Another write up from Houston paper

[utep2step]

"Coach Haskins was the toast of El Paso and the target of every bigot with a pencil. The 40,000 poison-pen letters he received may have set a record for hate mail."

Holy smokes! I didn't know he received that much hate mail?!

This same article was also in the panhandle press as well. Good to see The Bear still getting some love.

http://www.myplainview.com/news/article_970c889e-b139-11e4-afd6-f72e5bd837aa.html

The Bear

 

[sweetlou#1]

Excellent article. One important fact omitted is that the 1965 team was the best of all - it should have won the NCAA championship that year also. At a NCAA regional game, "Bad New Barnes" fouled out early in the 1st quarter resulting in a narrow loss. Many refs all over the country at the time were racists and could not accept "big talented Negro players" taking over a game the way "Bad News could. IMO he was the best player in the USA that year -he was drafted no.1 by the Knicks. When Charlie Brown and I met with Haskins after his last game at San Diego St. - two things Haskins truly regretted (1) not winning the NCAA crown in 1965 - he truly believed that was the best team he ever fielded at UTEP. Harry Flournoy and several other players felt the same way. (2) Screwing up by not signing Gary Peyton who wanted to play for Haskins. Many times thinking about these fantastic pair of guards on the court - Hardaway and Peyton playing along side each other!! Memories, memories!

 

[UTEPDefense]

Originally posted by sweetlou#1:
Screwing up by not signing Gary Peyton who wanted to play for Haskins. Many times thinking about these fantastic pair of guards on the court - Hardaway and Peyton playing along side each other!! Memories, memories!

I talked to Greg Foster about this one time. Greg Foster, Antonio Davis, and Gary Payton were all the same age and they were all from Oakland. Greg says that Gary Payton truly wanted to come to UTEP, but we had already committed our final scholarship to Eddie Williams from Louisiana. I guess these were the days before "over-signing" was a common practice....

We were very close to having Tim Hardaway and Gary Payton in back-court and Antonio Davis and Greg Foster in the front-court. UTEP would have had 4 future NBA players(3 future NBA All-Stars) in it's starting line-up.