Chapter 1: Basketball in Black and White "What a piece of history. If basketball ever took a turn, that was it." -- Nolan Richardson
Adolph Rupp's face would not permit a smile. The legendary basketball coach's eyes sagged as he aged, his eyebrows arched higher, and his chin receded into the expanding fleshiness of his neck. Two creases, widening each year like riverbeds in yielding soil, formed an indelible frown as they descended from his mouth. The result, even in those infrequent moments when he attempted a grin, was a look of perpetual displeasure. It was as if nature had reshaped his exterior to match what dwelled inside.
"Rupp was unique," said Bill Spivey, one of twenty-four All-Americas Rupp coached at Kentucky. "He wanted everyone to hate him and he succeeded."
By December 10, 1977, in a private room at the University of Kentucky's Chandler Medical Center, only that scowl identified the dying Rupp. Family members, realizing he could not long survive the spinal cancer that had hospitalized him since November 9, silently surrounded his bed. The only sound was the buzz of a bedside radio.
Rupp almost certainly could not hear the broadcast of that night's Kentucky-Kansas basketball game, but announcer Cawood Ledford's voice, familiar and reassuring, comforted the former coach's relatives. Rupp's son, Adolph, Jr., his daughter-in-law, and two grandchildren grew up immersed in UK basketball. Listening to Ledford's broadcasts was nearly a religious ritual for them, as it was for almost everyone in the commonwealth. From Jamboree on the Appalachian Plateau to Linton on the Cumberland River, Kentuckians adored the Wildcats. And, for nearly fifty years, they were Adolph Rupp's Wildcats.
At about 10:45 p.m. on this Thursday night, Rupp's relatives heard a great radio-muffled cheer arise from the crowd in Lawrence, Kansas. Kentucky was hopelessly behind. There were fourteen seconds left in the game, his son would recall, when Rupp exhaled, shuddered lightly, and died. He was seventy-six.
Rupp, a native Kansan, had transformed himself into a Kentucky colonel during his forty-seven years in Lexington. The Baron of the Bluegrass, as the basketball world knew him, owned several farms in horse country -- the last a white-fenced, Bourbon County estate where he planted tobacco and called his prized Hereford cattle by name. The drawl Rupp affected deepened annually, as did his devotion to good bourbon. All that was missing, it seemed, was the standard-issue white linen suit.
He drove his Wildcats to a then NCAA record 876 victories and four national titles before he retired, quite reluctantly, in 1972 at the age of seventy. He made the University of Kentucky college basketball's best-known program. Professional teams often tried to lure him away. Politicians asked him to run for office. Businessmen sought his counsel. By the mid-1960s Rupp was so dominant a figure in Kentucky that 83 percent of the state's viewers watched his Sunday night TV show. "It's on between The 20th Century and Lassie," he liked to brag.
Yet for all that, he was a solitary man. "He just wasn't a warm person, really," recalled Ledford. "I don't think he had a close friend." A Lexington newspaper columnist who knew and liked Rupp wrote that he "never seemed interested in much except himself and basketball."
Though he had a master's degree in education, he was no intellectual and would not have wanted to be called one. There were few moral ambiguities for him. Life was made to be diagrammed carefully like a basketball play, and that's the way he lived it. Rupp's world was black and white, even if his basketball teams were not.
The circumstances of his death would have delighted him. It came while Kentucky played at his alma mater, Kansas, the two schools that were the great forces in his life. The game took place on Adolph Rupp Night in Forrest Allen Field House, named for his old Kansas coach. And the arena was on Naismith Avenue, honoring Dr. James Naismith, basketball's inventor and one of Rupp's earliest instructors.
It was easy then for those who knew Rupp to imagine his final moments as something melodramatic, like Charles Foster Kane's death at the opening of Citizen Kane. In his own world, Rupp's intimidating power had been as immense as the fictional tycoon's, his motivations often as inscrutable. Surely he, like Kane, would have sputtered a farewell that revealed some buried facet of the man. If so, it would have referred not to a lost childhood toy, but to a lost basketball game eleven years earlier.
Rupp hated losing. But that one defeat, number 152 out of 190, stung him the worst. Toward the end of his life, he told visitors, he still awoke at night, wondering what Kentucky could have done differently. It was as if he understood how his reputation would forever be tainted by that one defeat, on March 19, 1966, when mighty Kentucky lost the NCAA championship game to a little-known school from the Southwest. "Rupp carried the memory of that game to his grave," wrote Russell Rice, his biographer.
For those who saw Rupp's death this way, as a symbolic final act to a large and controversial life, there was little doubt what his last words, his "Rosebud," would have been:
Texas Western!
Twenty years later, on one of those West Texas mornings that sparkle like a sunlit lake, Don Haskins talks about that same game, now more than three decades distant.
Texas Western's name had been changed long ago to the University of Texas at El Paso, but Haskins still remains the school's basketball coach and that unexpected 1966 championship its greatest monument.
Thirty-six and blond when his Miners shocked Rupp's Kentucky, Haskins is sixty-seven and gray now. He never coached in another NCAA title game, never even reached another Final Four.
The NCAA championship plaque -- wood and brass and coated with dust -- rests in a bookcase above Haskins' desk, a bookcase with very few books. Mementos from his thirty-six years at the school, particularly of that one game, fill the tiny office in UTEP's Special Events Center. There is a photo of the 1966 team smiling stiffly with that same plaque. Newspaper stories, banners, autographed basketballs all refer to that long-ago night when the school and Haskins leapfrogged obscurity and changed college basketball forever.
Atop a thick pile of papers on his desk this day, the start of another recruiting season, is a North Carolina newspaper story that someone had mailed him. Both its subject and its prominent position on his desk suggest how much 1966 continues to invade Haskins' present. No matter what evasions he attempts, that championship game is always in his face.
That surprising national title, not long after he had been coaching boys and girls at a tiny Texas high school, brought him praise and criticism, honors and hate mail, and, worst of all for this private man, attention. "I'll be honest with you," said Haskins in 1997, not long after he joined Rupp in the Basketball Hall of Fame. "I'm sick of talkin' about the damn thing. Sometimes I wish we finished second."
Now, asked about the clipping, Haskins picks it up. He glances at it, tosses it back on the pile, and, without comment, heads for the parking lot and his red pickup.
One word was prominently underscored in the headline atop the story:
"RUPP."
That March 19, 1966, championship game has acquired the mustiness of something stored too long in an attic's corner. The black-and-white film of the game is as interesting now for the basketball relics it portrays -- shiny uniforms, laughably short shorts, canvas Chuck Taylor sneakers, and numerous traveling calls -- as it is for the game itself.
The filmed record of Texas Western's 72D65 triumph, forty minutes of uneventful basketball on a long-ago Maryland night, appears to conta