"Glory Road," which opened in theaters last week, is an amazing film about the 1960s, when a new era in American athletics began. It is a story that has waited too long to be told.

In 1965 a small-town Texas basketball coach for a girl's high school team was hired to coach men's Division I basketball for a small west Texas college in El Paso, Texas Western College (renamed the University of Texas at El Paso in 1967). The school had so little funding that the coach, Don Haskins (Josh Lucas), and his family had to live in the men's dorm.

Haskins, a former collegiate basketball player, needed to put a team together, but again without much of a budget. That year, Texas Western didn't have an African American player. So that, taken with almost no money, led Haskins to recruit from the inner city courts where kids could really play ball but had little chance at getting a college education. He or his assistant, Moe (Evan Jones) visited Detroit, the South Bronx and Gary, Indiana, and managed to recruit seven African Americans. He had to win over the mothers most of all --- and he did.

The dean was suspicious that its boosters would not continue their support of the college, yet in the end they did. Haskins worked the new team members that included Bobby Joe Hill (Derek Luke), Harry Flournoy (Mehcad Brooks) and Nevil Shed (Al Shearer), David Lattin (Schin A.S. Kerr) and others. Among the Anglo players was Jerry Armstrong (Austin Nichols), who played defense and was responsible for many of the team's 27-1 record.

The Miners reached the NCAA Championships in 1966, playing against the University of Kentucky Wildcats, also at 27-1. At almost the last minute, Haskins decided to start with five African American players, and chose the other two as back up. He wanted to win. And they did, beating the storied Kentucky program (until then, college basketball's most dominant).

"Glory Road" could have been your typical feel-good sports movie --- the kind based on a true story and serve as a metaphor for life; the kind rated B.K. (bring Kleenex) that we love and have seen over and over, like "Rudy" and "Hoosiers." But though "Glory Road" is ultimately about the triumph of the human spirit on the court and off, it's also a slice of American history during the Civil Rights era when peaceful integration was a far off dream.

At the recent press junket, prodigious producer Jerry Bruckheimer (the "CSI" TV franchise and numerous films) told those of us from faith-based publications and online journals that there was even more to the story than made it into the film. Don Haskins played high school basketball with his best friend, an African American, when they were growing up in Oklahoma. Haskins was recruited to play college ball, but not his friend who was the better player; Haskins never forgot that he got a college education, but his friend did not.

"As filmmakers," Bruckheimer said, "we are in the transportation business; we're here to give you a great ride." Bruckheimer also said that he believes that athletics and music have done more for civil rights in this country than any march ever did.

John Voight, who portrayed legendary Kentucky coach Adolf Rupp, studied television footage of Rupp and read his speeches from which the brief dialogue he utters in the film is taken. Voight told us that Rupp was always open to learning; he was born poor, came up the hard way and did not believe in spoiling his players.

Contrary to the fears of Kentucky fans that Rupp would be portrayed as a racist in the film, the writers told us that they discovered nothing in their research that pointed to Rupp as a racist. But he clearly had little respect for the upstart Haskins and his team, and dissed him at the press conference before the championship game. Conversely, the film depicts the true account of how Rupp's wife Esther (Catherine McGoohan) befriended Mary Haskins (Emily Deschanel) at a party where she was being badly snubbed.

The actors who played the Texas Western players in the film were either actors who could play or players who could act. Mehcad Brooks, who plays Harry Flournoy (and Alfre Woodard's son on "Desperate Housewives"), comes from Texas and he said that the story of the Texas Miners was a bedtime story for him growing up.

Brooks said that they all had to go to a two-week basketball training camp to get ready for the film, and it was like "a descent into hell." The real Don Haskins even came one day, Al Shearer added, learned which characters they were playing, and then coached them for two hours --- calling them by the names of their characters. Brooks said playing the part made him realize what it was like in the 1960s when other ballplayers did not "reciprocate your existence."

There are two scenes in the film where the team is viciously treated because of the black players. Did this really happen?

"We had from 50-100 racial incidents to work from," said co-writer Bettina Gilois who, like writing partner Chris Cleveland, is from the greater El Paso area who grew up hearing the story of Coach Haskins and his Miners. "Each player had things done to him, so we had to find a way to show the truth of what happened in a two-hour movie. We decided to condense all the incidents into these two. So no, these exact incidents didn't happen, but others, some very serious, actually did. Plus there were the death threats and hate mail."

First-time feature director James Gartner and the writers stated that 80 percent of the film is "factual," but all of it is true. The film has a deliberately gritty look to it, unlike the classic "Hoosiers" or even Bruckheimer's "Remember the Titans." After seeing the film, Haskins called Gartner and told him how pleased he was with how the film turned out, at how accurate it is.

Some of the incidents, like when the coach called David Lattin's mom to come and get him to study, actually happened. One player (it may have been Lattin, I cannot recall) started fainting; they discovered he had an enlarged heart. The coach didn't want him to play, but his mother came and interceded for him. In actual fact, he also had two small strokes that same year.

Why did Haskins play all his African American team members that day? Was it a basketball decision or a political statement? Josh Lucas, who plays Haskins in the film, said it was probably both, plus Haskins' anger at how his best friend was not given a chance to play college ball, or obtain a college education.

"Haskins was a complex character," said Lucas. "He was charismatic but he also had rage. I think he's more complex and difficult than Bobby Knight." By not playing the white player, Armstrong, Haskins showed what he was willing to risk --- and believe in --- to win.

Lucas also said that, within thee weeks of the Miners' championship win, 100 percent the country's colleges and universities began recruiting African American players.

I was a teenager in 1965. Between the escalation of the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights Movement, I don't remember much else that made news --- and certainly not about basketball and civil rights. "Glory Road," then, is the history of a great struggle that young people know little about, a time in American history when social justice for African Americans was a dream waiting to begin to come true.

(We were told that, after one of the screenings in El Paso, a mother wrote to say thank you because her 10-year-old son could not believe that black people were treated that way; the film had given her a chance to sit down and talk to him about racism and its effects on people and society.)

Thankfully there are none of the usual clichés here. The film plays humor, heart, grit, courage, perseverance, determination and self-sacrifice against racism very well; I got a little teary a few times. But it is not manipulative like most feel-good movies are; in fact, this is not a pretty film --- don't forget that. It is a true story about real people with basketball as the backdrop, and it will inspire you.