Basketball’s Jackie Robinson moment was more complex than it first appears
Kansas men’s basketball coach Bill Self employed a variety of strategies while securing the Jayhawks’ fourth national title earlier this month. Suffice to say, how many Black players he selected was not a talking point.
But six decades ago the composition of the team was a significant call for Loyola’s George Ireland. His decision to start four Black players not only proved the difference in the Ramblers’ 1963 NCAA title run; it became a moment similar to Jackie Robinson signing with the Dodgers 75 years ago – one of those decisions that led to a sport becoming more inclusive, and also helped fuel the civil rights movement across the US. And yet for as watershed an event as the Ramblers’ ’63 title was, it has long tarried in the shadow of a Texas Western team that won the 1966 NCAA title with fiveBlack starters – a David and Goliath matchup memorialized in the Jerry Bruckheimer classic Glory Road. Even recent members of the Ramblers basketball team didn’t know much more than the basics of the ’63 team’s quest – even as the story came roaring back to the fore during the Ramblers’ recent storybook run to the 2018 Final Four. “And we have relationships with those guys,” says Lucas Williamson, a co-captain on the 2021-22 Ramblers team. “Especially pre-Covid, they were always around – at practices, at games. We know them. But we just never really talked about the racial issues they had actually gone through.”
The CBS/Paramount+ documentary, The Loyola Project, reckons with the ’63 team’s hidden history. It mixes archival footage, graphic novelstyle reconstructions and interviews with members of the ’63 team (also: Sister Jean appears!) For the better part of an hour, the doc retraces the Ramblers’ journey to college basketball’s mountaintop – a pathway made especially fraught by the unwritten rule against playing more than two Black players at a time. Three was really pushing it.
Ireland’s decision to play four would seem to make him out to be a real White Shadow, a true ally in the struggle, while pioneering the high-pressure style that has become the standard across basketball. But the truth, director Patrick Creadon found, was far more complex. In hindsight Ireland’s choice to recruit Black players from the inner city appears less motivated by altruism than the desperation of being a coach on the hot seat. Despite the physical toll his fast-paced playing style exacted, Ireland ran the Ramblers into the ground, his habit of rarely substituting starters giving rise to the nickname ‘The Iron Five’. Even more disturbing was Ireland’s apathy for the well-being of his Black players off the court. They were used as props at Loyola’s all-white school dances, were boarded on the Black side of segregated New Orleans for one big road game and were compelled to suffer racially abusive crowds. Overall, Ireland barely lifted a finger to defend or protect the Black Ramblers against the prevailing ugliness of the day.
And in the rare instances Ireland did interfere, he was heavy handed. After Jerry Harkness, the team’s best player in the NCAA final, flagged a pair of threatening letters, Ireland began intercepting all the hate mail addressed to the Ramblers’ Black players – a noble act, notionally. But when the threats got too real, Ireland commandeered a security detail for his daughters, not his Black players. He also never returned any of that mail to the players, leading some to think that Ireland had made up the threat in a twisted attempt to motivate his team.
But the letters do indeed exist. Ireland’s daughter, Judy, holds them under lock and key. “She had three envelopes full,” Creadon says. “I saw probably 125 letters, but I have reason to believe there were probably 400 or 500, which included everything from flat out death threats to stuff signed KKK to the nword being thrown around constantly. It was awful.
“But what happened next was weird. I told the players I had seen the mail, and they said, ‘We want it. It’s our mail. We’re not kids anymore. We want to see it ourselves.’”
That started a year of back-andforth conversations between production and the Ireland family to release the mail, and ended with the family holding firm, even when Harkness died last year during the making of The Loyola Project. “It was always about, ‘Well, with all this George Floyd stuff going on and these crazy BLMers, if we release this mail now, who knows what could happen?’ And I just remember thinking, who are you defending here?” Creadon says.
Sadly, relatively little of this drama plays out on camera. But that’s not necessarily to the detriment of The Loyola Project. The doc does a good job to show the actual allies the Ramblers had on their side – not least the all-white Mississippi State basketball team, who flouted their governor’s ban against playing integrated opponents and went on to lose to Loyola in the second round of the NCAA Tournament (aka The Game of Change). And Creadon smartly casts aside his aesthetic pride and includes snippets of a Zoom call between members of the ’63 squad and the recent team, which was revelatory to both sides. “It was the smaller things that really shocked us,” says Williamson, who majored in journalism. “Like Ireland [displaying] the national championship trophy at a barbershop that they couldn’t get into. Or us being absolutely celebrated on campus for making the Final Four and being treated like absolute royalty – but them feeling like they’re invisible, even after they won. Jerry couldn’t even get an apartment in Rogers Park.”
But Creadon and his team’s real masterstroke was turning their film over to Williamson to provide narration and contribute some writing. “We realised the more Lucas weighed in on the story, the more valuable his perspective is,” Creadon says. “He’s basically walking in the same shoes as Jerry Harkness.”
“I was hesitant at first,” Williamson says of joining The Loyola Project. “I knew the story – not as well as I do now, but I knew how serious it was. It meant a lot to me, and I didn’t want to be the one to mess it up.”
What Williamson wound up doing was bringing a righteous degree of skepticism to a fraught chapter of history that could have easily been spun into yet another whitewashed civil rights fairytale. As much as it smarts that it took this long for the story of the ’63 Ramblers’ Jackie Robinson moment to be told in full, The Loyola Project at least can say it told it the right way – with insight and empathy in equal depth.
The Loyola Project is available to stream now.