In ‘55, a team to cheer

In 1966, Texas Western fielded the first all-black starting five to win the NCAA basketball championship. The story was told last year in the feature film “Glory Road,” which drew considerable praise but also took considerable artistic license. In other words, it played fast and loose with several key facts.

More than a decade before Texas Western, there was Crispus Attucks High School of Indianapolis. The enrollment was all black because of the city’s segregation policy at the time. Led by future college and NBA great Oscar Robertson and several other players nearly as talented, Crispus Attucks won the 1955 Indiana state basketball championship and became the first all-black team to win a title in an integrated American sport.

It was a shock to the city’s culture and sensibilities, but a landmark event in civil rights history and a major step toward breaking down racial barriers. The team constantly fought prejudice. Now the story of Robertson and the school’s achievement has made it to the screen in “Something To Cheer About,” a documentary written and directed by Betsy Blankenbaker. It opens today at the E Street Landmark theater in the District and in eight other cities.

Unlike “Glory Road,” it’s all true.

“It’s an inspirational and hopeful film that a group of black teenagers can make a difference,” said Blankenbaker, an Indianapolis native. “‘Glory Road’ is a good story. This is a better story.”

The documentary, which features extensive archival footage and interviews with team members and others familiar with the story, “depicts life in Indianapolis and how basketball helped the schools integrate and how it helped us really grow as individuals,” Robertson said. “It allowed us to gain confidence and say, ‘We are somebody.’ For so many years it was, ‘Blacks can’t do this. They can’t do that.’ ”

Blankenbaker originally released the film in 2002 but said it was still “a work in progress.” She added an original soundtrack and made other changes to polish up what amounts to a true labor of love. The inspiration was the close friendship between her father, who died in 1989, and Crispus Attucks coach Ray Crowe.

“I went to see Coach Crowe about eight years ago, and I realized how old he was and thought, ‘If I don’t make this film now a big part of our history is gonna be lost,’ ” she said.

Crowe died in 2003, but he remains as much the focal point of the film as Robertson, the Big O. In a state where basketball is followed with near-religious fervor, Crowe helped revolutionize how the game was played with a fast-breaking, wide-open, yet disciplined style. He not only allowed, but encouraged his players to show off their prodigious dunking talents. He was dignified and demanding, tough in a subdued, non-combative manner. A half-century later, his players still speak reverently about him.

“I don’t think any coach can teach you how to play basketball,” Robertson said in a telephone interview this week. “But he could teach you about life. He had rules, and if you didn’t follow the rules, you were out. If you did anything wrong, you were off the team. This is what we lived by. We lived by those rules.”

A basketball legend, Robertson was an All-American at Cincinnati, a 1960 U.S. Olympic gold medal-winner and a perennial all-NBA player for 14 seasons with the Cincinnati Royals and Milwaukee Bucks. Beyond his play — he once averaged a triple-double for an entire season — he made a lasting impact on the NBA as a leader of the players union with the so-called Oscar Robertson Case, which opened the door to free agency.

Just as Robertson and his Crispus Attucks teammates made more than a few people uncomfortable, Robertson rankled the NBA establishment. “If not for being a great player, they would have gotten me out of there a long time ago,” he said.

He moved to from rural Tennessee to Indianapolis with his parents and two brothers when he was 4. His family was poor, like most of the other blacks who were concentrated in the city’s west side. He grew up in a “shotgun house” with no indoor plumbing until his dad, a meat-cutter, eventually got a toilet.

As more than a few white folks uneasily looked on, Robertson’s older brother, Bailey, nicknamed “Flap,” and Hallie Bryant, who later played with the Harlem Globetrotters, helped the 1951 Crispus Attucks team reach the state semifinals for the first time. It touched off a huge celebration in the black section of the city.

Oscar’s time would come later. He was a sophomore in 1954 when Crispus Attucks — named for the first casualty of the American Revolution, a black man — lost to Milan High in the semifinals, an event portrayed (again, with some historical inaccuracies) in the popular 1988 film, “Hoosiers.”

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