The undefeated Miners of Texas Western gave the home crowd thrills aplenty on Feb. 14, 1966 by slipping past Arizona State 69-67 for their 19th consecutive victory.
The miracle maker in El Paso was a former two-time all-state basketball star from Oklahoma. Don Haskins played college ball for Hank Iba at Oklahoma A&M (now Oklahoma State) and like many disciples of the living legend chose coaching for a career.
Haskins got his start in the Texas Panhandle with high school teams at Benjamin (1955-56), Hedley (1956-60) and Dumas (1960-61). He won 79 percent of the time, an impressive record but hardly an automatic springboard to the college level.
Prior to Haskin’s arrival, Texas Western had never gone to the NCAA tournament or the NIT. “The Bear” took the Miners to the NCAA in his second season (1963) and to the NIT in his fourth (1965). But no one, not even the optimistic Okie, ever could have imagined how far Texas Western would go the following year.
Except in the segregated South, basketball fans had grown accustomed to seeing three and sometimes four black players in the starting line-ups of major college teams. But no coach in the country dared begin a game without at least one white player on the floor.
Don Haskins broke that unwritten rule in the 1965-66 campaign not because he had something to prove but merely because he believed in playing the best players. And the seven best on his 12-man squad happened to be black.
The Miners blew out their ten December opponents by an average of 26 points. They survived a close call with Fresno State and ended the month by embarrassing sixth ranked Iowa 86-68.
By early February, Texas Western was a perfect 15-0 and in the Top Ten. A basket at the buzzer by Bobby Joe Hill snatched victory from the jaws of defeat at Colorado State, and the Miners rallied from 20 points down to win in overtime at New Mexico.
When Haskins’ heroes made the long trip to Washington state for the last game of the regular season, they were 23-0 and second only to Kentucky in the national polls. After the Wildcats fell earlier that evening, the top spot was theirs for the taking, but the Miners lost a heartbreaker to the same Seattle Redhawks they had beaten by a dozen in January.
Twenty-four hours later, Texas Western met the Oklahoma City Chiefs in the first round of the NCAA tournament at Wichita, Kansas. Still reeling from the upset of the previous night, the Miners quickly fell behind by 11 points.
Haskins called time, gave everybody a good chewing-out and sent Hill, benched for a curfew violation, into the game. The guard from Detroit responded with 24 points to ignite an 89-74 comeback.
The next stop on the road to the Final Four was Lubbock. Two thousand supporters came from El Paso to cheer on the Miners, who had their hands full with experienced Cincinnati. Texas Western prevailed in overtime thanks to six points from Willie Cager, a product of the New York playgrounds whose playing time was limited by a heart murmur.
The Kansas Jayhawks, who had eliminated Southwest Conference champ SMU, provided an even tougher test the following night. The weary Miners needed 22 points from Hill, 17 rebounds from David Lattin and two extra periods to eke out a one-point win.
To hear Adolph Rupp tell it, the Kentucky-Duke semifinal was the only game worth playing six days later in College Park, Maryland. Neither Utah nor the upstarts from Texas had a ghost of a chance against his sharpshooting Runts or the Blue Devils, or so he said.
When the Wildcats disposed of Duke, Rupp thought his fifth NCAA title was in the bag. To the old segregationist, whose teams remained lily-white in defiance of his own university president, the last act with Texas Western, who vanquished Utah 85-78, was nothing more than a distasteful formality.
Rupp was right about one thing. It was no contest. Bobby Joe Hill scored twice off two successive steals to put the Miners ahead for good. Taking full advantage of their superior speed and quickness, they stretched their lead to 11 with three minutes left. Any objective observer had to admit the game was not as close as the final score of 72-65.
At the Kentucky basketball banquet two weeks later, the master of ceremonies told the sea of sad faces, “At least we’re still America’s number one white team.” That was small consolation for Adolph Rupp, who said on his deathbed in 1977, “I often wake up in the middle of the night wondering what I could have done to turn the tide.”
Coach Haskins was the toast of El Paso and the target of every bigot with a pencil. The 40,000 poison-pen letters he received may have set a record for hate mail.
The Miners went 22-7 in 1967 but were snubbed by both the NCAA and NIT. The defending national champions had to watch the tournaments on television.
Don Haskins resisted the temptation of a fat paycheck at a big-time basketball school to stay in El Paso. His UTEP (the name change came in 1967) teams had a winning record 34 out of 38 seasons, won 20 or more games 17 times and took 21 post-season trips. He retired in 1999 with 719 victories, fourth best among active college coaches.
Did you ever get your autographed copy of “Murder Most Texan,” Bartee’s latest book? You may order it in the “General Store” at barteehaile.com or by mailing a check for $26.65 to Bartee Haile, P.O. Box 152, Friendswood, TX 77549.
