Glory Road is like about 20 sports films you’ve seen since  Hoosiers, most of them about basketball. A man takes a coaching job not because it ays more but because it offers a chance to make a name for himself. His players are troubled and he is as much a life teacher as a coach, giving them “tough love” when it comes to their classes. In the course of a season he battles both the school’s endowers and his own wife. Against impossible odds he takes the team to the state championship (or the Olympics. Or the World Series) and with only seconds left in the last quarter of the final game pull out victory from the jaws of defeat. His wife and the school supporters both come around. All this happens to a non-stop soundtrack of contemporary pop hits.

That Glory Road is fundamentally true makes it no less cornball, and that it makes a bold, if laggard, statement about racism in the 1960s only gives it more opportunities to extrude unearned emotional high points. The film, directed by James Gartner (his first feature after making a short subject called The Last Leaf) and credited to writers Chris Cleveland and Bettina Gilois (the first script, it appears, for each), falls into that broad catagory of film from Hollywood’s vast liberal conscience. As George Clooney said in his Oscar acceptance speech, Hollywood has been out of step with the nation by among other things encouraging equal rights when the rest of the nation practiced easy racism, a laudable stance. And it is still advocating equal rights with the same fervent if old fashioned determination. One suspects, however, that the five African American starters for the 1966 Texas Western team strike the overwhelmingly white producers of Hollywood’s films as “better” Negros that the bejewelled, gun-toting hip hop ganstars of their contemporary imagination and Crash.

The likable Josh Lucas, a blend of Paul Newman and Kevin Costner with a bit of Peter Coyote’s voice thrown in, plays the real life Don Haskins, who did indeed do all the things the movie says he did. Emily Deschanel (Bones) has the traditonal role of the skeptical wife, and one assumes that that is painfully true. The climax of the film, a televised match with the University of Kentucky for the NCAA title, is also as previously describe, with not even a subtle variation it fits right into the Disney template.

As the credits roll, the real players are shown, now in their dotage, remembering those times, and the viewer realizes that despite the admirable dedication to accuracy of the filmmakers, a better movie along the lines of When We Were Kings might have been forged from this documentary footage.

Glory Road comes to the screen in a fine wide screen trasnfer (2.35:1,enhanced; there is also a full frame release, and a UMD edition) and with DD 5.1 with French and Spanish language tracks and English, French, and Spanish subtitles. Gartner’s audio commentary track is informative, as is the yak track with the two writers, an option I would like to encourage the DVD publishers to continue. In addition there are four deleted scenes (about seven minutes), a profile of the real Haskins (12:36) and a study of his training techniques (4:26), more credit interviews with survivors (22:00), a music video with co-star Alicia Keys (2:00), and trailers for recent or forthcoming Disney releases. Glory Road hit the street on June 6 2006, retailing for $29.95.

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