O'Bannon, Jr. v. National Collegiate Athletic Association et al

Filing 255

Defendant NCAA's Notice of Motion and Motion to Admit Exhibits by National Collegiate Athletic Association (Attachments: #1 Exhibit A, #2 Exhibit B, #3 Exhibit C, #4 Exhibit D, #5 Exhibit E, #6 Exhibit F, #7 Exhibit G, #8 Exhibit H, #9 Exhibit I, #10 Exhibit J, #11 Exhibit K, #12 Proposed Order)(Miller, Jeslyn) (Filed on 6/27/2014) Modified on 6/30/2014 (cpS, COURT STAFF).

EXHIBIT B

to

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The Amazing Story ofthe 1966 NCAA Season
and the Championship Game
that Changed America

DAVID
"BIG DADDY D"
LATTIN

Wl UTE STONE BOOKS
!.AKI'IAND, HORIDA

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All scripture quotations are taken from the Holy Biblr: Nnv International Version®. NIV®.
(North American Edition)®. Copyright 1973, 1978, 1984 by International Bible Society. Used
by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved.

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Slam Dunk to Glory
The Amazing Story ofthe 1966 NC4A Season
and the Championship Game that Changed America
1-59379-117-8
Copyright © 2006 by David Lattin
Published by White Stone Books, Inc.
P.O. Box 2835
Lakeland, Florida 33806
Printed in the United States of America. All rights reserved under International
Copyright Law. Contents and/or cover may not be reproduced in whole or in
part in any form without the express written consent of the Publisher.

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INTRODUCTION

But he had not acknowledged me for my play with this team.
No, he remembered me from an earlier team, from a single game
in which I had played-from my moment in history.
We left after 20 minutes or so, but I was still in awe. I had
come a long, long way from the streets of Houston, Texas .

•
Bobby Joe Hill, the other great star of the 1966 championship Texas Western Basketball Team, and I often talked about
writing a book about that season. When he died unexpectedly
a few years ago, I put the idea aside until I was approached to
play a bit part in the motion picture Glory Road. I knew that the
movie, and the companion book by Coach Don Haskins,
would draw enormous attention to the game and surrounding
events. It is a compelling story. I should know; I was part of it.
Bobby Joe Hill was no longer there to take part, but I could
still write about what it was like for us, for those athletes who
actually played the games that season. No one but the black
players on the team knew what it was like for us as we entered the
all-white Cole Stadium for the championship game; how we felt
looking at the all-white referee crew, white reporters, white
scorer's table, white cheerleaders, and nearly all white fans. Bobby
Joe's brother and a small but very spirited group from his hometown of Highland Park, Michigan, were there to cheer us on.
Winning the NCAA championship that year was the crowning achievement for Coach Haskins, but the victory did not mean
to him what it came to mean to us. It could not possibly, since
· he did not walk in our shoes or come from our neighborhoods.
As good a man as he is, and as great a coach as he was, he did
not suffer the constant reminders of the inequalities in America
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SLAM DUNK TO GLORY

that we faced on a daily basis in our schools, public accommodations, and in almost every facet of our lives.
So here is my story as I lived it. I have drawn on a number of
sources that have told this unique story from different perspectives. Among them is And the Walls Came Tumbling Down:
Kentucky, Texas Ulestern and the Game that Changed American
Sports by sportswriter Frank Fitzpatrick, Haskins: The Bear Facts
as told to Ray Sanchez, and many articles and other news coverage of the subject. I am grateful to all of the writers and authors.
Over the years, I have made a point to talk with the other
players on that championship team, to understand what the
game has meant to them. I thank all of them for their cooperation and feel a tremendous loss not to share this story in the
flesh with my good friend Bobby Joe.
Finally, let me say this: Texas Western was not an all-black
basketball team. We had several fine white players and one
Hispanic, and without them we would never have made it to the
NCAA championship game. None of them played that night,
for reasons I will write about later. & part of our team, in a
perfect world without overt racism, they would have played.
But ours was not a perfect world then, as it is not now.
There were reasons why seven black players played that game
against an all-white team, reasons deeply rooted in our history
and in the times in which we played.
I am proud to have been a small part of bringing about
positive change. This is my contribution to history.

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EL PASO

Coach Haskins also trusted Hilton White, who had been
stationed at Fort Bliss and knew El Paso. He understood the
opportunity Texas Western could give young black men and
knew that they would be treated well in El Paso. He supervised
a playground in New York City where he coached teams and
saw a lot of players who were off the radar of the big schools.
Coach Haskins' deal with both men was that he'd do everything he could to see to it that any players they brought to him
got a good college edl!cation out of their athletic scholarship.
The academic record of his players speaks for itsel£
What Coach Haskins assembled was a team of enormous
strength and potential, assets that had to be harnessed. It was a
team about which Coach Haskins often expressed exasperation.
"It was a battle, every day," he said later. "It was a strange
bunch, I tell you." I can only agree. That we were.
But before this team was put together, Texas Western had to
play the 1964-65' season without "Bad News" Barnes, and it
was a struggle, as was to be expected. Coach Haskins had really
hoped I would step up to fill that hole in the team;, but I didn't
until the next year.
Attending all-black Tennessee State was a mistake, I quickly
realized. They'd honored their deal for my friends and given
them scholarships, making it possible for them to go to college,
but the school really didn't play that much of a basketball schedule, something I should have paid closer attention to.
What nagged at me were all those records set by "Bad
News" Barnes at Texas Western. Breaking them there had meant
more to me than I realized. By the end of that first quarter, I
knew I had to make a change. This just wasn't going to work. I
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SLAM DUNK TO GLORY

them from city basketball courts, if necessary. Coach Haskins
put on the court his five best players, regardless of race, and that
meant they were usually black.
Attending Texas Western, though, was for me, for all the
team, about more than playing basketball. We intended to get
an education, to leave with a college degree. An athletic scholarship was the only way any of us could get one, so I didn't just
play basketball. I majored in Communications and on Sunday
night hosted a jazz program, the Soul Room, on the college FM
station. With Dave Brubeck playing in the background, I
would set up the next tune. I was known as Big D or Big Daddy
D. Okay, I .was a big man on campus. It was great.
The style of play I was taught there was new to me, though
I'd always played center and been concerned with defense.
Coach Haskins was very defense-oriented, and defense, frankly,
is hard to play. It requires commitment and intelligence. It's
much easier to dribble down the court, pass the ball, then take
a shot. Much easier. Dropping back quickly, assuming a defensive posture, playing aggressive man-on-man, which is what we
did, is demanding and difficult.
Before the start of that first season, something unusual took
place, something I'd never experienced before. We were attending a dinner in a downtown hotel ballroom with some 500
boosters, the usual kind of thing you do before the season, a
chance for the boosters to get close to you. We sat at a table up
front and listened to the coach speak. Coach Haskins was
apparently very pleased with us, which came as news to me. He
said, "Listen, these guys are special. This is a special team."
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The next year, I spent a season with the Phoenix Suns, then
1n 1969, began my play with the Harlem Globetrotters. In
1970, I signed with the American Basketball Association
Pittsburgh Condors and played with them two seasons, then
went to the Memphis Tams of the ABA, before returning to the
Harlem Globetrotters in 1973 for three years.
In both the NBA and ABA, I missed playing with the Texas
Western .team. I missed the camaraderie, the cohesiveness, the
self-sacrifice. I just didn't experience it at the next level. I did .
come away, however, with the firm belief that, if the NCM
championship team had a seven foot center, it would be good
enough to win it all in the NBA. Coach Haskins was certainly
. good enough to have won at that level as well.
My years with the Globetrotters were the most enjoyable of ..
my career. I played with Meadowlark Lemon and Curly Neal.
This was a gre.at experience, because for once I was trying to
make people happy, to see smiling faces in the crowd. It was
because of my play with the Globetrotters that I met the president face to face.
Though Coach Haskins had, from time to time, regretted
the turmoil that. surrounded that win, I personally never have.
I'd prepared myself all my life to be on the public stage, and
playing on ,the team that won the NCAA basketball championship put me ·there. All that work, for all those years, had been
to that end.
So many lies have been told about us, for so many years,
please allow met~ set the record straight. We all went on to live
fine lives:
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