03/21/2026
A native Houstonian from Worthing High School was a member of that team. What an amazing feat.
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Don Haskins got 40,000 pieces of hate mail after his team won the national title. He never told his players. They didn't find out for years.
There was no ladder.
On the night of March 19, 1966, inside Cole Field House on the campus of the University of Maryland in College Park, five Black men from a school most of the country had never heard of beat the number one team in America for the national championship.
The final score was 72 to 65.
When the buzzer sounded, the tradition was simple and understood by everyone in the building. The winning team cuts down the net.
But when the Texas Western Miners looked around for a ladder, there was nothing. No ladder, no chair, no table, no stepstool.
Every championship team before them had been given something to stand on. This one was not.
Nevil Shed, a six-foot-eight forward from the Bronx, did not wait for what was not coming. He hoisted five-foot-six Willie Worsley onto his shoulders, and Worsley reached up and began cutting the net with whatever blade they could find between them.
The photograph of that moment ended up on a Wheaties box decades later. Shed joked about it for years, saying he wished they had cropped him out.
He said the photo just shows some guy holding Willie up.
But what the photograph really shows is two Black men making their own ladder because nobody was going to build one for them.
That is the story of the 1966 NCAA championship, not just the game or the score or the five Black starters. The missing ladder.
Texas Western College sat on the far western tip of Texas, in El Paso, a city where the desert meets the Mexican border. The school was small, underfunded, and had only joined the NCAA three years earlier.
Don Haskins was thirty-six years old and had been coaching there since 1961. He was white, from Oklahoma, and had played under the legendary Henry Iba at Oklahoma A&M.
Haskins recruited the way he played, which was without sentiment. He wanted the best players he could get, and in the 1960s, the best players who were being overlooked by the major programs were Black.
Three of his key players, Worsley, Shed, and Willie Cager, came from the same neighborhood in the Bronx. Bobby Joe Hill came from Detroit, David Lattin from Houston, and Harry Flournoy and Orsten Artis from Gary, Indiana.
These were not players who had been courted by the elite programs of the South. The Southeastern Conference would not admit its first Black basketball player until 1967, a full year after this game.
Haskins did not recruit these young men to make a statement. He said later that he was simply playing his best players, and they happened to be Black.
For many of the players, El Paso was their first time in the South. But the border city surprised them.
Worsley said the Mexican community embraced them warmly. They gave him the nickname Chico, probably because he was short enough to look some of them in the eye.
The Miners went 27 and 1 in the regular season, losing only a road game at Seattle by two points. They won their games by an average of more than fifteen points.
In the NCAA tournament, they beat Oklahoma City, then Cincinnati in overtime, then Kansas in double overtime, then Utah in the national semifinals. Each win moved them closer to something the country was not ready to see.
Their opponent in the championship game was the University of Kentucky, ranked number one in the nation. Kentucky had won four national titles and was coached by Adolph Rupp, who had been running the program since 1930.
Rupp's roster was all white. It had been widely reported that he opposed recruiting Black players, and he would not sign a Black player to a scholarship until 1969.
Rupp's team that year was called "Rupp's Runts" because no player stood taller than six-foot-five. They were disciplined, fast, and favored to win.
The championship was played before 14,253 fans. The crowd was overwhelmingly white.
Worsley later said that when the Miners walked out onto the court, they looked like flies in a barrel of buttermilk. Confederate flags were visible in the stands.
Haskins made a last-minute change to his starting lineup, replacing the six-foot-eight Shed with the five-foot-nine Worsley, going with a three-guard attack to match Kentucky's speed. Worsley was stunned because when Haskins said the name Willie, Worsley thought he meant Willie Cager.
Worsley later admitted his first thought was not about strategy. He said his first thought was that everyone from New York was going to see him on TV.
The game opened with a statement that required no words. On the Miners' second possession, David Lattin took a pass from Bobby Joe Hill and threw down a dunk directly over Kentucky's Pat Riley.
Hill was the hero. The five-foot-ten junior from Detroit scored twenty points and made back-to-back steals off Kentucky's Tommy Kron and Louie Dampier early in the first half, converting both into layups that gave Texas Western a lead they would never fully surrender.
Kentucky closed to within a single point early in the second half. Every team that had trailed Rupp's squad all season had eventually broken under the weight of that Kentucky tradition.
The Miners did not break. They answered with a run and held on, winning 72 to 65, finishing the year 28 and 1.
And then there was no ladder.
There was no Ed Sullivan Show invitation either, even though it was customary for the national champion to appear on the show. Texas Western was never asked.
Don Haskins did not tell his players about the mail. After the game, more than 40,000 pieces of hate mail arrived at the university, along with more than a dozen death threats directed at the coach personally.
He carried that alone. The players did not learn the full scope of it until years later.
Only one of the seven Black players on the roster, David Lattin, ever played in the NBA. Bobby Joe Hill, the hero of the championship game, stayed in El Paso after his playing days and worked for El Paso Natural Gas until he died of a heart attack in 2002 at age fifty-nine.
The championship jerseys were nearly thrown in the garbage before a graduate assistant named Danny Whitlock rescued them. For years afterward, he and his friends wore them for pickup games and yard work, and all of them were eventually lost or destroyed except one.
That single surviving jersey, Willie Worsley's number 24, was later sold at auction.
It took years for the players to understand what they had done. Shed once told a reporter that when they walked around with the championship medal, they were just happy, but Haskins was the one carrying a different brand, the mark of a white man who had let five Black players beat the best team in the country.
The moment of recognition came slowly and in pieces. Shed said he was coaching at the University of Wyoming years later when a football player walked up and read the names off his championship ring: Bobby Joe Hill, Big Daddy Lattin, Nevil Shed.
The player said he just wanted to say thank you because his father had been a great football player who could never go to a big school because of his skin. He told Shed that what that team did in 1966 opened the doors so that people like him, if qualified, could walk through.
In 2006, the story was made into a Disney film called Glory Road. The following year, the entire 1966 team was inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame.
On February 6, 2016, at the fiftieth anniversary celebration inside the arena now called the Don Haskins Center, a video message from President Barack Obama was played for the crowd. Obama said that by becoming the first team to win an NCAA title with five Black starters, the Miners were not just champs on the court, and that their contribution to civil rights was as important as any other.
Shed cried that day. He told a reporter that the 1966 Final Four was the first time his father had ever seen him play, and that after the final buzzer, he walked off the court looking for his father in the crowd.
He pointed, and his voice broke.
Today, every championship team in America climbs a ladder to cut the net. The ladder is always there, already in position, waiting at center court before the final horn even sounds.
That ladder exists because of what happened in 1966. Not because someone decided to be generous, but because the men who were denied one made the moment theirs anyway.
Nevil Shed put Willie Worsley on his shoulders, and Worsley reached up and cut the net. They did not need permission, and they did not wait for the world to catch up.
The world caught up on its own.
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