Basketball: Haskins' act of defiance marked end of an era
Sunday September 14 2008
A great man died this day last week.
Don Haskins (pictured) was the coach of Texas Western College when they defeated hot favourites University of Kentucky 72-65 in the 1966 NCAA basketball final. Texas Western, from El Paso, were the first team to start five black players in a big college game.
Kentucky fielded five white starters as they had always done under coach Adolph Rupp, a man prone to talking about 'coons' and 'niggers' who in 42 years at the helm recruited just one black player.
The final marked the end of an era. No segregated university ever reached the NCAA final again and the percentage of black players in college basketball, and college sport generally, soared.
Rupp and his apologists did his best to tarnish the West Texas victory over the next few years and at times Haskins wondered aloud if he might have been better off to lose the final.
"I wasn't trying to do anything but win the damn game," he insisted.
At the time, however, simply trying to win the game without worrying about the racial make-up of the team was a revolutionary gesture in itself.
During the season, the president of Western College, John Ray, had asked Haskins, a white Oklahoman who was only 36 at the time, to stop playing an all-black team but the coach refused.
The Black Power gesture of Tommy Smith and John Carlos has now assumed legendary stature, but that 1966 win was arguably the greatest kick in the teeth ever received by America's sporting racists.
Given the enjoyment we've all been given over the years by great African/American performers, it might be worth saying a small prayer today for the repose of the soul of Don Haskins and remembering the names of Bobby Joe Hill, David Lattin, Orsten Artis, Willie Worsley and Harry Flournoy, the quintet with whom he made history.
