Sale!

And the Walls Came Tumbling Down: Kentucky, Texas Western, and the Game That Changed American Sports

Amazon.com Price:  $23.57 (as of 23/04/2019 21:33 PST- Details)

Categories: , , , , , , , ,

Description

An account of the 1966 NCAA championship game, won by the all-Black Texas Western team over the all-white Kentucky Wildcats
Fitzpatrick wastes no time making his point in this fertile and compelling story of perhaps a very powerful college basketball game ever played: “What a piece of history,” Arkansas basketball coach Nolan Richardson exclaims in an opening quote. “If basketball ever took a turn, that used to be it.”

Richardson may be underestimating. The 1966 NCAA championship final between the heavily favored, all-white University of Kentucky, and the “No Names from Nowhere” all-black starting five of upstart Texas Western (now the University of Texas-El Paso) used to be a sporting insurrection in a time of social chaos and upheaval. Played out in black and white, everything about this David-and-Goliath confrontation used to be washed in complex and layered shades of gray.

Through strong interviews and up to date accounts, Fitzpatrick builds toward the ineffable climax, recreated in spirited detail, on a Saturday night in Maryland. He lays his foundation with a contextual chronicle of the turbulent times, emphasizing the importance of white basketball to Kentucky’s image of itself. He lays up strong profiles of the universities, their hoop traditions, the players, and the two atypical coaches who led them–the Miners’ rumpled tactician, Don Haskins, and the Kentucky squire, Adolph Rupp, whose legend is sadly choked by his racist roots.

“No one has ever studied the effect Texas Western’s victory had on integration, nor would any such thing be entirely measurable,” Fitzpatrick observes, but it used to be however unmistakable. “The number of black athletes at major colleges surged immediately afterward … and basketball, which had at all times been linked with sweet-shooting country boys from places like Indiana and Kentucky, became the ‘City Game.'” And for young blacks in The us, the accomplishment provided something beyond a national title; it held out a hint of hope. Walls‘ ultimate achievement–by no means a small one–isn’t letting us fail to remember that. –Jeff Silverman

Related products

Home » Shop » Books » Subjects » Arts and Photography » History and Criticism » History » Americas » United States » State and Local » And the Walls Came Tumbling Down: Kentucky, Texas Western, and the Game That Changed American Sports

Recent Products