On March 19, 1966, Texas Western Miner’s defeated the University of Kentucky Wildcats in the NCAA men’s college basketball final in College Park, Maryland. The top-ranked University of Kentucky men’s basketball team was favored in the final over the third-ranked Miners. Kentucky’s coach and like many other coaches of the time, neither recruited nor played African-American players, using exclusively a white player line-up. Coach Don Haskins, which led the Texas Western team, on the other hand had inherited an integrated team and regularly played African-American blacks.
Until that moment, at the height of the civil-rights era, no major-college team had ever started five blacks in an NCAA championship game. In fact, until Texas Western coach Don Haskins did it earlier that season, no major-college team had ever started five blacks in ANY game. For the first time that night, on the edge of the Mason-Dixon Line, a major American sports championship would be contested by one team that was all white and another whose starters were entirely black.
In 1966, American cultural and sports mythology insisted at least one white starter was necessary for success. Black athletes, prevailing wisdom implied, needed the steadying hand of a white teammate. Otherwise, games would go into complete chaos. John W. Stewart wrote in the Baltimore Sun the weekend before the title game ”`They can do everything with the basketball, but sign it.’” Referring to the myth of the undereducated black society.
Of Texas Western’s seven black players — the Miners also had four whites and a Hispanic, none of whom played that night – all total of the group – four graduated. The other three came within a semester of their degrees. Meanwhile, only four of Kentucky’s five starters, including star players Dampier and Riley, had not earned degrees. This was huge in proving that blacks and whites if given the chance can learn and do at the same levels.
Adolph Rupp and his all-white Kentucky program were not only the epitome of college basketball at the time, but were the ideal contradiction in the form of Haskins and Texas Western. It was as if history demanded that for change finally to occur, a great hero and a great villain must meet. Rupp and Haskins fit those roles perfectly. In the years immediately after Texas Western’s title, the integration of college sports took a great leap forward. Between 1966 and 1985, the average number of blacks on college teams jumped from 2.9 to 5.7. Showing that the times were finally changing.
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