RIP Don Haskins

Certainly Haskins was an influential and significant figure, and a legend at TWU/UTEP, but I always thought the deal about "breaking the color line" has been a little bit overdone -- Phil Woolpert at USF a decade earlier won back-to-back NCAA titles playing four or five black players (although I don't think ever all at once), and I'm pretty sure the great Cincinnati teams from 1958-62 played a lot of black guys (primarily Oscar Robertson), so it's not like blacks hadn't been allowed on the court before.



But to stick it right in the face of UK (more so than Rupp individually) and all-white southern basketball kicked open the doors for good. Supposedly Bear Bryant saw that game, as well as Michigan State's juggernaut football teams of the mid-60s (heavily stocked with black players from the South), and said, "holy shit, if we don't start recruiting black players, we might as well hang it up."

 

Legend has it that is was Sam Cunningham running all over Bama when he was at USC that convinced Bear he needed to integrate.

 

Additionally, Loyola-Chicago had four black starters when it won the 1963 title by beating Cincinnati, which had three black starters. Similar to Texas Western/UTEP, Loyola is the only Illinois team to win a national title.

But, yes, the context of Texas Western vs. Kentucky is what makes that game most memorable.

 

Damn!

Love to hear stories from my uncle and other old scribes who covered the old WAC about Haskins taking them out drinking after games and thoroughly outlapping the lot of them.

Besides the things he is known best for, it was also cool that he stayed at UTEP when he could have gone dozens of other places after 1966.

RIP Bear

 

And in your Maryland connection, that seminal game was played at Cole Field House.

RIP to a great coach and a greater human being.

 

The Haskins stories are absolutely legendary. He will be missed.

 

Actually, the way I remember the story is that Bryant scheduled USC because he knew Cunningham would run wild against them, and that would be the impetus the coach needed to convince the school hierarchy and the boosters that he had to be allowed to recruit blacks.

 

:'( :'( :'(

I have so much more to say, but I can't articulate it right now. RIP.

 

USF and Loyola were pioneers and should get more love, but in the context and the situation that presented itself, Texas Western going up against a program as huge as Kentucky and Rupp, made this a historical part of college basketball, and for Don Haskins.

RIP Coach Haskins. You have done the game of basketball proud in more ways than one.

 

Damn.

RIP.

 

And Loyola's first win in that tournament came against a Mississippi State squad that literally had to sneak across the state line to defy the governor's orders not to play against an integrated squad.

 

Sneaking into east lansing... amazing... usually people snuck out.