Texas Western basketball and Don Haskins helped shape the future of sports
EL PASO, Texas (BVM) — There are certain moments in sports that can have a ripple effect across history. One of those moments was the 1966 national championship game played by Texas Western (now UTEP) and Kentucky.
The game included some legendary basketball figures including Pat Riley, Louie Dampier and Coach Adolph Rupp. But history would especially remember the coach and other players on the other bench and most notably, the starting five.
The starting five for Texas Western was the first all African-American starting five in NCAA basketball history to play against an all-white starting five. Coach Don Haskins was chastised at the time for doing that, but it helped the Miners win a national championship and change the course of history in every sport.
“I wasn’t out to be a pioneer when we played Kentucky,” the late Texas Western coach Don Haskins told the Los Angeles Times. “I was simply playing the best players on the team, and they happened to be black.”
Haskins grew up in Oklahoma and from early on learned to love the game of basketball. Alongside his childhood friend Herman Carr, an African-American in the same town he grew up in. Carr played an influential role in how Haskins grew up to see the game of basketball.
“He [Don Haskins] was good friends with him and worked with him at a local feed store,” Don’s son Steve Haskins said. “He and Herman would play ball together [1-on-1 games] and they would be pretty competitive.
It was a different time in the United States so a great player like Herman Carr was overlooked by colleges. But when Don got the job at Texas Western, he went looking for the best players that weren’t even on some of the top programs’ radar.
“My dad’s thinking was, I’ve got a bunch of Herman Carrs (overlooked athletes) [here] and I’ll take them,” Steve said. “Herman Carr is just a sweat-heart of a man and a great guy [and one of the reasons my dad recruited those players].”
“Back in that era, there were teams that had African-Americans playing but there was none in the Southwestern Conference,” Dan Wetzel, the author of “Glory Road” said in a podcast with Andy Katz. [It’s] basically all of Texas and Oklahoma, none in the SEC and none in the ACC. [There were no players] in the south, no African-American players.”
Coach Haskins began coaching at Texas Western in 1961-62 and finished with an 18-6 overall record. In the following season, the Miners finished 19-7 and made their first NCAA Tournament appearance under Coach Haskins.
Texas Western’s first chance to win a national championship game with his 1964 team. Led by Jim “Bad News” Barnes, the Miners made it to the Midwest Region semifinal before being knocked out by Kansas State (KSU).
During that season Barnes averaged 29.1 points and 19.1 rebounds. But in the game against KSU, Barnes played only eight minutes before fouling out. Barnes was the No. 1 draft pick in the NBA following the Miners’ exit.
Coincidently, 1964 was UCLA basketball’s first year winning a national championship. If Barnes and Coach Haskins were playing them, who knows how history would have changed.
Now, the 1965-66 Texas Western team would go down in history. They finished with a 23-1 overall record and finished No. 3 in the AP poll. The Miners defeated Oklahoma City, Cincinnati, Kansas and Utah.
In the final game of the season, Coach Haskins and the Miners faced off against the No. 1 ranked Kentucky Wildcats. It was the first time a
coach started an all African-American starting five against an all-white starting five.
“He had an all-black starting five for the entire year,” Wentzel said in the podcast. “He certainly heard about it on the road and all that, but there was nothing that was going to change his thing. He just said, ‘I’m playing my best players and that’s all there’s going to be.’”
“The influence that game had on black families across the country was massive.”
Texas Western defeated the Wildcats by seven and the course of basketball history was changed forever.
Players like Bobby Joe Hill, Willy Cager, Orsten Artis, Willi Worsley, Nevil Shed, Dave Lattin and Harry Flournoy helped the Miners do that. For what that team did, the 1966 team was inducted into the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame in 2007 and the National College Basketball Hall of Fame in 2020.
It may not have been what Coach Haskins and his team were trying to do, but the 1966 Texas Western Miners helped progress basketball and make every sport better.
“There’s just no way any other college basketball game had this impact,” Wetzel said on the podcast. “Right away, they started taking [African-American] players across the south. So you think about the impact that had on the number of families that all of sudden their kids could get a college scholarship, and not just basketball but football and track and baseball and whatever it was.”
