UTEP wrote history when they beat an all white Kentucky team with an all black UTEP team

In the year 1965–66, African American basketballers wrote their name on the history book when Hall of Fame coach Don Haskins coached Texas Western Miners basketball team, which represented Texas Western College, now called the University of Texas-El Paso (UTEP), and then.

It was black against the white night, and the team made history by winning the national championship in 1966, not just that, also becoming the first team with an all-black starting lineup to do so. They defeated Kentucky, Kentucky at that time was at that time an all-white program until 1969.

The scores were 72–65 in the historic championship game. The game was played on a Saturday, March 19, at Cole Field House on the University of Maryland campus in College Park, a suburb of Washington D.C. Kentucky and Texas Western had never played before that day.

Many closed doors of the past soon opened, and a trickle of black players to many of the top programs eventually turned into a gusher. College basketball would never be the same after that victory. No one understood the moment better, or quicker than the players themselves, remembering the hard journeys they had taken to get there.

The team was inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in 2007, and it inspired the book and film Glory Road.