The Baron and the Bear: Rupp's Runts, Haskins's Miners, and the Season That Changed Basketball Forever by David Kingsley Snell (review)

March 19, 2016, marked the 50th anniversary of the so-called Glory Road game when the all-black starting five from Texas Western College defeated the all-white University of Kentucky team. It was so-called due to its play on Rupp's words during his retirement press conference and, because Tennessee State A&I (now University) won three consecutive National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics (NAIA) basketball titles against all-white teams from 1957–59. In fact, the 1958 TSU title team had four players that played in the NBA. The 1958 UK title team had three on their roster. Talent and meritocracy were moot because the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) prohibited historically black colleges and universities access to their tournament. I digress. Coach Don Haskins with Dan Wetzel co-authored an accessible book that became a major Hollywood motion picture. Glory Road made forty-two million at the box office and ESPN gave it the 2006 ESPY for best sport film.

In 2002, Cotton Productions released a 45-minute documentary called And the Wheels Turned: The 1966 NCAA Basketball Championship. Intriguing occurrences in the black and white film footage took place at the twenty-four minute, fifty-five second mark in the documentary. There were three signs and one read "Big Blue." There also was a sizable section of majority white-male spectators that waved anywhere from ten to fifty Confederate Flags. Media and subsequently Hollywood needed an antagonist that seemingly represented an exclusive, segregated past in American sport and society. They found their culprit in Adolph Rupp. Allegations, innuendo, and conjecture swirled. Rumors circulated that Rupp said "he would not lose to a team of blacks, of coons." As of 2016, no one can confirm truth in these allegations. Nevertheless thanks to Sports Illustrated writer Frank Deford, Frank Fitzpatrick, and a slew of others, Rupp was framed after his death in 1977 as the architect of racism and segregation in an American sporting past.

Armed with oral interviews, secondary sources, and media accounts, journalist David Kingsley Snell de-clutters myths about Adolph Rupp the racist and writes a readable, climatic narrative on the 1966 NCAA basketball national championship victory of Texas Western against the University of Kentucky. Nolan Richardson, former Texas Western player, head coach, and 2014 Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame inductee, provides a powerful and thought-provoking Foreword. In the Prologue, Snell problematizes master narratives and their impact on memory particular to Rupp and Haskins. In the Epilogue, Snell challenges revisionist interpretations on race and sport, and infuses primary accounts with critical analysis in ways useful for casual sport fans, undergraduate students, and experts on sport in history, journalism, and sociology. These three sections and his central argument and exploration of a championship game that paralleled an Emancipation Proclamation within the athletic Civil Rights Movement, are the most significant contributions of the book.

Although Snell investigated a misconstrued topic, there were notable omissions in the text, and room remains for future scholarship on Adolph Rupp, sport, and the politics of integration. The book lacks historiographical depth. Numerous scholars and journalists have written on race and basketball in the last ten years, including works on UCLA, Bill Russell, John McClendon, and the NBA. More importantly, there are missed opportunities that could have resulted in this book becoming the definitive treatment on Rupp and race. Discussion on his engagement with Freeport High School, the Kentucky Negro Education Association, Don Barksdale, Jim Tucker, CUNY, Solly Walker, coverage by black presses in the 1950s, and a post-championship game interview with Standard Oil would have significantly strengthened his argument. These quibbles aside, Snell has written a valuable book with engaging stories on both Texas Western and Kentucky that, at minimum, should reignite debates on who Rupp was, and...