Jerry Bruckheimer does to college basketball what his Remember the Titans did for high school football with Glory Road.  In other words, Road is the true(ish) story of a Vietnam-era sub-Mason-Dixon Line sports team played by and for Crackers, and the topsy-turvy struggle they must all undergo when the Blacks come and make them all feel intermittently uncomfortable and angry.  So, basically, aside from a thicker coat of Disneyfication, the only thing that’s different is the shape of the ball.

Don Haskins (Josh Lucas) makes the leap from coaching high school girls to the Big Time: Division I hardwood at Texas Western University in El Paso, Texas in 1967.  Sure, the team is in rough shape, and the court is in shambles (its Louisiana stand-in has since been destroyed by Hurricane Katrina), but the no-nonsense Haskins shouldn’t have any trouble rolling up his sleeves and getting attention in a state where football is king.  Right?

The aforementioned attention comes when Haskins decides to recruit Black players.  This was, mind you, happening in Texas, at a time when there wasn’t one single Black starter in the ACC, the SEC, or the SWC, and when unwritten rules existed about when you could and couldn’t use a black player (one at home, three if you’re losing, etc).  Hearing locals throw around terms like “niggerball” and insisting that Black players, “can jump, but they can’t lead,” might sound shocking these days, but back in the quaint mid-‘60s Deep South, it was commonplace.

The rest of the film plays out just as you would expect it to (especially if you’re familiar with college basketball history).  Haskins runs into trouble with the school’s supporters, and his new players have trouble fitting in with the holdovers from the previous year.  There’s strain on Haskins’ family.  And then, using my favorite sports flick cliché of all, we’re shown details of the team’s first two games before a montage whips us through the rest of the season.  Man, it just doesn’t get any better than that.

Clichés in sports flicks is one thing – even the great Friday Night Lights couldn’t avoid the apparently unavoidable trappings – but if you’re looking for even a hint of subtlety in Road, you’re in the wrong neighborhood, brother (otherwise, what would Trevor Rabin’s score be doing here?).  The only character given the slightest bit of depth is Haskins, as Lucas is able to partially shed the “aw, shucks” persona honed in movies like Sweet Home Alabama.  Everyone else is a caricature, including his Black players, who are so one-dimensional, they become the Seven Dwarves of Color Barrier-Breaking College Basketball.  There’s the short one, the surly one, the horny one, the one with heart trouble, and so on.  On the plus side, Derek Luke, for the second time in as many roles, gets to play a brash star of a West Texas sports team named either Bobby or Booby.  And that’s just plain weird.

I don’t want to give anything away here, but the final game pits Texas Western against Kentucky, a team coached by what appears to be a beefier, more racist H. Ross Perot (played by Jon Voight).  In that skirmish, Haskins screams at his team to “slow it down,” but we’re never shown any evidence that the pace of the game is changed one bit.  This shouldn’t come as much of a surprise, considering Road is the directorial debut of James Gartner, an award-winning creator of television commercials.  If this leaves you wondering why the TV ads for Road trumpet Gartner’s name like we’re supposed to know who he is, you’re not alone.  If you do manage to see this film, make sure you stick around for the closing credits, which contains interviews and clips from the real participants of the groundbreaking TWU squad.

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for racial issues including violence and epithets, and momentary language