Changing Everything

A Talk with the Cast of Glory Road

Americans love a winner and will not tolerate a loser. Americans play to win all the time. I wouldn't give a hoot in hell for a man who lost and laughed... The very thought of losing is hateful to Americans.

—Patton, 1970

Winning changes everything.

—Glory Road, 2006

Before we went out under those ubiquitous Friday night lights every fall weekend for three years, Coach Mike Huard (yes, that Huard) played the soundtrack to Patton. Every Friday night, football drilled into us that the Bulldogs were Americans, and that Americans play to win, all the time. Coach Huard was desperately trying to turn the Bulldogs into winners.

At least while I was there, he didn’t. We weren’t winners. The vast majority of the time, we were losers. So most weeks, what Patton did was suggest how little tolerance our coach and community had for us. As Vince Lombardi has often been quoted as saying, “Winning isn’t everything. It’s the only thing.”

Shortly after I graduated from high school, though, the Bulldogs did start winning. And it did change everything. Mike Huard got a better job. He went to a bigger, better school. He won several state championships. His sons quarterbacked PAC-10 championship Husky teams and played in the NFL.

So even my own experience with athletics confirmed Patton’s dictum.

What Glory Road affirms—what so many sports movies this year, from The Greatest Game Ever Played to Dreamer, tell us—is that heroes matter, that their stories have merit, because they were winners.

I’m not so sure.

Now, do movigoers tend to pay more attention to stories about winners? Sure. The answer is obvious. Even Rocky—that lovable, mumblingly mythic runner-up to Apollo Creed—had to become an articulate and well-dressed winner in the sequels. “Who likes losers?” asked Glory Road’s Derek Luke while in Seattle for interviews last month. “You don’t get too many prizes for runner-up.”

So I asked Luke: “Would everything have changed if Western Texas had lost the NCAA title game?”

“No,” he said. Even though they did in fact win, he pointed out, the press and the nation still managed to largely ignore the story. Without recent efforts of NBA legend Pat Riley and powerhouse movie producer Jerry Bruckheimer, Luke says, most Americans would still not know about this story. And the Miners had won. Just imagine if they’d lost.

But seriously: Was it winning that did the trick, or was it gaining a measure of respect through winning? Because if winning is all that matters—if winning is indeed everything—we might make a dangerous leap and conclude that it didn’t matter how the Miners won.

The curious thing about that Lombardi quote is that Lombardi didn’t actually say “winning is the only thing.” Vanderbilt’s Red Sanders said that. “What I said,” clarified Lombardi, “is that ‘Winning is not everything—but making the effort to win is.’”

For me, the real victory of Glory Road was simply that the Miners had the chance to field an all-Black starting roster in the finals of the NCAA tournament—whether or not they won. But I likely react in this way because the civil rights era was over before I even entered junior high, and because I grew up watching integrated athletic competitions.

Silly me. I watch movies for what they mean today, rather than what the story meant forty years ago. And what I see in Glory Road is a story about respect, not a story about winning. And there have been other movies about the importance of respect this year. “I can only pray that people will take me seriously,” says Fiddy Cent’s Marcus in Get Rich or Die Tryin. “I can't go out like a shit house nigger. That isn't who I was raised up to be.”

Neither were the Miners. And they did earn respect. Without the NCAA title, says Mehcad Brooks, the establishment “still would have been able to dismiss” the Miners’ near-perfect season. “Because they won,” added Luke, many White basketball fans were finally “able to look past their race” and see that Black atheletes do, in fact, have what it takes to win at that level.

But what about Glory Road itself? If the movie fails, will it have been a waste of time? Is winning all that matters at the boxoffice, too?

“No, no, no,” Brooks protested. “Winning is making a great film, no matter how it’s received at the boxoffice... We acheived something because it’s a great film.”

“If we remind one person,” added Al Shearer, “about the trials and tribulations that African Americans had to go through during the civil rights era—remind one person, or empower one person, or enlighten one person to further change—we won.”

So after all was said and done—and despite the fact the interviews with the cast of Glory Road were some of the most enjoyable I’ve ever done—I was still left confused. I’m to believe, it seems, that the Miners mattered because they won, and that victory changed the entire basketball system; and paradoxically, I’m also to believe that Glory Road matters even if it only changes one heart.

Which is it?

I think perhaps that John Madden is little closer to the real truth: “Winning is a great deodorant.”