Thread by @KitTalksSports

Today is the 52nd anniversary of Texas Western’s lone basketball title in its history as both Texas Western and as UTEP. A thread now commences:

When coach Don Haskins rolled the ball out to Bobby Joe Hill, David Lattin, Orsten Artis, Willie Worsley, and Harry Flournoy, he made history by dint of their skin color. He was sending out the first all-black starting five in the history of the NCAA Basketball title.

Those five, along with two subs, Wille Cager and Nevil Shed, also black, defeated the University of Kentucky, an all-white lineup coached by Adolph Rupp.

Haskins himself, while he was alive, was reluctant to cast himself as a hero. Texas Western’s policy of recruiting black players was already in place when he was hired. In his opinion, he was only sending out his best players, not making a grand statement.

And far be it from me to call a man who autographed my basketball camp shirt when I was seven wrong, but this misunderstands the nature of breaking barriers in race. it was enough for him to not join in the wall-to-wall chorus of claims of the superiority of the white athlete.

A well-placed silence is just as good as a statement, and often much more jarring in this world of incessant clattering teeth.

Something as unassuming as Haskins’ statement that these seven players are the best on his team takes on new dimensions against Adolph Rupp's Kentucky.

Holding Rupp’s first name against him isn’t exactly fair, as that was just another name in 1901, but for those of us that find connections in all things that’s an easy benchmark.

Rupp was an unapologetic racist, one who claimed in a pre-game interview that Texas Western’s players gained their athleticism from the time they spent chasing zebras as kids.

He also called the Texas Western players escaped convicts, and intimated that their center, David Lattin, transferred from Tennessee State Prison rather than Tennessee State University.

Rupp reportedly called the Texas Western team coons during his halftime speech, and never gave his vanquishers credit for their achievement. Even after the loss, Rupp still did not recruit a black player to Kentucky until 1970, well after every other SEC coach had given in.

His last Kentucky starting lineup in 1972 was as his first: all-white.

Rupp spent most of the rest of his life attempting to undermine UTEP’s historic achievement.

Rupp continued to refer to that team as a “bunch of crooks,” falsely claimed that UTEP had been put on probation for fielding ineligible players, and continued to tell his canard about where David Lattin transferred from. Rupp’s status as a legend ensured people believed him.

Author James Michener, someone who really ought to know better, called the game “one of the most wretched [stories] in the history of sports.” The players got perverted somehow into hired guns, thoughtless mercenaries in it just for the sake of a title.

Never mind that coming to El Paso for a title is like coming to El Paso for lutefisk, and never mind that four of the seven players in that title game got their degree on time. No one on that Kentucky team had their degree even ten years later.

Michener called them thugs, never mind that there was one fight all season and the player, Nevin Shed, was quickly brought to heel by Haskins.

Michener said UTEP undisciplined and unformed, “sent out to muscle the ball away and throw it at the bucket until it went in” as if the Hank Iba-worshiping Haskins was even capable of sending out a team that didn’t know at all what it was doing.

This is a game that still needed to be replayed in people’s minds every year, a battle that needed to be re-fought every season in the foggy uncertain battleground of memory.

A couple years ago was the 50th anniversary. Banners were all over utep's beautiful campus, and local media brought people’s eyes back to that game, but in an unsettling twist, the game was put under a very soft focus.

There was a 30 second TV spot in El Paso markets which compared the starting of five black players to the triumph of the automobile over the horse-and-buggy, or to television outlasting its critics.

Casting black equality as a technological achievement of some kind, and not an overdue granting of dignity.

These comparisons are distressing especially coming from an ad meant in celebration. Why are we softening the nature of what was achieved? Who are we trying to reassure? Don Haskins was not defying conventional wisdom when he played seven black players. He was defying racism.

He wasn’t exploiting a system of undervalued assets intentionally. This was not Moneyball. People in College Park, Maryland weren’t waving the confederate flag because they thought that black players were an annoying fad, like the hula hoop.

These men were not televisions. They were not the Model T. They were men, and they had the temerity to conduct themselves as men, saying nothing about their skin color and ignoring your insulting questions about the same

because when everyone around you is talking nonsense, a well-placed silence is the same as a scream.

-fin-

If twitter threads are not your preferred medium an earlier version of this appears here:
kittalksaboutfootball.tumblr.com/post/141319849…

unroll, i need to save this in word