The Baron and the Bear

Rupp's Runts, Haskins's Miners, and the Season That Changed Basketball Forever

De: David Kingsley Snell

Narrado por: Christopher Snell

In the 1966 NCAA basketball championship game, an all-white University of Kentucky team was beaten by a team from Texas Western College (now UTEP) that fielded only black players. The game, played in the middle of the racially turbulent 1960s - part David and Goliath in short pants, part emancipation proclamation of college basketball - helped destroy stereotypes about black athletes.

Filled with revealing anecdotes, The Baron and the Bear is the story of two intensely passionate coaches and the teams they led through the ups and downs of a college basketball season. In the twilight of his legendary career, Kentucky's Adolph Rupp ("The Baron of the Bluegrass") was seeking his fifth NCAA championship. Texas Western's Don Haskins ("The Bear" to his players) had been coaching at a small West Texas high school just five years before the championship.

After this history-making game, conventional wisdom that black players lacked the discipline to win without a white player to lead began to dissolve. Northern schools began to abandon unwritten quotas limiting the number of blacks on the court at one time. Southern schools, where athletics had always been a whites-only activity, began a gradual move toward integration.

David Kingsley Snell brings the season to life, offering fresh insights on the teams, the coaches, and the impact of the game on race relations in America.

©2016 David Snell (P)2016 David Snell

The rest of the story

If you've seen Glory Road this is not only the rest of the story it also specifically corrects some of the things the movie changed. I really like how it traced both teams through the season and brought both coaches to life. Rupp was not the villain I had been lead to believe. Like a lot of great coaches in the South during this time period he was not in favor of his team being segregated if it put him at a competitive disadvantage. Whether or not he was racist is up for debate, but the book provides evidence that he wanted black players on his teams before the rest of the University wanted him to do it. Haskins was a great defensive coach, something that gets lost in the movie. Great sports book and a very good examination of race relations of the time. Two stories in one.