Donald Lee Haskins (March 14, 1930 - September 7, 2008) was an American collegiate basketball coach and player. He played for three years under legendary coach Henry Iba at Oklahoma A&M (now Oklahoma State University). He was the head coach at Texas Western College (renamed the University of Texas at El Paso in 1967) from 1961 to 1999, including the 1966 season when his team won the NCAA Men's Division I Basketball Championship over the Wildcats of the University of Kentucky, coached by coaching great Adolph Rupp.
In his time at Texas Western, he compiled a 719-353 record, suffering only five losing seasons. He won 14 Western Athletic Conference championships, four WAC tournament titles, had fourteen NCAA tournament berths and made seven trips to the NIT. Haskins led UTEP to 17 20-plus win seasons and served as an assistant Olympic team coach in 1972.[1]
He was enshrined into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in 1997 as a basketball coach. The 1966 team was nominated in its entirety to the Basketball Hall of Fame, and was inducted to the Hall on September 7th, 2007.
A year after his 1966 team was inducted into the Hall of Fame, Haskins died at the age of 78.
Early Coaching Career
After college and a stint with the Amateur Athletic Union’s Artesia Travelers, Haskins began coaching, successfully leading some small-town high school basketball teams. He took a pay cut for a chance to be a college coach, accepting a job offer at Texas Western College (now the University of Texas at El Paso) in 1961.[3]
In the 1950s, prior to Haskins' arrival, Texas Western recruited and played African American players, in a time when it was still common to find all-white college sports teams, particularly in the South.[4] When Haskins arrived in El Paso, he inherited three black players from his coaching predecessor. (One of those players, El Paso native Nolan Richardson, would go on to win a national title as the head coach at Arkansas.)
The Miners reached the NCAA Tournament in 1963 and 1964 and played in the National Invitation Tournament (commonly called the NIT) in 1965. On numerous occasions, Haskins stated that he believed his 1964 team could have won the NCAA Tournament had All-American Jim "Bad News" Barnes not fouled out after playing only 8 minutes in a 64-60 loss to Kansas State in the Tournament.
The 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.[5]
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.[6]
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 the game."[7]
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."[8]
Texas Western's 1966 Championship Game Roster:
Texas Western College Miners FG FT RB F Pts
Bobby Joe Hill* 7-17 6-9 3 3 20
David Lattin* 5-10 6-6 9 4 16
Orsten Artis* 5-13 5-5 8 1 15
Willie Worsley* 2-4 4-6 4 0 8
Willie Cager 1-3 6-7 6 3 8
Nevil Shed 1-1 1-1 3 1 3
Harry Flournoy*+ 1-1 0-0 2 0 2
Totals 22-49 28-34 35 12 72
*Denotes Starter
+Denotes Injury
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,
“ But even as the jubilant Miners celebrated a new set of myths was emerging. Rupp's lingering bitterness helped paint the Miners as urban street thugs, quasi-professionals imported from Northern cities to win Haskins a championship.[9] ”
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 [stories] in the history of American sports" and saying that the Miners were "loose-jointed ragamuffins. Hopelessly outclassed [by Rupp's Kentucky program]."[9] 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.[9]