Rare Footage Of ’66 Miners Shot By Wild Kingdom Host
if you look long enough, every once in a wwhile. you find a real gem of a video on YouTube.
And if you’re a fan of the late-great Don Haskins, this is one of those days.
The video is called “Don Haskins Defensive Drills from 1966.” The 1967 video was sponsored by Coca-Cola and features rare footage of The Bear teaching others how to run the defense that won the Miners a championship.
“Coca-Cola made these videos to disburse to teams, high school, college teams,” said Togo Railey, a guard on that ’66 squad who went on to coach high school basketball.
Railey said he bought a 35 milimeter copy of it to show his team.
The man who developed and hosted the TV show Wild Kingdom, Marlin Perkins, was responsible for putting the package together and promoting it with Coca-Cola.
Railey said the team had a lot of fun making the video.
“We were all practicing our slow motion moves because, you know, in Wild Kingdom you saw the animals loping across,” Railey said. “(Perkins) stopped the film and said ‘time out, time out. Coach, full speed. We slow it down up here!'”
The nearly 12-minute film even features a short commercial for Coke voiced by Haskins.
“In our dressing room at halftime or after practice, something else gets shared, refreshment, ice cold Coca-Cola is about the quickest refreshment around,” Haskins said in the advertisement.
“We never even got water and here we walk into the locker room and here’s this shiny light on this big shiny Coca-Cola box with ice in it and little six ounce bottles of coke,” Railey said. “Oh man, we’d died and gone to heaven. They gave us one, that’s all we got .”/
The video ended up on YouTube after Haskins’ old friend Joe Gomez bought it on eBay from a Kansas high school coach
Gomez said he gave it to Tim Floyd as a present last summer after he took over the UTEP basketball program and Floyd made copies of the video to share with other coaches around the country.
