In any other year late-March would be a time for reflecting on the Elite 8 and looking forward to the Final 4, but this year is not like any other year. Instead, we will spend the week reflecting on champions of the past, from a famous coach who won the 1947 NCAA title as a player to a Hall of Famer who led her team to a perfect 34-0 season in 1986. HoopsHD’s Jon Teitel continues our 8-part series with Oscar Combs, founder of Kentucky sports magazine “Cats’ Pause”, about former Wildcats coach Adolph Rupp winning all of those titles and losing to Texas Western in the 1966 NCAA title game.
He was known for using a fast break and extensive movement/screening on offense and a tight man-to-man defense: what made him such a great innovator, and why did he decide to utilize a trapping 1-3-1 zone defense beginning in 1963? He was a great coach because he was a great teacher: once practice started his voice was the only 1 that you would hear. He switched to a zone defense to help him win games.
He emphasized excellence through repetition and was very demanding of his players (including mercilessly berating them for any mistakes during practice): did his players hate him because he was a strict disciplinarian or respect him due to his tough love or other? Most of them would say they had a different relationship with him after their playing days because during school it was all business. Once he was no longer their coach it changed. By the 1960s his age difference made him old enough to be his players’ grandfather so there was not a lot they could talk about in general.
He was known to carry a “lucky” buckeye in his pocket and allegedly only wore a brown suit at games after losing 1 game as a high school coach while wearing a new blue suit: how superstitious was he? I never heard about the blue suit. I heard that he wore a brown suit, won a game that he was not expected to win, and then stuck with brown suits after that.
As head coach at Kentucky he won 4 NCAA championships from 1948-1958 (including the “Fabulous 5” that won the 1948 title and provided the core of team USA that won the gold medal at the 1948 Olympics and the “Fiddlin’ 5” that won the 1958 title) and the 1946 NIT title (after Rhode Island player Dick Hole missed a FT with 23 seconds left): how was he able to dominate for more than a decade? The NCAA had only come into being during the early 1940s and there was no tourney during the war years. Kentucky did not get integrated until the early 1970s but he had a style of basketball that people liked to watch. In the 1940s you had to get invited to play in the NCAA tourney so some of that involved being in the right place at the right time.
The Wildcats did not get to play for a title in 1953 due to a point-shaving scandal (despite Rupp denying any knowledge of the incident and no evidence ever proving that he was involved, the NCAA requested all other schools not to schedule Kentucky in the 1st de facto NCAA “death penalty”): why did Kentucky accepted the penalty, and do you think that it tarnished his legacy at all? The penalty was enforced in 1953 but the scandal occurred a couple of years before that. Walter Byers was the head of the NCAA and in 1952 he sent a letter to every school and ordered them not to play the Wildcats. The scandal was centered in New York so he had no control over that: he famously said they could not touch his players with a 10’ pole but he was wrong. Perhaps they had an 11’ pole! Some of the players denied it but some said they did it because they needed the money. Some of the players redshirted in 1953, came back to play in 1954, and were undefeated: they even beat the La Salle team that ended up winning the 1954 NCAA tourney. Byers decreed that Rupp could not use those specific players in the tourney so Rupp decided to bow out.
In the 1966 NCAA tourney title game “Rupp’s Runts” (featuring 5 starters, including Pat Riley, who all stood 6’5” or shorter) had a 7-PT loss to Texas Western (featuring Coach Don Haskins’ 5 African-American starters): how big a deal was the game at the time, and how did it change the recruiting approach of SEC teams going forward? It was not that big a deal at the time but it has gotten bigger each year. There were some schools that had already enrolled some African-American players but not very many. It was not an all-Black team: Texas Western had some White subs. Kentucky beat Duke in the Final 4 and Duke had 5 White starters. It haunted Kentucky for years after that: the recruiting coordinator found out that other schools would use that against them by saying, “Do you think your kid will be safe when they fly to Oxford or Gainesville?”
He was inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in 1969: where does that rank among the highlights of his career? I spent a lot of time with him during the last year before he passed away: that subject did not come up with me. I do not know if the Hall of Fame meant as much back then as it does today.
Forced into retirement in 1972 at age 70 (the mandatory retirement age for all Kentucky state employees), he won 876 games in 41 seasons (his 82.2 W/L% is #3 in D-1 history behind Clair Bee/Mark Few), including 27 SEC titles, and was a 5-time national COY: where does he rank among the greatest coaches in the history of the sport? Definitely in the top-5: at 1 time he was #1 but I think that John Wooden passed him in the 1970s, and now maybe Dean Smith/Coach K have as well.
He passed away in 1977: when people look back on his career, how do you think that he should be remembered the most? A lot of people have a lot of different opinions on that. He was a Midwesterner who learned the game from 2 legends (Rupp attended Kansas and was a reserve on the basketball team under head coach Forrest “Phog” Allen and assistant coach/inventor of basketball James Naismith), coached an African-American player while he was a high school coach, and was a tremendous teacher who did everything according to schedule. At the end of the day he just outworked everyone.