Tag: The Sixties

Bound for Glory.


Nothing if not textbook and by-the-numbers (Coach Haskell would be proud), Disney’s Glory Road — the story of the 1966 NCAA Champion Texas Western Miners, the first basketball team in tournament history to feature five black starters — still makes for a decent genre matinee. It’s not a movie that’ll light the world on fire by any means, but it hits its beats decently, and benefits from amiable performances from Josh Lucas and Emily Deschanel right on down the bench. I wish the movie had stayed more with the historical game plan it marked out in the opening credits — and that the basketball scenes were more engrossing — but, all in all, Glory Road is a journeyman sports pic.

A synopsis here is probably overkill, suffice to say that a well-meaning disciplinarian coach (Josh Lucas) rides into El Paso, circa 1965, to try to mold a championship basketball team out of a triracial group of college athletes. Do these youngsters overcome their cultural differences, learn there’s a method to Coach’s madness, and become a Team? Do they play well enough to get to the Big Dance? Well, I’ll leave that for you to discover. The main — ok, the only — thing that differentiates Glory Road from its many predecessors is its period flavor. These players don’t just have to worry about the usual assortment of college problems: They’re also caught up in the middle of the civil rights revolution — and the white backlash — across the South, and have to contend with brutal acts of racism off the court as well as the usual opposing teams. George Will recently questioned whether this team was as history-making as it’s made out to be here. Well, ok, but, in a way, that’s beside the point. By bringing race and the civil rights struggle to the fore here, Glory Road acts as a corrective to the main flaw in what’s otherwise a better basketball film, Hoosiers. As Spike Lee points out in Best Seat in the House, it’s hard to watch that film, particularly its final game, and not feel at times that its an uncomfortably white basketball flick.

Speaking of Spike Lee’s book, it also kinda ruined some of Glory Road for me. Therein, Lee (pre-He Got Game) spends a chapter calling out ridiculous basketball scenes in movies — watching unathletic actors dunk on 6-foot rims, etc. And, while the rims look the right height in Glory Road, I have to admit, none of the basketball scenes are all that engaging. They’re cut too close, there’s barely a sense of plays developing, and very few shots seem to leave the actors’ hands to go into the basket. (For that matter, you don’t really get a sense of what various players’ strengths or weaknesses are here, other than that Bobby Joe Hill (Derek Luke) has a nice handle and Nevil Shed (Al Shearer) has a tendency to disappear in the paint. What’s more, Coach’s advice throughout basically can be summed up as “You can do it!” — Not a lot of play-calling going on.) Still, for what it is — an uplifting vignette of sports history — Glory Road is solid enough. Formulaic, sure, but no harm, no foul.

Uncomfortable analogies.

According to National Security Agency historian Robert Hanyok, his recent work outlining a deliberate NSA cover-up following the Gulf of Tonkin incident has been suppressed by the agency since 2001, in part because of Weaponsgate. “He said N.S.A. historians began pushing for public release in 2002, after Mr. Hanyok included his Tonkin Gulf findings in a 400-page, in-house history of the agency and Vietnam called ‘Spartans in Darkness.’ Though superiors initially expressed support for releasing it, the idea lost momentum as Iraq intelligence was being called into question, the official said.“

Politics of Ancient History?

“Our generation has envied our elders’ experiences more often than we’ve questioned them. Growing up in the shadow of the ’60s, we couldn’t help viewing the political involvement of the age as nobler, the culture and the music as more vital, the shattering of social norms more exciting, than the zeitgeist of our own formative years.” Slate‘s David Greenberg invokes popular culture’s (and the academy’s) rampant Sixties-ism to suggest why post-John Wesley Harding Dylan gets so little love.

Killen Time.

On the other side of the Padilla coin, a terrorist who has been tried and convicted has been walking free…until now. 80-year-old Klansman Edgar Ray Killen is rejailed after it was discovered he had been lying about being wheelchair-bound. “‘It’s interesting,’ said Susan Glisson, the director of the William Winter Institute for Racial Reconciliation at the University of Mississippi. ‘Forty-one years ago the police department was involved in a conspiracy to murder these three young men. The fact that members of that same police department are now involved in putting Mr. Killen back in jail is indicative of how far this community has come.'”

Ghosts of Mississippi.

Edgar Ray Killen, the 80-year-old Klansman mastermind behind the murders of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner in 1964, is found guilty of three counts of manslaughter. To some extent, as with the recent Senate sorry-about-all-that-lynching resolution, I feel justice delayed is justice denied here. This fellow Killen got to live out the 41 years since — a lifetime he denied his victims — in freedom. Still, for the families of the slain, for the rule of law, and for the history books, it’s good to know that these crimes will no longer go unpunished. It may take a lifetime, but, as a purported man of the cloth such as Killen should’ve known, eventually the sins of the past will catch up with you. Update: Killen gets the max — 60 years.

In the Key of X.

“‘I think people will find something in the objects to provoke new levels of interest and new levels of scholarship,’ Howard Dodson, chief of the Schomburg, said in an interview. ‘We’ve consciously tried to stay away from putting a heavy interpretative line on it and to let Malcolm X speak for himself.’” The NYT previews the new Malcolm X exhibit, opening at the Schomburg Center next Thursday.