Otherwise, Miners players said there was no racial tension. Brawl Erupts In Handshake Line After High School Baseball Game Over Broom Taunt, Former NBA Player Dante Exum Gets Body-Slammed And Dropped In Brawl During Euroleague Playoffs. During Black History Month, with the series 28 Black Stories in 28 days, USA TODAY Sports examines the issues, challenges and opportunities Black athletes and sports officials face after the nations reckoning on race in 2020. Contribute to The Shadow League today and help us share our narratives. Game Writeup - by Gordon S. White, Jr.,New York Times. David Lattin led the Miners with 29 points. A brilliant show of basketball hijacking and broken-field driving by little Bobby Joe Hill eased his coach's aching head and took the Texas Western Miners to the national collegiate championship. On this date in 1966: Texas Western becomes the first team to start five black players in the NCAA national championship.The Miners beat Adolph Rupps all-white No. Bobby Joe Hill led the Miners with 19 points. Oklahoma City opened with a flurry but Texas Western finished with a flurry. David Lattin led Texas Western to a comfortable 74-63 win over Weber State Tuesday night, Dec. 14, in front of 3,875 fans in Memorial Gym. Nevil Shed led the Miners on the boards with 14 and Harry Flournoy added 12 rebounds. Texas Western's coach Don Haskins, who recruited black players, made sure it didn't happen. The Miners, ranked fourth in the nation, improved to 18-0 with the win. Arizona State cut the lead to 62-61 with five minutes remaining. HISTORY reviews and updates its content regularly to ensure it is complete and accurate. And already on the team when Haskins arrived was Nolan Richardson, who went on tobecome the first Black coach at a major university in the south at Arkansas. David Lattin had 16 points, 15 rebounds. "We didn't see Black and white. Riley worked his way into the Texas Western locker room on his own and remembers seeing pure joy,as USA Today details. Still, Rupp held out. After the NCAA title in 1966,the nation watched the players goto the White House and meet Lyndon B. Johnson. Have all theAfrican American players come to your room. The top rebounder for the Miners was Flournoy with 11. A member of Rupps top-ranked all-white team, Riley scored 19 points for Kentucky that night. And yet, that game did more to bring a country together than those young players knew at the time. Orsten Artis had 12 points and Nevil Shed and Harry Flournoy had 10 points each. President Lincoln's 75,000 volunteers. Required fields are marked *. For several years Kentucky president John W. Nevil Shed finished with 13 points while Harry Flournoy scored 12. Its my legacy. Fireball seen over 4 states was not a meteor, experts say | Fort Worth The win boosted Texas Western to a spotless 4-0 record and handed Weber State its first defeat, dropping the Wildcats to 3-1. But it was not enough for the Jayhawks. The Miners never trailed and led this game 45-21 at the half on their way to setting up a meeting with Nevada in Wednesday night's championship game. Walking toward the red "M" at center court, in their orange uniforms and The color of the players' skin wasn't even mentioned in newspaper articles that followed. Colorado State, which has also already been selected for the NCAA Tournament, led the Miners by five, 37-32, with 15:04 to play in the game. The crowd is white. The thing you noticed at the start of the game was Texas Western did have a size advantage, Williams said. had come to Tennessee (on the same day Seattle beat Texas Western), shot He is talking about a team of aggressive, good players. The team was presented with keys to the city of El Paso. Nomention of skin color. The nationally ranked Hawkeyes dropped to 8-1 on the season. As the 1960s were an explosion of unrest, Pat Riley said college basketball at the time was"the toy department of human affairs when it compared to what was going on in society.". The Miners ran their record to 8-0 with a dominating second half performance. The Miners made history by winning the 1966 NCAA University Division Basketball Tournament, becoming the first team with an all-Black starting lineup to win an NCAA National Championship. A pool-shooting hustler from Enid, Okla., Haskins was a pragmatist on By Devon POV Mason | Published on: February 22, 2021 Comments (0) The 1965-66 Texas Western Miners basketball team represented Texas Western College, now known as the University of Texas. "Even coach.". ". Worsley said he never felt any discrimination being Black in college. all-white and another whose starters were entirely black. Lattin and roommate Bobby Joe Hill sitting on their beds. All Rights Reserved. ", 1966: TWC rallies to rout Oklahoma City, 89-74. in 1977, the old coach lamented to visitors about the loss. I didnt say I dislike these guys. Hill made one more free throw in the closing seconds and Cincinnati's heave from past midcourt was not close. 3 in 1966, wasn't on a crusade when they bookended their 27-1 season with an NCAA title, but they did exude the courage to challenge the status quo. and a great villain must meet. Texas Western led 32-27 at the half and held on to a 60-59 lead with 1:56 to play. blacks at home. Afterward, he realized he hadnt shaken hands with his worthy opponents. This is the most important college game ever played? The Miners held Tulsa to just 37.7 percent shooting from the field. Did The Flock Sign Him Or Does He Have A New Trolling Target. Led by Don Haskins, a gruff, straight-talking coach known as "The Bear," the Texas Western Miners lit up the 1965-66 regular season with a 23-1 record. At Northern colleges, where the unwritten rule for coaches had been, "Two Rupp's lingering bitterness helped paint the Miners as urban street thugs, Texas Westerns players came from all over the country to El Paso, Texas. Orsten Artis had 15 points, eight rebounds. just 38 percent. Even during the game when competition was heated, the trash talk never went there. The Texas Western Miners did make history, with an all-black starting five winning the national title in 1966. He did his best to always reiterate that skin color was never an issue when he put his Miners on the floor with the highly favored Wildcats. Texas Western ripped Nevada 86-49 Wednesday night, Dec. 22, to easily win the Mississippi Valley Cage Classic in Rockland, Ill. Whites then thought that if you put five blacks on the court at the same The Broncos did not pick up their last two points until making a pair of free throws with one second remaining in the game. Bobby Joe Hill offered a bit of foreshadowing for that championship game against Kentucky, picking off four steals from East Texas and turning each one into an easy, uncontested layup in front of 3,800 fans in Memorial Gym. Whether it happened or not, five In fact, the nucleus had been on campus for a while, winning 18 games the year before while qualifying for the NIT in 1965. Oswald, realizing changing times and the school's border-state geography "Nevil (Shed)I'll never forget him saying back then," Riley said. Willie Worsley, Harry Flournoy, Orsten Artis, Nevil Shed and Willie Cager standing. Significance of Texas Western's 1966 NCAA title not realized at first He was also certain his team would secure the championship. major network, and it was televised only on a tape-delayed basis in several [1] The Miners only lost one game, a road loss to Seattle by two points. By William Gildea. Three were from New York; two from El Paso; and two from Gary, Indiana. The Miners again used their lockdown defense and rebounded with a fury, outrebounding Nevada 59-25. The following season, several college teams started to integrate. Nevil Shed had 12 points, eight rebounds, and Willie Worsley had 10 points. Five minutes into the game, the Miners led 17-4. Texas Western vs. Kentucky: 1966 National Championship | FULL GAME On Saturday night, Dec. 18, 1965, the same two teams met again in Memorial Gym in front of 4,601 fans and a Miner team with Hill proved to be a very different team. Kentucky was a prohibitive favorite in the 1966 national championship game: think Sonny Liston versus Cassius Clay in Miami in 1964, Mike Tyson against Buster Douglass in Tokyo in 1990 and 40th Street Black versusBootney FarnsworthinLets Do It Again. Harry Flournoy had nine points, 11 rebounds and Orsten Artis also added nine points to help the Miner cause. Don Haskins portrayed by Josh Lucas, head coach of Texas Western College (now known as University of Texas at El Paso or UTEP), coached a team with an all-black starting lineup, a first in NCAA history. History of Texas - Wikipedia "Hell, he'd No big deal. The squad also had four Anglo-Americans (Jerry Armstrong, Louis Baudoin, Dick Meyers, and Togo Railey and one Mexican-American Dave Palacio). Annexing Texas (article) | Khan Academy Hill played the second half, scored 17 points and got the Miner offense rolling, leading them to their sixth straight victory, a commanding 83-65 decision over Fresno State. She heldhis hand during the flight. I wish at that time we could haveall just embraced each other.'". David Lattin added 11 points and Bobby Joe Hill had 10. Texas Western won 72-65 in the title game. Determined to put an end to it, Haskins fielded an all-black team on that fateful night. Iowa, ranked No. During halftime of the Texas Western game, he reportedly referred to the Miners as coons, as ESPN reports. knew nothing about the team but its curious racial makeup helped sustain TWC led just 29-22 at the half but shot 60 percent from the field in the final 20 minutes and outscored Nevada 57-27 in front of 3,600 fans. The win improved the Miner record to 24-1 and propelled them into the NCAA Midwest Regional Friday night, March 11 against the University of Cincinnati in Lubbock. "For that moment in (19)66, it was simply about winning a national championship. If your brains were dynamite, this place would be blown apart.. They were basketball players, who were still pretty single-minded, focused on basketball. 1966 NCAA tournament: Bracket, scores, stats, records On March 19, 1966, fans packed Cole Field House in College Park, Maryland, to watch the matchup between Kentucky and Texas Western. The Miners dominated the overtime period and escaped with the win. If we could have just gone over and shook their hands. consecutive steals from Kentucky's guards. Haskins coached until 1999, never reaching another Final Four. Harry Flournoy had 19 rebounds, Shed had 12 and David Lattin had 10. [1] TWC held the Chiefs to just 37.3 percent shooting and outrebounded them 40-32. Texas Western walked the ball up court, ran "(He) carried the But before Haskins arrived in El Paso for the 1961season, the college had already been recruiting Black players. Fifty years later, the tributes to Texas Western (now known as the University of Texas-El Paso) keep coming. I couldnt stand the movie because it didnt tell the truth, said Willie Cager, a black Texas Western forward in 1966.