As the NCAA basketball tournaments drew to a close, ESPN presented a 90-minute special on the 1966 NCAA championship game between Kentucky and Texas Western. Texas Western, now the University of Texas at El Paso, started five black players and upset the highly favored Kentucky team. Since Texas Western started five blacks and their only two substitutes off the bench were black, many people at first assumed that the little known Texas Western was a black school. This game literally changed college basketball. Afterwards college basketball began to present a different color and flavor.
The mighty goliath in this game was Kentucky with its racist coach, Adolph Rupp. Historically, it was a perfect setup. One of the best ways to describe the vaunted Adolph Rupp is as a person possibly more racist than George Wallace. He had vowed to never have a black player on his team. Proof of his resistance is the fact that one of the greatest players out of Kentucky, the college and NBA Hall of Famer Wes Unseld, was the starting center “next door” on the University of Louisville team that same year because Rupp refused to recruit him. However, after the Texas Western victory, the avalanche of black players being recruited to traditionally white colleges became so strong that two years later even the racist Adolph Rupp had a black player.
I remember this game quite well as I was privileged to be in attendance at the University of Maryland’s Cole Field House. Long-time friend and fraternity brother, Rufus Daniels, had received a ticket from the athletic director at Alabama State which he passed on to me. So I attended the game and was quite pleased to witness Kentucky getting its comeuppance.
My attendance at the Texas Western vs Kentucky game completed quite a double-header feat, as I attended the NIT final game in the afternoon at Madison Square Garden and drove down to Maryland for the NCAA game that night. BYU beat NYU in the NIT championship game. In those days only 16 teams played in the NCAA championship, with some conferences sending only the conference champion to the tournament. Thus, very good teams participated in the NIT. Consequently, the NIT games stood almost on a par with the NCAA games. For example, BYU was ranked 11th in the country that year, and also in the NIT tournament was the 13th ranked NYU team.
The success of the Texas Western team and its black players should not have been a surprise. Two years before, the dominant Boston Celtics started a game with an all-black lineup: Bill Russell, K.C. Jones, Sam Jones, Tom Sanders, and Willie Naulls. And that same year, 1966, Bill Russell became the head coach and player/coach of the Celtics, where he won two NBA championships in three years. But of course, racism and its accompanying racial prejudice has seldom been logical.