Awesome national championship game tonight -- listened to it on the radio, old school.
But there was a much bigger story here.
Baylor was only the second Texas team in men's college basketball history to win the national championship.
Pop quiz: what Texas team was the first to win a men's national basketball championship? Hint: the 1965 - 1966 season. The losing opponent, the Kentucky Wildcats, ranked #1 in the nation.
Read this incredible story here.
After you read that story, then read this story, happened during the same 12-month period
All of this sort of puts Covid-19 into perspective.
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A Year Earlier
This is so good on so many levels. Link here.
As a sports fan the Texas Western (Now UTEP) has always been a compelling story. Add the atmosphere of the time and it is amazing. And made for a great movie was well
ReplyDeleteI am absolutely blown away by your knowledge of this and the fact I completely missed this. This says a lot about me and where I grew up. I was 14 - 15 years old at the time, growing up in (essentially) an all-white community, northwest corner of North Dakota. I was so far away from the civil rights movement at the time (both in age and geographically) I could have been on a different planet. What the UTEP guys would have had to go through is magnitudes greater than what athletes are going through now (Covid-19), at least to the extent I might know. This just blows me away. Again, without the blog, this, too, might have passed me by. My wife vaguely remembers the movie, but I looked it up: Glory Road. Wow. What a story. Thank you for taking time to write.
DeleteI may not have a whole lot of readers, but they sure are knowledgeable. I am always humbled when I get notes like the Mike's note above. That means a lot to me.
DeleteAs I said, being a sports fan (fanatic) helps. Can appreciate your upbringing as mine was similar. Small town in SW Washington state. The first minorities to attend my school were Vietnamese boat people in the mid 70's.
ReplyDeleteYour hard work on this blog is appreciated as well, so thank you
Thank you for the kind words.
DeleteSpeaking of Vietnamese boat people. I forget when it was, but it must have been in the late 90s that I was assigned to a big USAF hospital; I forget what air force base it was.
I was some years older than a very, very highly respected pharmacist in our hospital. He was a junior office, probably about 28 years old, maybe a bit older.
He was obviously oriental, but more than that I did not know until I asked him. It turned out he was not much older than two years old when he escaped with his family as a "Vietnamese boat person." He says he remembered parts of the escape. He said it cost his father thousands of dollars to get a spot on the boat. So this two-year-old refugee grows up to become a pharmacist (it's hard to get into pharmacy school than medical school) and then joins the USAF. Absolutely remarkable, the human spirit.
Its what makes America great.
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