Nevil Shed says his teammates were all so focused on playing basketball that they never thought about social impact.
They were 22-year-olds playing for Texas Western, making an improbable run to the NCAA national championship game.
It wasn’t until Shed looked around the arena that the realization hit him. The crowd was white. The media members were white. The referees were white. The opponents, the University of Kentucky, were all white.
Texas Western’s starting five was all black.
“I was a fly in a bottle of buttermilk,” he said.
On March 19, 1966, Shed and the Miners faced Kentucky, a team that had already won four championships under legendary coach Adolph Rupp.
The moments from that night shaped the rest of Shed’s life.
Texas Western won 72-65 to claim the national championship. All seven Texas Western players who checked into the game were black, and it was the first team to win a national championship with an all African-American starting lineup.
Miners coach Don Haskins told the team before the game that he heard Rupp said, "No five blacks are going to beat Kentucky."
Early on, Shed was frustrated by some racial taunts coming from the crowd at Maryland’s Cole Field House. He turned to Haskins, who snapped back.
“Is that who you really are?” Shed said Haskins shouted. “You get out there and show them who you really are. Show them what is your character all about.”
Shed hit a free throw that gave Texas Western a 10-9 lead, and the Miners never trailed again.
Shed remembers seeing his parents celebrating in the stands. Shed grew up in The Bronx, and the final was the first game his father saw him play in person for the Miners.
This year’s March Madness marks the 50th anniversary of that game. It has been chronicled in many books, landed the team in the Basketball Hall of Fame and made Shed a character in “Glory Road,” a Disney movie based on the team.
“It’s amazing to think that it’s been 50 years,” Shed said. “We were just a bunch of kids playing basketball.”
Shed is 72 now. He’s spending the next month with his old teammates on reunion tours, anniversary celebrations and commemorative documentaries. He recently went back to Cole Field House, the site of the championship game, and will be at this year’s NCAA Final Four in Houston. Eleven of the 12 players on the team are still alive – guard Bobby Joe Hill died in 2002 and coach Don Haskins died in 2008.
After a knee injury cut Shed’s career short before he played in an NBA game, he went on to coach at UTSA and has been the director of Spurs Basketball Camps for 30 years. Shed, who also works as a motivational speaker, gives aspiring basketball players lessons on the game with his booming voice that would make Haskins proud.
He tells the elementary school-aged kids in one Spurs Camp about will, determination and hard work, but one thing Shed does not mention is race.
“They don’t know what segregation means yet,” Shed said. “They’re all sitting together, regardless of race or gender. They’re all friends. We could learn a lot from children.”
Shed’s first experience with segregation was when he spent his freshman year at North Carolina A&T before going to Texas Western.
“I wasn’t accustomed to sitting on the back of the bus, having white and colored water fountains on going to the balcony at a movie and the back entrance of a restaurant,” Shed said. “I wasn’t having it, so I went home.”
Haskins offered him a scholarship to go to Texas Western, and Shed accepted even though he said all he knew of Texas at the time was “oil wells and cows.”
Shed found that Texas Western (now the University of Texas at El Paso) was less cows, more cactus and mountains. The racial discord he experienced in North Carolina was nowhere to be found in El Paso. And there was a coach who had no problem starting five black players.
The 1965-66 season was Shed’s junior year, and the Miners won their first 23 games of the season before a loss against Seattle. Shed was the tallest player on the team at 6-foot-8, and played such tight defense that he was nicknamed “The Shadow.”
In the NCAA tournament, the team defeated Kansas in double overtime to reach the Final Four, and knocked out Utah in the Semifinal.
Up next was Kentucky, which had an All-American forward in Pat Riley. The game was a pivotal moment in college basketball.
Three years later, Kentucky signed its first black player.
“We played basketball in an era when a lot of negative situations were going on,” Shed said. “The Vietnam War, the civil rights movement, assassinations. I think people were ready to see a team like ours overcome the odds.”
Time has turned the team into legend, but it didn’t seem like it would head that way in 1966.
Shed held guard Willie Worsley on his shoulders as Worsley cut down the nets. Nobody brought out a ladder for the team, so Shed improvised and picked up his teammate.
Hate mail continued to flow in to Haskins’ office and the team didn’t get their customary invite on “The Ed Sullivan Show.” Shed said more than 10 years passed before they received championship rings.
The Miners didn’t get a chance to meet the President until 2006, when they watched a screening of “Glory Road” with George W. Bush.
“We look back on those things and say ‘a long time coming, but right on time,’” Shed said. “Who would ever think that team would be inducted into the Naismith Hall of Fame?”
They were inducted in 2007.
Spurs guard Kyle Anderson grew up in New Jersey, not far from Shed’s hometown in The Bronx. Anderson was in middle school when he first heard about Shed while watching “Glory Road.” Now, Anderson and Shed will stand together at Spurs camps as they speak to a new generation of basketball players.
“That team did a lot for the game,” Anderson said. “They were pioneers, paving the way for everybody to be able to play together. They had to take risks so my generation wouldn’t have to go through that kind of discrimination.”
Shed feels the impact of “Glory Road” through his seven children, who could apply to any college and were never forced to walk into a building through the back door. One of his daughters, Courtney, is a doctor.
“We are living examples,” Shed said. “We are still here, 50 years later, and we’re able to share our story so that things keep getting better.”
lchan@attcenter.com
Twitter:@lornechan