Glory Road (Blu-ray)

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There's a scene in "Glory Road" where black students at the University of Kentucky are huddled around a television set in a dorm room, secretly rooting for the Wildcats' opponent to win the NCAA Division-I championship game. Why? Because Texas Western basketball coach Don Haskins decided to make a statement against racism by benching his white players and playing five black starters and two black subs against Adolph Rupp's all-white team.

We may never know if the UK dorm scene was based on fact, the way that a great deal of the film was, but this much is certain: all across the country, people who normally didn't care two free throws about the sport that James C. Naismith invented in 1891 were suddenly on the edge of their seats. It was the NCAA version of Jesse Owens at the 1936 summer Olympics.

Like "Hoosiers," this Jerry Bruckheimer film is a David and Goliath sports saga that holds just as much suspense and interest no matter how many times you watch it. That says something about the story, the writing, and certainly the performances. It may be a cliché, but it's a true cliché, and like the classic sports films, it works.

Josh Lucas is superbly convincing as a single-minded basketball coach who wants to make it on the big stage so bad that he'd agree to move with his wife and kids into a boys' dormitory and eat cafeteria food just to get the chance. Before getting the nod at Texas Western—which, incidentally, became the University of Texas-El Paso (UTEP) the year after he made history by taking the small mining school to the NCAA finals—he was a high school girls basketball coach. But by the time it was all over, Haskins ended up in the Hall of Fame, and his players were rewarded for all the racism that they had to endure throughout the season with a memory that would last a lifetime.

It wasn't a total surprise, though. In his very first NCAA game, Haskins started three "Negroes," which had the president who hired him and the school's biggest alumni donor starting to squirm. That was nothing compared to the taunts, the threats, the vandalism and the violence. And since black players hadn't been recruited or included on teams in the South, it was also no picnic trying to get the whites and blacks on the Miners to accept each other. All of which is to say that there's plenty of drama here apart from the usual sports-stage fare. Thankfully, there are also moments of comic relief. Much of the fun even comes before any of the balls start to bounce. As Haskins (Lucas) and his assistants go on the recruiting trail to convince stars on the playground, the YMCA's, steel-mill pick-up games, and high school leagues that they should come to Texas ("To get lynched?"), there's plenty of comedy.

First-time director James Gartner enlisted some actors with roundball experience, which adds to the realism. Damaine Radcliff, Schin A.S. Kerr, Al Shearer, Mehcad Brooks, Alphonso McAuley, Sam Jones III, and Derek Luke shine as the "colored" players—a term which, used by Haskins' assistant coach trying to recruit the New York standouts, ends up getting him stripped of his clothes and stranded in an unfamiliar neighborhood. But Austin Nichols also brings an appropriate intensity to the part of Jerry Armstrong, the ostensible leader of the white players who, for the first time, find themselves not only forced to accept black players on the team, but to take a back seat to them as well.

There's plenty of life in the banter and player shenanigans, and just as much drama in pockets of prejudicial behavior that the players encountered throughout the season. But once Haskins and his players took a stand, other schools followed to end discrimination on the basketball court. Two years after the Miners appeared in the national finals with a record identical to Kentucky's 27-1 mark, I attended Utah State, which played UTEP in basketball, and there wasn't so much as a blink or a question mark attached to black players. We're told in the film's postscript that even the legendary-but-curmudgeonly Rupp (played with uncanny mimickry by Jon Voight) would himself recruit Kentucky's first black player before he stepped down as coach.