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Picture this: 1965. Five black basketball players. A crowd hurling racial slurs onto the court. Confederate flags waving in the stands. An all-white basketball team from Kentucky whose head coach is named Adolph.

It was an intimidating environment for these five players. The deck seemed to be unfairly stacked against them, but that's usually the way history records underdogs. And that's usually why myths bloom with time.

But this story is no myth. Glory Road, except for some dignified story-driven alterations, is an entirely true story, one that has contributed to the current state of the NBA, NCAA and basketball in general. In 1965, black athletes weren't playing college basketball, except for a player here and there -- never two on the same team at the same time.

Coach Don Haskins was coaching girls' teams when Texas Western (now the University of Texas in El Paso) approached him to lead its squad. On a shoestring budget he recruited the best players he could find, regardless of race. His journey took him behind factories and directly to the player's mothers. What he ended up with was a de-segregated basketball team unlike the world had ever seen.

James Gartner's racially charged basketball picture, in the same vein as Hoosiers and Remember the Titans, is a simple sports movie that doesn't glamorize the action, and manages to capture the racial climate on the young faces of its college-bound basketball players. Many sports movies already exist and many more will follow this one, but right here and right now Glory Road is a necessary and vital way to introduce a piece of history to young people, especially the families it is aimed at.

Like all sports movies, the coach is the keystone to the player's dreams and aspirations. Josh Lucas plays Coach Haskins, a gruff man with a bit of a belly and a way of yelling at his players, even after a magnificent win. Lucas gives him many of those annoying sports movie pep talks, and he acts unnaturally wooden courtside, but he also gives the firm coach a sense of direction within a school pressuring him to play his whites over his blacks. After all, people were telling him, whites were superior athletes.

As much as the coach pushes, though, the players are self-propelled by their own hearts. Their rooms are vandalized, one of them is beaten in a restroom and the vast majority of white society seems to pray for their failure, but they push on. One player breaks his nose and rather than quitting dons a catcher's mask to practice; "I won't be giving up today," he tells his coach.

Their spirit eventually leads them to the NCAA championship game, where Haskins plays five black starters to show the world that black players have a role in basketball. His message still rings clear today.

Concerning the film's accuracy ... I subscribe to Roger Ebert's theory: films are not the outlet for facts, but rather emotions. Do we get the comprehensive guide to Texas Western's basketball domination in 1966? No, but I'm sure a book exists somewhere that will get it right. The movie is for us to see the dread in a player's eyes when he first witnesses he's the victim of a racial attack.

So why the so-so rating? Because the film is by-the-numbers sports action. It's as if producer Jerry Bruckheimer transplanted the heart out of his Titans and sloppily stapled it on the sleeve of Glory Road. The basketball scenes are lifeless and flat, the coaching is simply Lucas yelling from the sidelines, and the relationship between the black and white teammates was a tad unbelievable.

Don't let this reflect on the story, though. The message Glory Road sends is important for people of all ages, and I hate to think that it won't get seen because the movie is mindless and somewhat dim in its delivery.