"Glory Road"

My review of the basketball movie will be in the Feb. 13, 2006 issue of The American Conservative [subscribe here]. Here's a brief excerpt:

At least since 1967's Best Picture-winning "In the Heat of the Night," in which Rod Steiger's bigoted Southern sheriff and Sidney Poitier's angry Northern detective reluctantly team up to solve a murder, movies aimed at guy audiences have often astutely promoted racial harmony not as an end in itself, but as the most efficient way for real men to work together for important manly goals. A canonical illustration is the Jerry Bruckheimer-produced 2000 hit "Remember the Titans," in which the black and white football players at a tense newly integrated Virginia high school in 1971 learn to play as a team to win the big game.

Bruckheimer's new basketball movie "Glory Road" purports to be similar. Yet, this quasi-true story of the 1966 Texas Western (now UT at El Paso) Miners, the first squad to win the NCAA championship game with an all-black starting line-up, actually exemplifies more unsettling historical trends: the beginning of the de facto re-segregation of basketball and of the triumph of recruiting over coaching, of nature over nurture.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer