, and they feel that they have lived out the full meaning of exploitation.”

A year later, one of America's more famous authors took up the tune, adding a few licks of his own. In
Sports in America
, James A. Michener described the 1966 Miners as “a bunch of loose-jointed ragamuffins” who had been “conscripted” to play basketball in El Paso.

“The El Paso story is one of the most wretched in the history of American sports,” he wrote. “… I have often thought how much luckier the white players were under Coach Adolph Rupp. He looked after his players; they had a shot at a real education; and they were secure within the traditions of their university, their community and their state. They may have lost the playoff, but they were the winners in every other respect, and their black opponents from El Paso were losers.”

Years before Michener's book was published, eight of the 1966 squad—the five whites plus Nevil Shed, Harry Flournoy and Willie Cager—had received their degrees at UTEP. David Lattin had left early because he was drafted by the Phoenix Suns. “He had a year of eligibility left, but I encouraged him to go,” Haskins said. “There was a lot of money in it for him, and I kept thinking, ‘What if he plays another season for me and ruins a knee or something?'” The remaining three players—Orsten Artis, Bobby Joe Hill and Willie Worsley—had amassed between 78 and 115 semester hours of credit before they dropped out of school to take jobs. Worsley later graduated from the State University of New York.

Michener, who often brags of the amount of research that goes into his massive books, later admitted in a letter to Dr. Mimi Gladstein, a UTEP English professor, that his investigation of the 1966 Miners had gone no farther than the
Sports Illustrated
article. He had consulted neither Haskins nor the players nor even Olsen.

Haskins wanted to sue Michener for libel, but his lawyer talked him out of it. He didn't have the resources, the lawyer said, to fight the author and his publisher, Random House, in the courts.

“I had no fun after winning the national championship,” Haskins said.