Glory Road

HOOSIERS is the greatest movie ever made. Consequently, I've seen it about 30 times, and, in fact, just watched it a few weeks ago. Last night I watched Glory Road.

The parallels are obvious -- both are basketball-themed movies about underdog teams with a fairly predictable conclusion. Both are based on true stories, but each takes a fair number of liberties for dramatic and other purposes. While I'm sure that Jerry Bruckenheimer (producer) and James Gartner (director) had seen HOOSIERS, I'm equally sure they endeavored to make their own movie. Nonetheless, it was difficult to watch Glory Road and not see countless cinemagraphic similarities between the two. Maybe unavoidable, but hard to miss.

Glory Road is a good enough movie -- the drama is there, of course, and I was pleasantly surprised that there was literally no profanity (the PG rating is due to the racial themes and related scenes). It did, however, have a few disappointments --

(1) In one of the early games, the team is struggling and the players beg their coach to let them play "their game" -- finally, the coach gives in, and the team wins. All's well that ends well, but Coach Norman Dale would have never done this.

(2) Even allowing a reasonable amount of license, Glory Road takes a number that are unnecessary and could have been easily avoided -- making one wonder if their intent was to be misleading. The "Goofs" list from IMDB highlights several outright mistakes about logos, team names, conferences, and players, but most notably are the liberties taken with Coach Haskins' biography -- 1.) Haskins didn't come to Texas Western directly from being a high school girl's coach 2.) the team was already integrated before he got there 3.) the group of black players he recruited weren't part of the same class 4.) the team didn't win a national championship until Haskins' fourth year at the school 5.) Haskins started coaching there in 1961, not 1965.

I'm quite sure they could have built a pretty good screenplay around the actual facts, so I'm puzzled as to why they made these rather significant changes. The skeptic in me wonders if the filmakers were traying to make the racial crisis in west Texas in 1965 worse than it really was, but I don't know why they would have to do that.

Hogan's Heroes & the Holocaust

This article has been around for awhile (April 2000) but HH junkies might be interested:

http://www.geocities.com/lrampey/hogan.htm

Endorsed by Robert Clary (Cpl. LeBeau), a Holocaust survivor and a pretty good actor.

More Broadway

I scanned his bio from the 2002 Red Sox Media Guide (the most recent I have).


The Boston Globe has another obituary.

Also the NY Times.

Broadway Charlie Wagner (1912-2006)

Longtime Red Sox consultant and Pennsylvania native "Broadway" Charlie Wagner has died -- Boston Globe.

Ironically, Wagner had just been honored at a Reading (PA) Phillies (AA) game that night, where the press box at First Energy Stadium is named in his honor.

One report I heard was that he was found in his car outside the stadium after the game. The R-Phils staged a tribute for him the following night.

He was one of those guys who appeared in the Red Sox media guide year after year. I stopped collecting media guides in 2002 (it got too expensive to keep up), but he was still there in uniform as a consultant.

A Wikipedia report is here. RIP, Broadway.

8/30/06 also saw the passing of actor Glenn Ford (I always enjoyed his performance in Imitation General), and George Johnson, one of the few remaining WWI veterans.