Mehcad Brooks (Matthew Applewhite) has scored his first big-screen role in basketball movie Glory Road.

The film is based on a true story, when in 1966 Texas Western coach Don Haskins led the first all-black college basketball team to the NCAA national championship. "Growing up, it was a bedtime story for me," Brooks told Zap2it.com. "I'm from Austin, Texas and my dad's from West Texas, so he was like 13 years old when the whole celebration happened."

Brooks said the night was momentous for many people. "This was like the Ali/Frazier fight for some people," he explained, "so it's really, really big and moving for a lot of people. Some kids grew up with Rapunzel and Hansel and Gretel and Pinocchio. I grew up with the Miners at night." Brooks will play Harry Flournoy Jr., a defensive standout at forward for the Texas Western squad.

In other good news for Brooks, he was recently nominated for the Outstanding Supporting Actor in A Comedy Series award in 37th NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) Image Awards. His competitors for the gong include Chico Benymon from UPN's Half and Half, and Kenan Thompson from NBC's Saturday Night Live.

Glory Road, which is produced by Jerry Bruckheimer, gets its release in the US on 13 January 2006. Other release dates include the Czech Republic on 16 March 2006 and Australia on 4 May 2006.

More from Brooks can be found in the full interview at Zap2it.com. The official Glory Road website can be found here, and its IMDb page here. The full list of NAACP nominees can be found at the NAACP website.

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