Customer Reviews

And the Walls Came Tumbling Down: The Basketball Game That Changed American Sports

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This is the best book available on the monumental historic 1966 NCAA men's basketball championship of Texas Western, the first team to start 5 blacks in the Final Four. It is very well researched, with an extensive bibliography. The civil rights impact is well dealt with, as are the racial attitudes of several of the major players. The Kentucky coach, Adolph Rupp, is treated fairly and the reader is left to make his own decision about his character. This is tricky to handle, because his attitudes had to be presented on a backdrop of his times and environment.

I have two minor criticisms of the book, which prevent me from awarding it 5 stars. The first is that the racial attitudes of Don Haskins, the Texas Western coach, were not clearly portrayed. We are left with the impression that he cared about the game more than anything, and we know that he was a little bit country, but we never really find out whether he harbored any prejudices.

Second, while the race issue is well dealt with by Fitzpatrick, he does not deal in depth with the problem with gentlemen's agreements. This refers, for example, to the rule of thumb "2 at home, 3 on the road, 4 when behind" that apparently many coaches used to define their quota for black players. A discussion of this, including who knew about these agreements and how widespread was their impact, would definitely have been in order in this book which is trying to place that basketball game in its spot in history.

The author has researched well this game in 1966, but the writing leaves a little to be desired. I felt the author could have done a better job of caputring the players as charachters in the book rather than just topics of a history paper.

I HAVE NO COMPLAINTS. THE TRANSACTION WENT SMOOTHLY. I'M READING THE BOOK RIGHT NOW. I'M ENJOYING READING THE BOOK.
THANK YOU,
ROGER

The Walls Came Tumbling Down is the true story of a group of men who changed the face of sport. Coach Adolph Rupp defied the status quo and changed the face of basketball by drafting five black players onto the 1965-66 Texas Western Miners, and then led that team to a championship.

It's a story of the turbulent times and the social upheaval that inspired these men to take on the culture for the sake of the thing that mattered to them most-winning.

This was two groups of young men playing for their love of the game not some social agenda. Their biggest concern was basketball, chicks, food and cars and not necessarily in that order. The author is playing into the hands of todays political agenda and totally left out that the fact the Pat Riley, a very reliable and respected source, said that Lattin called him a honky during the game. That is just part of the game on both sides to get into other players'heads and that does not make Lattin a black racist and the history of the game in retrospect does not make Rupp a racist. Rupp gets vilified unfairly just as the Texas Western kids gets glorified too much. Loyola won the title with 4 blacks years earlier yet they get no respect for being instrumental in using black players because they happened to have one white player. Nobody buys that nonsense that people thought you needed one white- 4 blacks and your star is black was the real major breakthrough. Like some white roll player really made all the difference- nobody was that nieve. And what about San Francisco, and Cincinnati who's superstars were black? They were ther true pioneers. Bill Russell was the man!!