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Adolph Rupp
Adolph Friedrich Rupp
(September
2, 1901
-
December 10, 1977) was
one of the greatest coaches in the history of
American
college basketball. Rupp won 875 games in 41 years of coaching, and
set a remarkable standard of excellence. He was enshrined in the
Basketball Hall of Fame on April 13,
1969.
Born in
Halstead, Kansas, he played college basketball for the
University of Kansas under the great coach Dr.
Forrest "Phog" Allen from
1919 to
1923. Rupp went on to coach basketball in Kansas, Iowa and Illinois.
Rupp coached the
University of Kentucky basketball team from
1930 to
1972. At Kentucky, he earned the title "Baron of
the Bluegrass". Rupp was a master of developing local talent. He
took more than 80 percent of his players from the hills of Kentucky and
turned them into champions. Rupp possessed an intense desire to win and
instilled that feeling in his players. He promoted a sticky man-to-man
defense, and a relentless fast break offense that battered opponents
into defeat.
His Wildcats teams won four
NCAA championships (1948,
1949,
1951,
1958), one
NIT title in
1946, appeared in 20 NCAA tournaments and captured 27
Southeastern Conference titles. Rupp demanded 100 percent from his
players at all times, pushing them to great levels of success.
Rupp's legacy has one major
flaw: he was widely regarded as a
segregationist, or at the very least unwilling to recruit
black players. This reputation is not clearly supported by all
available evidence and the subject remains controversial to this day. As
a high school coach in Illinois before coming to Kentucky, Rupp had
African American players on his teams. Many of Rupp's most trusted
employees on his farms were African-American and many of those who knew
Rupp during his life have insisted that Rupp was not a racist. Most of
Rupp's coaching career was in the era of institutionalized segregation
in the American South/ Rupp was among the first coaches in the two
southern conferences, the
SEC and
ACC, to recruit African American players. Other colleges in other
parts of the country had been using black players before the 1960s
(e.g.,
Wilt Chamberlain at the University of Kansas), however, many other
southern schools not only didn't have black players, but would refuse to
play against schools that had a single black player on the roster. Rupp
scheduled games against integrated teams since the 50's, and recruit
African American players as early as 1964. The loss of the all-white
Wildcats team in the
1966 NCAA finals to
Texas Western College (now the University of Texas at El Paso),
under
Don Haskins, who started five black players, was long after the fact
held out as a sign of change in the game; most participants have
publicly stated that nobody saw the game that way at the time. The Final
Four that year also included another all-white team,
Duke. Rupp was forced into retirement in
1972 after reaching age 70, at that time the mandatory retirement
age for Kentucky state employees.
Twenty-four of his players
earned
All-American honors, seven won
Olympics gold medals and 28 played professionally. A four-time Coach
of the Year, Rupp established a winning tradition at Kentucky later
achieved only by
John Wooden at
UCLA and
Dean Smith at
North Carolina. A little more than a year before his death, the
Wildcats moved from their on-campus Memorial Coliseum to
Rupp Arena, named after him, in downtown Lexington; the team
continues to play there. The
Adolph Rupp Trophy, named in his honor, has been awarded annually to
the best white or black player in men's college basketball since 1972.
Rupp died at age 76 in
Lexington, Kentucky. The
University of Kentucky since 1976 has played its home games in
Rupp Arena, named for the program's longtime coach.
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