Though my father is a UT grad, he also attended East Texas State University in Commerce, not far from the even smaller town in which he grew up. ETSU has since become a Texas A&M franchise school and its old identity largely forgotten.

Except that it makes an appearance in the new Disney movie Glory Road:

In the movie, East Texas fans are shown throwing drinks and popcorn and yelling racial slurs at Texas Western, now known as the University of Texas at El Paso, during a regular-season game in Commerce, Texas. A scene after the game shows a vandalized hotel room, with racial slurs written on the walls in red.

"It was just too awful for words," Pace said.

It never happened, Pace said.

According to UTEP athletic department archives, the Miners played the Lions in El Paso on Dec. 9, 1965. The Miners won 73-51. The Miners won the game in the movie, but the margin was much closer.

I can certainly see why the folks in Commerce are so upset. I'd be interested to know whether the fabrication came from the movie or the autobiography it was based on. Presumably if it was from the autobiography we can attribute it at least somewhat to faulty memory (maybe it was West Texas State or North Texas State or East Tennessee State), though something like that seems easy enough to check. If it wasn't in the book and the whole thing was a fabrication by the makers of the movie, it gets a little more problematic. If you're going to set a school up as an exemplar of racism in Texas at the time, you need to just go ahead and make up a school rather than malign one that already exist. Perhaps they didn't know that East Texas State still existed and thought that it was safe.

In any case, bad move.

The University of Kentucky, who are the "big team" the Miners play in the championship game, have also complained. I'm not sure whether those complaints are the portrayal of UK as the big, bad, white school or if there are particular inaccuracies at the time. From what I've read UK's basketball program was particularly ivory even for its time and I recall hearing somewhere that blacks in Kentucky were not sorry their state school lost. But that could be circular -- from the movie itself, which has already demonstrated itself to be not-entirely-reliable.