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Catching Up With . . .
Harry Flournoy, Texas Western
forward
March 28,
1966
Posted: Tue March 31, 1998
As Texas
Western's
all-black starting five prepared to
take on Adolph Rupp's all-white
Kentucky team in the 1966 NCAA basketball championship game
in College Park, Md., Harry Flournoy and his Miners
teammates knew they had a chance to change the face of the
sport. They knew that no team with five black starters had
ever won an NCAA title;
they also knew that the legendary Rupp, who was going for
his fifth national championship, refused to recruit black
players. A few hours before tip-off, a visibly upset Miners
coach Don Haskins told his players he'd just heard Rupp vow
that "no five
blacks are going
to beat Kentucky." "From that point on,"
Flournoy says, "Kentucky had as much chance of winning
that game as a snowball had of surviving in
hell."
Texas Western (now UTEP), led by the disruptive defense of
Willie Worsley and the scoring of Bobby Joe Hill, who
finished with 20 points, grabbed the lead midway through
the first half and won 72-65. Though he scored just two
points in six minutes
before twisting his left knee, Flournoy, a
6'5" forward, was shown on the cover of the next
week's
SI grabbing one of his two rebounds, from Wildcats
All-America Pat Riley. "Kentucky was playing for a
commemorative wristwatch and the right to say they were
national champions," says Flournoy, who averaged 8.3
points and 10.7 rebounds that season. "We
were out to prove that it didn't matter what color a person's
skin
was."
Flournoy had already experienced racism on the court at
Emerson High, the predominantly white high school he
attended in Gary, Ind. "All the best players on the
team were black, but there was this unspoken rule that no
more than three blacks could play
at once," says Flournoy. "It was a bad situation,
but that's the way things were in those
days."
These days Flournoy, now 54, is a sales representative for
a bakery based in Los Angeles and lives in Lakewood,
Calif., with his wife, Yvette. He no longer plays
basketball, but he follows
UTEP and the local college teams on TV and, every now and then,
especially during March Madness, reflects on what he and his
teammates accomplished. "I wonder what college ball
might be like if we hadn't won that game," says
Flournoy. "A lot of people don't realize what it was
like for black players. But now I see so
many players disrespecting the game—trash talking,
mouthing off to officials and coaches, and showboating.
Sometimes I can't even watch because they are undoing
things we worked so hard
for."
—by B.J.
Schecter
Cover photograph by James Drake
Issue date: April 6, 1998
Past Editions of Catching Up With...
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