Glory Road features a lot of what you'd expect from a sports movie. Courtesy Disney

By Kelvin C. Bias, SI.com

Spoiler Alert: If you don't want to know how producer Jerry Bruckheimer's latest opus, Glory Road, ends, stop reading now.

Texas Western wins the 1966 NCAA basketball championship under the tutelage of Hall of Fame basketball coach Don Haskins (played by actor Josh Lucas of Sweet Home Alabama fame), with five black players in its starting lineup. There, it's been said. Sorry if that ruins the film for you.

Anyone who is surprised by that admission is missing the open lay-up from the sports film coach's playbook. The inherent problem of nearly all Hollywood sports movies -- and Glory Road is no exception -- is that we know the team (regardless of sport) we have been following for nearly two hours is going to win.  We know the team will break curfew rules, or some facsimile thereof, and get punished for it. We know there will be team dissension, and we know there will be a final confrontation against a formidable opponent (in this case an all-white Kentucky team coached by the prosthetic-nose visage of Jon Voight as Adolph Rupp and led by Miami Heat coach Pat Riley).

None of these things are new; these are classic sports movie staples. However, the primary audience for this film -- 18-34-year-old male basketball fans, be they black or white -- was born after 1966. Glory Road makes a point of setting the period in perspective through racial incidents and epithets, including one particularly gruesome sight of blood smeared on the Texas Western players hotel room walls during a road trip to East Texas.

These are the off-the-court obstacles that the Texas Western (now known as UTEP) players had to overcome. What the filmmakers have to overcome is the ennui of knowing Texas Western will succeed in the end. This is where the classic sports movie gambit rears its head. In any historical movie, and more often in historical sports movies, liberties are taken for dramatic effect.

Glory Road (directed by James Gartner) portrays Haskins being hired in mid-1965, straight from coaching a Texas high school girls team. Truth is, he was hired in 1961 and won the NCAA title in his fifth season at the school, not his first, and had overseen boys and girls teams at several high schools. Also, several of the black players portrayed in the film were recruited by Haskins before 1965. But, of course, it's infinitely more dramatic if Haskins wins the title in his first season at the school and has to send a white assistant coach to the South Bronx to look for some "colored" players the summer before the Miners win the title.

If you blink during this early part of the film, you'll miss the cameo appearance by the real-life Haskins, who appears as a gas station attendant while his on-screen counterpart, Lucas, is talking to said assistant in New York City via telephone. (And if you leave the theater before the credits finish, you'll miss the modern-day interviews with Haskins, Riley and some of the original Texas Western players).There is one other glaring inaccuracy -- at least from this viewer's standpoint: Haskins never appeared on the cover of Sports Illustrated. However, the magazine did give the filmmakers permission to use a faux cover for the film.

Permission is really what Glory Road, which opens Friday, is about. The black players simply want permission to play major Division 1 basketball. And even though we know the team will win the title, it's the road to that moment that is exciting. Because everybody roots for the underdog, Hollywood will continue to make the inspirational sports movie, cliches, liberties and all. Cliches are bad, but as actor Al Shearer, who plays Nevil Shed, tries to explain to one of his white teammates, Jerry Armstrong (Austin Nichols): "Bad is good."

While it's far from a slam dunk, Glory Road should strike a cord with its core audience: the future Bobby Joe Hills, David Lattins, Harry Flournoys, Willie Worsleys, Nevil Sheds, Willie Cagers and Jerry Armstrongs.