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

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This is a nice, easy read about a milestone game in college basketball history. It certainly dispelled some of the myths I had about the contest. Fitzpatrick talked to all sorts of people and checked many resources, leaving the reader impressed.

Ironically, "And the Walls Came Tumbling Down: Kentucky, Texas Western, and the Game That Changed American Sports," preserves a stereotypical view of the game that presumably challenged a prevailing stereotype. The controversial figure in this story has always been Adolph Rupp, coach of the Kentucky Wildcats, whose "Rupp's Runts" were the last all-white team to play for the championship in the NCAA mens basketball title game. Fitzpatrick makes Rupp the iconic figure of white racism. Indeed, before the game, Rupp told the press that a team of five black players could not beat a team of five white players. However, certainly Rupp was not alone in that holding that stupid position. While it would not be surprising that Rupp, as a older Southern white man, would be a racist, his attempts to recruit future pros Wes Unseld and Butch Beard would seem to suggest he might have been something short of a card carrying member of the Klan. Yet Rupp is demonized throughout the book, while his players, most notably Pat Riley and Louie Dampier, are forced into the role of apologists. Unfortunately, Rupp's legacy pretty much ended with this game, while Riley and Dampier both got to prove their willingness to play not only against but with blacks in professional basketball.

I had spent years booing Don Haskins and the Miners in the Pit in Albuquerque for years before I found out that UTEP had once been Texas Western and how won the NCAA title in 1966. The final score was 72-65, but as they often say, the game was never really that close. Fitzpatrick does assemble all the stories and quotes needed to give you a sense for what happened and how it was seen as important. The collision course between the two teams, the programs, the two coaches, the two ways of thinking, is crystal clear from start to finish. However, despite its importance, primarily in opening up the SEC to black basketball players and other athletes, this game certainly did not impact on the national championships for the rest of the decade. After all, the argument could be made that the only reason Texas Western won in 1966 was because freshman were not eligible to play and two-time defending national champion U.C.L.A. had the best player in the country, Lew Alcindor, playing on their freshman team. U.C.L.A. would win the next seven NCAA titles and all of John Wooden's 10 title teams were won by integrated teams. I have to believe, that even if Texas Western had lost, that the value of black players would have been lost on the rest of the country.

As interesting as the story about this pivotal game happens to be, the story about the story is equally fascinating. While it was obvious to everyone who watched the game that a team of black players beat a team of white players, the sports media managed to cover the game without dealing with the racial aspects of the encounter. The aftermath of this story abounds with more irony. Kentucky did not recruit a black player until 1969, at which point Don Haskins was having trouble recruiting black players because of a Sports Illustrated story claiming he was exploiting black athletes by bringing them to Texas Western just to win the national championship (I know, think about it a bit and pretend it makes sense). When Rupp coached and lost his final game, it was again an instance of his five white players losing to a team of five black players. Ultimately, the picture of Rupp in this book makes him more of a pathetic figure than anything else. I guess when you have a larger than life figure like that it is impossible to put anything else in perspective because they overwhelm any story in which they are involved. But even though they are tearing down Cole Field House at Maryland, where this game took place, it is certainly a moment in sports history that needs to be recalled from time to time.

This book was very inspirational to me. Before 1966 there was a myth that five African-American couldn't play on the basketball court together without having one white person on the court to keep things in order. This championship game of 1966 with five African-American's starting as well as winning the game busted integration wide open. If minorities as a whole can apply the same techniques to academics that they apply athletics, we as a race will be able to tear down many racial barriers whether we have affirmative action or not. Just look at the blacks that are in big time positions that are not athletes. Kenneth Chenault/CEO American Express, Frankie Raines/CEO of Fannie Mae, etc.

Frank Fitzpatrick has undertaken and successfully written a much needed book that should set the record straight forever about Texas Western College in El Paso and the much revered Don Haskins in 1966. "And The Walls Came Tumbling Down" is well-researched, beautifully structured and concisely written as pure as journalism can offer. Hey - if you were a part of the memorable experience like I was in El Paso as a 10-year-old youngster in 1966, you remember all the fine print and details. Fitzpatrick does make one serious error. He writes in Chapter 10 that Texas Western was not invited back the following season in 1967 to the NCAA. Wrong. The Miners went to the tournament's western regional and fell a game shy of playing a UCLA team led by a sophomore named Lew Alcinder. It would have been a pleasure to read Fitzpatrick's hypothesis about the dream meeting - Texas Western's David Lattin and a transfer from New York that year named Phil Harris versus Alcinder. Could you have imagined? Thank God the Philadelphia journalist came along and put some sacred cows like Sports Illustrated and its James Olsen series in 1968 and the thoroughly disgusting James Michener's analysis of the Miners in his "Sports in America" book where they rightfully belong - in the trash can. "The real story of Texas Western's championship team is far different from the myth that has grown around it," Fitzpatrick writes. YEA! Fitzpatrick deserves more than a pat on the back for accurately describing El Paso and what we thought of our heroes. He should be hugged. He accurately writes there wasn't the faintest hint of exploitation or racism toward black athletes. Fitzpatrick successfully portrays who those Miners were. They were winners. They were El Paso. Ultimately, they were us. We couldn't have been prouder. We embraced what that team accomplished and will always. Fitzpatrick even captured the bedlam at El Paso International Airport when our heroes arrived home. I cried reading it like I did then. The memory tingles now. It should forever thanks to a magnificent book like this one.

Frank Fitzpatrick has provided readers with a vibrant, well written book about the beginning of the end of intercollegiate athletic segregation at southeastern schools after the 1966 Kentucky/Texas Western NCAA championship basketball game. The two teams were complete contrasts in skin color, coaching, and recruiting.

As an Auburn University archivist and the athletic museum curator, I noted a few things written by Mr. Fitzpatrick about Auburn University which I do not find in our records. First, Auburn University is located in Auburn, Alabama, not Anniston, Alabama (pages 233 & 238). Nor did Auburn have, in Adolph Rupp's last game as coach in 1971-72, four blacks on the basketball team (page 222). Acccording to our basketball media guide from that year, Auburn had two blacks on the basketball team. One of them was Mr. Henry Harris, Jr.

But the most disturbing thing to me is the author quoting Mr. Perry Wallace, the first member of his race to play basketball in the SEC, to the effect that Henry Harris' experiences at Auburn as its first black basketball player may have directly or indirectly led to Mr. Harris' suicide in 1974 (page 238). Mr. Fitzpatrick offers no other sources to back up this hypothesis. None from Mr. Harris' family, his former teammates, the Auburn Athletic Department, or the Auburn University Archives, which houses records of this era from the Athletic Department, the President's Office, and University Relations. This is not the kind of research or reporting I would expect from Mr. Fitzpatrick. It does make me wonder about the accuracy of other parts of the book.

This book is a huge disappointment. Frank Fitzpatrick buys into all the criticisms of Rupp while ignoring or dismissing out of hand much of the contradictory evidence (freely available to anyone who can use a search engine) which shoots holes through his basic premise. The author spends so much time villifying Rupp and covering for Texas Western coach Don Haskins that he loses all sense of perspective on the state of society during that time. The characters that Fitzpatrick presents are one-dimensional and overly simplistic. The result being that the readers are not provided with a complete picture of the complexities and hard decisions which were made by everyone during integration of college basketball in the South and nation in general. This prediliction towards blaming Rupp for just about everything is one result of a willful decision by Fitzpatrick to not understand the man, a flaw the author has basically admitted to. In an interview with Billy Reed, the author states "I still don't feel I have a real grasp of the guy. In a lot of ways, I think he was a simplistic figure." This basic flaw should, by itself, prevent anyone from wasting their time with this book.