I saw Glory Road this afternoon ---and it was an entirely appropriate way to spend part of this national observance of Dr. King's birthday.
The movie is a dramatization of the 1966 NCAA National Basketball Championship season of the Miners of Texas Western College. The Miners' victory over the University of Kentucky Wildcats was not just a story of a little-known school defeating one of the great dynasties in collegiate basketball history, but a major step in the history of the racial integration of American sports.
And it was understood to be as such in its own time.
My Daddy became the chief of police at TWC the year after that epochal event (when the school became the University of Texas at El Paso) and knew well the film's protagonist, head coach Don Haskins. Daddy had great respect for what Haskins had accomplished and shared that admiration with his boys. (I recall sitting near an unfinished temple on the Greek island of Naxos back in 1995, reading a long article in a newspaper I had found about Haskins and why he hadn't yet made it into the College Basketball Hall of Fame. I hear that's since been rectified.)
The movie itself is exceptionally well-paced, essentially honest, and an important story that very much needed to be told, even 40 years on.
With my many personal and familial connections to that school and its hometown, it was gratifying to see its 1966 champions remembered in this way. (At the end of the movie, the entire audience burst into applause. When the credits began to roll, many dozens of theatergoers remained to watch the accompanying interviews with the actual players and Haskins himself. It was a heartening sight.)