Basketball’s Jackie Robinson moment was more complex than it first appears

Kansas men’s basketball coach Bill Self employed a variety of strategies while securing the Jayhawks’ fourth national title earlier this month. Suffice to say, how many Black players he selected was not a talking point.

But six decades ago the composition of the team was a significant call for Loyola’s George Ireland. His decision to start four Black players not only proved the difference in the Ramblers’ 1963 NCAA title run; it became a moment similar to Jackie Robinson signing with the Dodgers 75 years ago – one of those decisions that led to a sport becoming more inclusive, and also helped fuel the civil rights movement across the US. And yet for as watershed an event as the Ramblers’ ’63 title was, it has long tarried in the shadow of a Texas Western team that won the 1966 NCAA title with fiveBlack starters – a David and Goliath matchup memorialized in the Jerry Bruckheimer classic Glory Road. Even recent members of the Ramblers basketball team didn’t know much more than the basics of the ’63 team’s quest – even as the story came roaring back to the fore during the Ramblers’ recent storybook run to the 2018 Final Four. “And we have relationships with those guys,” says Lucas Williamson, a co-captain on the 2021-22 Ramblers team. “Especially pre-Covid, they were always around – at practices, at games. We know them. But we just never really talked about the racial issues they had actually gone through.”

The CBS/Paramount+ documentary, The Loyola Project, reckons with the ’63 team’s hidden history. It mixes archival footage, graphic novel-style reconstructions and interviews with members of the ’63 team (also: Sister Jean appears!) For the better part of an hour, the doc retraces the Ramblers’ journey to college