We lost one of the great pioneers of collegiate sports this week with the passing of Hall of Fame basketball coach Don Haskins.
Known as “The Bear,” Haskins spent 36 years as the head coach at the University of Texas-El Paso, formerly Texas Western. Haskins made the most courageous stand in 1966 when he decided to put five black starters on the floor for the first time, which was unheard of in the 1960’s during the period of segregation in the South.
Haskins joined Brooklyn Dodgers president Branch Rickey and Boston Celtics coach Red Auerbach as white gentlemen who went against the times of racial segregation and separation to bring black people into the athletic arena.
That 1966 Texas Western team that Haskins coached went on to defeat Adolph Rupp’s all-white University of Kentucky team 72-65 for the NCAA Tournament title in a game that was nationally televised. Rupp, one of the all-time great coaches in college basketball, was also a devout racist who refused to recruit black players to Kentucky and was proud of it. My family witnessed “The Baron’s” brand of racial bigotry first-hand because my uncles (George and Wes Unseld) were prep All-State and All-American players at Seneca High School in Louisville, and neither was recruited by “The Baron.” Uncle George went on to play at Kansas while Uncle Wes stayed home to attend Louisville.
Other college teams had started black players and won NCAA championships before (such as San Francisco in 1956, Cincinnati in 1960 and ’61, Loyola of Chicago in 1963 and UCLA in 1964), but Haskins was the first coach to do away with the “quota system” and put his best players on the floor, who all happened to be black. The top seven players on the team were Bobby Joe Hill, Nevil Shed, Dave “Big Daddy” Lattin, Willie Cager, Harry Flournoy, Willie Worsley and Orsten Artis, who were all African-American.
Haskins’ brave stand was met with great resistance throughout the South and Southwest as he was inundated with hate mail from thousands of people and his team was pelted with racial slurs and epitaphs on road trips and during games throughout the season. In today’s college game, One can only imagine today what he and his players had to go through during that season.
Friends and colleagues of Haskins were equally concerned and fearful about Haskins fielding an all-black team. They thought he was committing career suicide. Haskins could care less. His job was to win and to accomplish that task, he needed to put the best players on the floor.
Although Haskins said he never set out to be a pioneer, his stand was a revolutionary move in the world of college athletics. It came at a time where there were no black basketball players in the Southeastern Conference, Southwest Conference and Atlantic Coast Conference. Many of the top black players who wanted to play college basketball in the South decided to attend black colleges. Players such as Willis Reed (Grambling State), Dick Barnett (Tennessee State), Earl Monroe (Winston-Salem State) and Bob “Butterbean” Love (Southern U.) became stars as black colleges.
The floodgates opened after Texas Western’s success, as many Southern schools began to recruit black players, including Alabama’s C.M. Newton, who put out an all-black starting five of Leon Douglass, Reginald King, Rickey Brown, T.R. Dunn and Anthony Murray in 1976.
Haskins enjoyed a marvelous career at Texas Western/UTEP with 13 NCAA Tournament appearances and 33 winning seasons. He retired with a record of 719-353. He also developed such great players as Nate “Tiny” Archibald and Tim Hardaway and helped shape the coaching career of Nolan Richardson, who was on Haskins’ first team at Texas Western. Richardson went on to be the only coach ever to win a national junior college title, the National Invitational Tournament (Tulsa) and the NCAA Tournament (Arkansas).
Haskins was inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame in 1997. The story of his 1966 team is recounted in the book Glory Road, which was made into a motion picture in 2006.
Don Haskins was 78.