Glory Road
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Bonus Review #2
Film: Glory Road [PG] 106 minutes
WIP: $13 (second viewing) $10.50 (first viewing) average = $11.75
When 2nd Seen: 14 January 2006
Where Viewed: Regal Cinemas Parkway Plaza 12, Tukwila, WA
Time: 3:20 p.m.
Dedicated to: Matthew M. of Sacramento, CA (thanks for being a great fan)
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DVD | soundtrack |
To clear up the first point, this was the second time I have seen Glory Road. The first time I saw it was at a sneak preview two weeks ago. I review it now by special request and after having seen it a second time. This time I have decided to increase the WIP by quite a bit for reasons I will explain later.
Glory Road is another in a long string of sports movies based on true sports stories. There are three main problems with these kinds of movies. First, they are based on true sports stories. Being true sports stories, their stories are already well known to true fans of the sport. If you truly follow college hoops and you do not know this story, I would question the validity of your commitment to following college hoops, for the story upon which Glory Road is based should be core in your lore. The second problem is one more of logic than anything else. In order for a story to become legendary in sports lore it must feature unexpected triumph. So, there must be a David that defeats a Goliath, a Cinderella underdog that topples a powerhouse franchise, a fledgling coach that inspires a bunch of no-names onto victory over a veteran coach of superstars. And, so, therein lies a fundamental problem of every one of these movies, they are ultimately predictable. As I do not claim to be an aficionado of college hoops, almost to the point that I feel nearly disingenuous even using the word ‘hoops’ for basketball, I am free to admit that I did not know the story of the Texas Western Miners. I knew nothing about the team, what they accomplished, etc. So, for me, the first of my two problems with these movies I didn’t face personally. The second one, however, I did. I knew the Miners were going to win. If they weren’t, why would anyone have made the movie? Most people do not make movies about losers. Even the people who made and then remade The Bad News Bears made a movie about losers that become winner because they overcome their ‘loser-dom’. In Glory Road, there was a bit of a twist in that the players were not losers. Instead, they were perceived at the time to simply be unable to really be winners. This turns out to be a subtle but very important point which I will address more completely later. In any case, if you are a person that really doesn’t like to know the outcome of a movie before the movie begins, this cannot be helped in this case. The third problem lies in the part of historical accuracy. Inevitably, there will be criticism of Hollywood for taking liberties with the history to make the movie more self-contained. I do not begrudge Hollywood on this point for I realize that any time anyone ever tells a story, they play with the accuracy. The feature their hero more prominently, they exaggerate certain details, such is the case with history and stories. Certainly, there are factual inaccuracies that Hollywood might do better with, but the point is to tell a really good story, capture the essence of what really happened, and draw people into the theaters. Like it or not. Hopefully, some people will be inspired to go and read the more historically accurate version after seeing the film.
Glory Road begins with a coach, Don Haskins played incredibly well by Josh Lucas, coaching his girls team to win the Girls Texas State Basketball Championships, and then being hired to coach the NCAA Division I Western Texas Miners. Little does the president of the college know what Coach Haskins will have in store for the University, the ever-supportive Booster Club, and the nation as a whole. Breaking every unwritten rule of college basketball in the south at the time, Coach Haskins goes on to recruiting a team of 7 out of 12 black players. He intends to start three. The year was 1965. For me, that was a crucial realization as I was born in 1965. I have no idea what times were really like in this country until 1970. For me the years of 1965-70 are non-existent. I have no recollection of anything other than that it was fun to play out under the trees, to have my mom sing me to sleep with what I would later learn were anti-war songs, to listen to wonderful stories told by one of our neighbors from New Zealand, and to smell thick slabs of bacon frying in the apartment across the hall. I had no idea that the Vietnam War was going on, that President Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., and Malcolm X had all been assassinated, or that race relations in our country were politically charged, violent, and even deadly. So, one of the most important aspects of Glory Road, for me, was to have it put in the context of my lifetime that there was a time in college basketball, when black players really were not considered anything but tokens. There was a time when it was a common belief that black players were never going to really be important in basketball. If you see Glory Road, and I hope you will, pay attention to the continually degrading things the sportscasters say about the Texas Western team. Even up to the final championship game, when the Miners are leading at half time, the sports announcer says something like, “Even though the Miners are leading at the half, the smart money still has to be on Kentucky.” That line rocked me to the core. The “smart money”? A lot of people spend a lot of time in this movie eating their words. I liked that. As a person that is diametrically opposed to racism, I like a movie that puts racists in their place. It did make me very angry, however, that this story took place during the 1965-66 basketball season. It made me sick to my stomach that it has only been in my lifetime that the color of a person’s skin has become irrelevant when determining basic eligibility of a person to successfully play basketball. That was something I had not realized, and it made me sad. The situations, some of which are horribly graphic and disturbing, faced by the black players, their non-black teammates, and the coach and his family, also made me deeply sad and retrospectively angry. Worse, though it is very clear we have come a long way since 1965, we still have a very long way to go. We need to get to a time where people would go and see Glory Road and be absolutely stupefied that it was ever like this in the USA. Unfortunately, I fear too many people will see this film and feel that either too little progress or change has been made or too much of it will resonate with a life they still live. So, for that, I give the film many kudos, and I raise my WIP to $13 from the $10.50 I originally gave the film. My reason for $10.50 was that it bothers me, from a coaching standpoint that the players, on more than one occasion, sneak out of the dorm and drink and drive and mess around without much in the way of serious consequences. I don’t know how accurate this part of the story was. I also know that college students do participate in risky behaviors under the guise of ‘college fun’. I just wish there would have been more obvious consequences to their lack of regard for themselves, their teammates, and their coach. When I first saw the movie, I loved it, but that part stuck in my craw a bit, and I couldn’t get past it when I ranked the film. Upon my second viewing, however, I was way past that and on to the social impact. This movie needs to be seen. It is not one of the greatest movies of all time. It is not even the greatest sports movie of all time. But it is an incredibly important film when it comes to giving people of my generation perspective on what has been accomplished in our lifetimes and younger people a look at how ridiculous the thinking of some people was just 40 years ago and generally the fragility of that progress. We cannot allow anything to move us backward. We need movies like this not just because they are inspirational stories of an underdog team overcoming great odds—because, actually, they were not overcoming great odds in the basketball sense since they were a team of incredible basketball players who were really destined to win the championship from the moment they came together as a team—but because they demonstrate the capacity for greatness in all human beings when freed of the labels of confinement used to categorize and ultimately demoralize those who do not have the power and privilege to just be themselves.
I fully recommend Glory Road. It is an important story that needs to be in the lore of all people not just those who follow college hoops.
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