Don Haskins - 1966 NCAA Championship Team

1966 NCAA Championship Team

The Texas Western Miners finished the 1965–66 regular season with a 23–1 record, entering the NCAA Tournament ranked third in the nation in the final regular season AP college basketball poll.

In the first round of the tournament, the Miners defeated Oklahoma City 89–74. In the next round, they defeated Cincinnati 78–76 in overtime. They went on to defeat Kansas in double overtime in the Midwest Regional Finals, 81–80, and to defeat Utah in the national semifinals, 85–78.

Facing the top-ranked University of Kentucky in the championship game, Haskins made history by starting five African American players for the first time in a championship game against Kentucky’s all-white squad, coached by Adolph Rupp. The Miners took the lead midway in the first half and never relinquished it — though Kentucky closed to within a point early in the second half. The Miners finished with 72 points to Kentucky’s 65, winning the tournament and finishing the year with a 28–1 record.

Later asked about his decision to start five African American players, Haskins downplayed the significance of his decision. "I really didn't think about starting five black guys. I just wanted to put my five best guys on the court," Haskins was later quoted as saying. "I just wanted to win that game."

Though credited with setting in motion the desegregation of college basketball teams in the South, he wrote in his book, Glory Road, "I certainly did not expect to be some racial pioneer or change the world."

Also, in his book, he wrote: "I've said this many times over the last 40 years, but for a long time I thought winning the national championship was the worst thing ever to happen to me. I wished for a long time that we had never won that game with Kentucky because life would have been a heck of a lot easier for me, my school and my players."

Texas Western's 1966 Championship Game Roster:

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Frank Fitzpatrick, a sportswriter for The Philadelphia Inquirer and author of a 1999 book on the championship game, And the Walls Came Tumbling Down: Kentucky, Texas Western and the Game That Changed American Sports (ISBN 978-0-80-326901-9), wrote in a 2003 piece on the team,

A decade after the game, James A. Michener took several swipes at the team in his book Sports in America, calling the game "one of the most wretched in the history of American sports" and saying that the Miners were "loose-jointed ragamuffins. Hopelessly outclassed ." Michener's criticism proved to be far from reality.

In the historic game, Texas Western played only its seven black players. Four of the seven – Cager, Flournoy, Shed, and Worsley – earned degrees. The remaining three left college a semester or less from graduation, and went on to their respective careers—Artis as a Gary, Indiana police officer; Hill in sales, eventually rising to senior buyer for a natural gas company; and Lattin as an NBA draftee for the San Francisco Warriors, and then in business management, currently as an executive with a liquor distributor. In contrast, though it was not mentioned until decades later, four of Kentucky's five starters, including stars Louie Dampier and Pat Riley, had still not earned degrees by the mid-1970s.