One
of the hardest things to believe about Glory Road is that Jerry Bruckheimer hasn’t
already produced a movie entitled Glory Road - I mean what are the chances? Generally
I tend to avoid sports films, because of a basic aversion I have to unrealistic
looking play. From Ronald Reagan mowing down big league sluggers with slow, looping
floaters, to Rocky Balboa’s head popping back while he takes twenty straight
jabs with his guard down around his waist, then rebounding with 10 straight left
hooks that land right on the money. Most people point to the boxing choreography
in the Rocky movies as being pure ballet, personally I thought it was pure bull----.
I’m a tough sale when it comes to sports realism.
Did
I have problems with Glory Road? Big time. The championship game was laughably
rife with hot-dogging stuff that just didn’t exist in 1966. Reverse dunks,
behind the back passes and, wouldn’t you know it, the winning bucket is an
alley-oop slam off the backboard. I’m not a total fuddy duddy, but in a movie
that is supposed to “represent,” a time period of great importance in
our cultural development - I think “period detail” should have been
observed, not Bruckheimered into oblivion. Glory Road has it's moments, but it
could have been a great film, maybe even an important one, had the material been
treated with some respect, instead of blatant target-audience pandering. It is,
after all, based on a true story.
Perhaps
I have no right to complain about this, given that I went into the film knowing
full well it was a Bruckheimer production, I suppose I should be grateful that
the backboard didn’t explode. Alas Bruckheimer can only be blamed for some
of the film’s shortcomings - Glory Road mostly loses it's way in a morass
of mediocre writing, innumerable sports clichés, and enough soap box speachifying
platitudes for 10 sports movies. Josh Lucas as maverick coach Don Haskins is mostly
effective and does the best he can with the material he's given to work with.
He manages to keep a straight face while spouting off one lame coachism after
another. When one kid talks about quitting the team, Lucas fires back, “If
you quit now, you’ll quit every day for the rest of your life.” And
your car will always make that funny hissing noise and never get decent gas mileage
even on the highway. Okay so I added the bit about the car, but when your mind
begins to play games like this, it’s a sure fire sign that you’re not
watching a classic.
Glory
Road now that I’m already halfway down it, tells the story of Coach Don Haskins
who is so hell-bent on putting together a winning program that he heads to the
urban playgrounds of Detroit and New York to recruit the kind of talent he thinks
he can do it with. Of course they all happen to be black, and though it seems
hard to believe, as recently as 1966 having more than one or two blacks on your
team was awfully suspect - particularly at Texas Western College (now University
of Texas at El Paso). Obviously the line “How do you expect to win basketball
games with a team full of Negroes” is going to fetch a big laugh, but in
the context of the era, it wasn’t a joke, it was a pointed question asked
by a deadly serious group of rabid local boosters. So imagine their dismay when
after the final cut is announced only 5 of the 12 players are WHITE?
With
the makings of such a compelling story, not to mention the fact that this squad
would go on to be the first team in history to win the NCAA championship with
an all-black starting line-up, it really is a shame that this film was placed
in the hands of a first time director (James Gartner) who was just flat unable
to make the emotional impact of the material resonate beyond the obvious clichés.
The
acting was perfectly fine, there just wasn’t much of it to be done. Only
one or two of the players are given enough character individuality to stand out
from the others. I would have liked to see these young men contend with the bitter
and constant racial hatred, not only from the townsfolk but from their white teammates,
instead of dwelling on the beyond-trite cutesy exchange of cross-cultural lessons
and characteristics from black to white.
This
event was an tremendously important stepping stone on the road to racial tolerance
and the film could have done a much better job of getting the message across.
Unfortunately it all gets mushed-up and diluted into a Disneyfied fairy tale that
is so inauthentic that to call it cliché is doing it more justice than
it deserves. The film quite simply trades a genuinely fascinating and poignant
human story for a lot of silly grandstanding. Not only does Glory Road fail to
represent but it’s misrepresentation is ridiculously unnecessary. The film
would have been all the richer and more compelling had the letter of the story
been more accurately observed. Glory Road could have strolled off into the sunset
every bit as jubilantly - with everyone heartened, uplifted, better educated and
just as entertained.
