The duo already scored a touchdown in 2000 with their profound telling of the racial struggles faced by the football players and Head Coach Herman Boone—who was played by Denzel Washington and who recently spoke at Rensselaer—during the team’s 1971 championship run at the newly integrated T.C. Williams High School in Alexandria, Va., in Remember the Titans.

Six years later, Disney, Bruckheimer, and director James Gartner have delivered a slam dunk with the dramatic inside story of the 1966 NCAA Championship basketball squad Texas Western in Glory Road.

While the Miners’ 72-65 upset over the heavily favored Kentucky Wildcats was a story, it was not the story of the night—after all, Texas Western only lost one game in 1966. The true essence of the Miners’ victory rests in who accomplished it. Seven of Texas Western’s players, and all five of its starters, were black. The Wildcats’ entire team was white, and their legendary Head Coach Adolph Rupp, played by Academy Award winner Jon Voight, was an alleged bigot.

During the peak of the civil rights movement, these outstanding athletes proved to the entire nation, and many of the coaches who refused to recruit them, that color did not matter.

Glory Road captures the journey of these phenomenal athletes. Their defiance, determination, and camaraderie is vibrantly on display as an integrated team of perceived nobodies fights for respect on the court and off it.

For those ignorant and cold-hearted enough to not see the significance within the Miners’ triumph, there is plenty of basketball action in the film. Bruckheimer does not disappoint with high-flying dunks and behind-the-back passes.

Several off-the-court scenes are painfully authentic for a Disney film and its PG rating; Bruckheimer uses this stark reality to drive home his point. The endless taunts, hurled beer, bathroom muggings, and destroyed hotel rooms brand these violent images on the viewer. The film’s theme arises from the players’ resolve, which proves stronger than the collective hatred they faced on a daily basis.

Still, the movie does leave holes—as most pictures do—when recollecting a year-long voyage in less than two hours. The difficulties Texas Western Head Coach Don Haskins, played brilliantly by Josh Lucas, encountered as he tried to recruit these athletes to a southern school with no budget were minimized. The danger he put himself in was virtually ignored.

In the movie, only once does Bruckheimer reference the over 400 letters of hate mail Haskins received on virtually a daily basis or the pressure he received from the top to stop recruiting African-Americans. Haskins, now viewed as revolutionary, was hated almost as much as the players he recruited, and this attitude led him to insist for years, “Winning the national championship was the worst thing to ever happen to me.”

Also, the picture practically ignores the issue of race relations within the team itself. It is not common knowledge even in the sports world, but Texas Western had several white players, two of which started, until Haskins made a controversial change in the national championship game.

While Bruckheimer tackled the team chemistry issue head-on in Remember the Titans, the audience is left to assume that Disney magic suddenly makes these two groups suddenly coexist in Glory Road. In sports, winning is said to solve problems, but it cannot have routinely fixed this.

Glory Road is a must see. This is a basketball movie, but it is hardly about basketball; it is about life. It reminds us of where our society was, is, and needs to be. Sometimes life’s deepest lessons can be found at the heart of a game.