December 1, 2008
Terps' Williams spectator to history
Don Haskins (second from left) and his players celebrate winning the NCAA title at Cole Field House. (File photo / January 12, 2006)
The fact that a Texas Western team with an all-black starting lineup was facing an all-white Kentucky team for the national championship is not what first caught Gary Williams' attention as he sat at Cole Field House on a March afternoon in 1966.
"The thing I remember most," Williams said this week, "was the idea that Texas Western came in … and was the more sound, more fundamental team. They just out-executed Kentucky. Kentucky was a very good team, small but disciplined, and [Texas Western was] just more disciplined. They beat them with fundamentals."
Don Haskins, who coached the school later known as Texas-El Paso to an improbable and historic NCAA title that day, died last weekend. His passing led Williams to reminisce about the influence Haskins had on his career and to recall the watershed moment Williams, then the Terps' junior point guard, witnessed when he sneaked into Cole to watch the Final Four.
"The Final Four was a little different then," Williams said from the middle of a recruiting trip in New England. "I doubt that you can sneak into a back door now. But that was the door we always had to use to get in. Even though the game was sold out, we found a couple of seats."
"We," it is hardly a coincidence, included sophomore teammate Billy Jones, a Towson native, later UMBC's coach, but then the first African-American basketball recruit in the Atlantic Coast Conference or any major Southern conference. So Maryland and the coach who brought Williams and Jones in, Bud Millikan, were ahead of the curve.
The rest of the South started catching up after the Texas Western-Kentucky game. "I think the significance of the game came later," Williams said. "The big thing was that it opened the Southeastern Conference to recruiting black players. The other thing was that the game did change attitudes and opinions - that five black players could beat anybody."
Haskins' legacy has rightly been elevated for breaking a longtime taboo and busting a number of stereotypes. Yet that same legacy is also enhanced by the reason Haskins made the revolutionary move. Contrary to the dramatic license taken in the 2006 movie Glory Road, it was strictly about basketball. To match up with, and pressure, the small Kentucky team, Haskins started a smaller lineup and kept his rotation tight.
"They hadn't started that lineup all year," Williams said. "He just decided that the five black starters were the best to play against that Kentucky team."
It was a further accident of history that Kentucky was coached by a man perceived (understandably so) as the leading segregationist in the sport, Adolph Rupp. Haskins' outcoaching Rupp obviously gives the story extra punch. However, history has proved it was no fluke; Haskins stayed in ElPaso 38 years and won 719games, although one eclipsed all the rest.
Williams didn't get to meet him until two decades later, through Bob Knight, his fellow BigTen coach when he was at Ohio State. Knight, not surprisingly, idolized Haskins.
"We never played him at any of the places I've been," Williams said. "But he was one of those coaches who all other coaches knew."
For the best of reasons: Haskins was not just a trailblazer, but also simply a great coach with the nerve to play the people who could best help him win. The best example of that, in 1966 at Cole Field House, Williams was lucky to see in person.
Listen to David Steele on Fridays at 9a.m. on WNST (1570AM).
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