Rupp was no saint - but neither was he clearly a racist
By Christopher Harris Commonwealth Journal
Published July 24, 2020
You can read the original article here.
There are few names in the state of Kentucky that carry as much weight as that of Adolph Rupp.
Kentucky is a part of the country that for decades has lived and breathed the game of basketball. That is due almost primarily to Rupp. In a difficult time for this nation, mired in the poverty of the Great Depression, the brash Kansan came into the Bluegrass State and gave folks in all corners of the commonwealth something to be proud of: a winner's identity. For a rural people that were largely mocked and stereotyped, the fact that Rupp built a program that could regularly waltz into the game's then-biggest stage in New York City and compete against the best in the nation was cause to puff out one's chest and walk a little taller.
Not only did he win four national titles, not only did he have one of the game's first great teams in the Fabulous Five, but Rupp was also a pioneer in the practice of recruiting and giving out athletic scholarships. Purists at the time of Rupp's glory years, in the '40s and '50s, wanted collegiate basketball to be purely an amateur affair: Take the best material your school has to offer, and field a team out of it. Rupp saw the potential for more. The potential to make basketball a means to increase a school's profile, to help extraordinary student-athletes and reward them for their talents, to build the best team possible. These practices have over time enabled countless young men and women, particularly African-Americans, to receive educational opportunities and a better shot at a bright future.
And yet, for all of that, Rupp has become a controversial figure as time has gone on. The narrative has become this: that Adolph Rupp was a racist.
Some will tell you that Rupp used language considered extremely racially insensitive today. Some will tell you that he didn't want to recruit black athletes to Kentucky. Some paint the 1966 game with Texas Western as a match-up between a progressive trendsetter and a modern-day Simon Legree.
We are in the midst of an era in which every historical figure's reputation is under the microscope, particularly in regards to race. This is true not just of people, but of brands —everything from pancake syrup to the Washington Redskins, a team whose owner once swore never to change the name ... and here we are, in 2020, with the "Redskins" moniker no more.
In Kentucky, the name "Rupp" still looms large, as the name of Rupp Arena, home of the Kentucky Wildcats Basketball team. Bearing the name since it opened in November of 1976, it has earned a place of one of the hallowed halls of the sport. The name "Rupp" is as iconic as any in basketball. Even with a recent naming rights tweak, the venue is still called "Rupp Arena at Central Bank Center." It was that important to keep the legend's name in there, even as the football team's Commonwealth Stadium was totally renamed into “Kroger Field.”
But some have speculated that it would only be a matter of time until there came pressure to change the name of Rupp Arena. That time has come already. Thursday was abuzz with the news that the University of Kentucky's African American and Africana Studies requested changing the name of Rupp Arena, saying in a letter to President Eli Capilouto that Rupp's name "has come to stand for racism and exclusion in UK athletics and alienates Black students, fans, and attendees."
Problem is, it has only come to stand for those things in the minds of some because of rumor and myth. The reality is that Rupp, as we all are, was a product of his time. And in that time, he was actually one of the better friends a black athlete in the South might have.
An excellent read on the subject is James Duane Bolin's "Adolph Rupp and the Rise of Kentucky Basketball," published last year. The book is a comprehensive and unflinching look at the man who made the winningest program in college basketball what it is today. It does not paint a completely rosy picture of Rupp, and does not shy away from addressing his perceived weaknesses in the area of race. I won't go through the whole book with you; it's worth reading for itself, as are any other materials you can get on the subject.
But one thing becomes abundantly clear the more you get to know Rupp. The only thing he cared about, when it came right down to it, was this: Could you play basketball, or not? Could you help him win, or not? No matter what one's race, that need to be the best was a constant for Rupp.
He was by no means a perfect person. Far, far from it. My mom still recalls watching his TV show when she was growing up and noticing how awful he was toward his players. She hated him for it. He did not make emotional connections with them, and was not easy to play for. Excellence was nothing special; it was the bare minimum expectation. Anything less than excellence was unacceptable. He cursed, he drank, he was a massive self-promoter with an ego the size of the Daniel Boone National Forest.
But he was what Kentucky needed. His no-nonsense approach drove his players to overcome any kind of adversity. His bombastic personality and need to soak up media attention put a school in an Appalachian state on the national map when pretty much the entire basketball culture revolved around major East Coast cities. He made himself the center of attention, so that UK's enemies criticized him, not the young men who played for him.
Of course, it's well-known that before Rupp got to UK, he coached and started William Moseley at Freeport High School in Illinois in the late '20s. Moseley was the first Black student-athlete at the school, only the second to graduate from Freeport at all, and Rupp paid particular praise to Moseley, his contributions, and his determination in a very public setting, at the school's basketball banquet. Rupp "offered (Moseley) as an example to the other boys of the school," wrote the Freeport Journal-Standard in 1927. Rather than ignore or dismiss the Black athlete, Rupp was his champion. Rupp liked winners, and saw the stuff of them in Moseley.
Even more striking is the story of Don Barksdale, an African-American player from UCLA who somewhat controversially earned a spot on the 1948 Olympic basketball team of which Rupp was assistant coach (and his national championship players like Alex Groza and Ralph Beard were part of the roster). Barksdale was the first African-American college consensus All-American, the first to play on an Olympic team, and among the first to play in the NBA. Bolin writes in his book that Barksdale would tell an interviewer in 1984 that Rupp "turned out to be (his) closest friend" during that Olympic experience. Rupp would try to comfort Barksdale when the latter faced incidents of discrimination; as Bolin wrote, "Rupp ironically developed a close relationship with (Barksdale as an Olympian), something he never did with his players back home." During an exhibition game pitting UK's players against some of the other Olympians in Lexington, Barksdale was unwelcome to stay with the others at a local hotel; Rupp contacted leaders in the city's African-American community to arrange for lodging for Barksdale.
In the late '50s and early '60s, Mississippi State fielded SEC champion teams under names like coach Babe McCarthy and future NBA All-Star Bailey Howell. However, the school's administration would not allow them to accept the spoils of their victory and go on to compete in the NCAA Tournament, where they might have to play integrated teams. Instead, Kentucky took the spot that Mississippi State had earned. Rupp had no problem playing anyone, of any race, anywhere, any time. He just wanted to win the ballgame. He got that opportunity because while he was focused on the game, others were mired in the most disgusting kind of prejudice.
Red Auerbach, architect of the Boston Celtics dynasty who built his franchise around African-American Bill Russell in a still largely white NBA of the '50s (then named Russell his successor at coach), was a good friend of Rupp's. Bolin quotes Auerbach from his book "Let Me Tell You a Story: A Lifetime in the Game," vehemently insisted Rupp wasn't racist and that he "never saw any sign from him or heard anything from him that indicated ... (Rupp) was a racist or bigot in any way." More colorfully, Auerbach put it this way: "(Rupp) did hate black guys — who couldn't play! He also hated white guys who couldn't play, blue guys who couldn't play, and green guys who couldn't play."
Did Rupp sometimes use a certain notorious word to describe African-Americans in certain situations? It appears so. Of course, it was a word that was in more common use when Rupp came up. The truth is, all of us, no matter how "on the right side of history" we are, are saying things today that will be considered unacceptable at some point in the future. That's not our fault, but we will be judged for it nonetheless. Things change in life, and leave us behind. Bolin noted that in a 1974 interview, Rupp talks about being unimpressed with his first glance at the UK campus, seeing what he called in a previous interview "little shanties," but here calling them "n--- shacks." Of course, that was a common term at the time for that kind of structure; does Rupp's use of then-contemporary nomenclature outweigh, say, the impression he left on Don Barksdale?
Other reports have Rupp using the race of Texas Western players as motivation in the landmark 1966 title game, the first NCAA Championship by an all-Black starting five. But the game has been heavily mythologized through the years; at the time, virtually no one saw it as a contest of races. It was simply "Rupp's Runts" vs. the last team standing in their way. Some sportswriters have wanted to create an epic showdown of progressive good vs. racist evil — and with the name "Adolph," isn't he just the perfect villain? — but Kentucky journalism giant Billy Reed has called this the work of "revisionist historians." Members of the "Runts" have denied that Rupp made it about race; in Bolin's book, it notes that Runt Pat Riley was a consultant for the 2006 film "Glory Road," a Hollywood portrayal of the game, and that he did it to "protect" Rupp's reputation. Riley, mind you, is the same Pat Riley that coached Magic Johnson's Showtime Lakers and built the LeBron James-era Miami Heat. Not exactly the type to approve of white supremacy in the sport.
As "Runt" Tommy Kron once told the Lexington Herald-Leader, "The only thing that bothers me is that some people think we were motivated by that, by playing an all-Black team. That was certainly not the case at all. To me, that's ignorance, and we didn't deserve that. All we cared about was winning the game." The team took its cues from its leader, Rupp — a man who was likely too consumed by winning to even notice what type of person was wearing the other jersey.
There's one more sticking point, and that's Rupp's recruiting of Black players to UK. The perception is he was slow to do so because he didn't want them. Bolin's book talks about the high-profile recruitment of Kentuckians and eventual Louisville Cardinals Wes Unseld and Butch Beard, both of whom felt as if Rupp didn't want them badly enough.
But Rupp knew what life was like in the SEC, in the Deep Southern states where crowds were racist and vicious and unpredictable. Moreover, if there's anything those fans hated more than Black players, it was Kentucky and Rupp. It wasn't safe. And in playing venues that at the time were little more than glorified quonset huts, there was little to prevent these vile types from harming the players.
Even with Barksdale, Bolin writes, Rupp was hesitant for him to play in Lexington for his own safety, for something as benign as an Olympic exhibition game. "As Rupp later argued repeatedly, it would be dangerous to bring a black player to a Southern state. In the 1960s, when University of Kentucky administrators pressed Rupp to recruit Black players, he told them that a Kentucky Black recruit would have a hard time on road trips to Mississippi or Alabama." In recruiting Beard, Rupp told the player's family that he was cursed at and had bottles thrown at him in many of his trips throughout the league, wrote Bolin; Beard's mother asked, "If that happens to you, then what's going to happen to my son?" Rupp reportedly replied that he'd take "real good care" of her boy, but the assurances reportedly seemed insincere to Beard's family.
But wasn't Rupp being honest? Beard's mom had a valid concern, one that Rupp surely knew to be a problem. All he could do was prepare black players for the likelihood they'd face horrors playing in a league that was not ready to integrate. He couldn't truly protect those young boys from being hurt, insulted, degraded by other fans (and even by UK's own fans, unfortunately). If he had hesitations in recruiting them, is that because he was racist? Or because he knew it wasn't the responsible thing to do for a young Black man, to subject them to that kind of scrutiny? It's certainly not hard to imagine the latter is true. Perry Wallace integrated the SEC at Vanderbilt shortly thereafter, but Vandy was no lightning rod, not like UK and Rupp already were. For once, it seems, Rupp cared about something other than winning. Having Unseld and Beard would have helped him win big-time — good grief, can you imagine Unseld on the "Runts"? — but playing in the SEC might not have helped them. Rupp knew that all too well.
Eventually Rupp brought in his first Black player, Tom Payne, signing him in 1969; Payne's career at UK was short, for reasons that had nothing to do with Rupp's feelings on race, but rather Rupp gave Payne every opportunity to succeed early. In Payne's only season at UK, he averaged a double-double and earned All-SEC honors. Former LSU coach Dale Brown recalled to journalist Larry Vaught, "Tom told me one time that everybody brought up about Adolph Rupp being a racist. ... Tom said, 'He was not. He was the only person who communicated with me and my mother when I was in trouble. Adolph Rupp was the only one. You don't forget that.'"
Rupp will never be regarded as a saint or a paragon of moral virtue, but neither do his actions indicate that he was a racist, or that his iconic name deserves to be tossed into the dustbin of history when it has been a source of pride and cultural identity in this state for so long. Rupp lived in different times, difficult times, and as transition began happening in the sport and across the nation, his age and cantankerous, stubborn nature may have made it appear as if he was more sinister than he was. For all his faults — and in fairness, language that wouldn't fly today appears to be among them — he did not mistreat the Black players who found their way into his sphere. Instead, he praised them, protected them, and ultimately played them. And the legacy he left provided opportunities for so many more African-Americans down the road to come that they might not have had if not for Rupp.
Instead of talking about changing the name of the arena away from Rupp's, let's recall the man instead and what he actually did. There are things to criticize, but there are also things to celebrate. And that's why Kentucky plays in Rupp Arena and always should — in net return, the celebration outweighs the criticism.