Here are a series of articles (excerpted from the Baron and the Bear) profiling the players and coaches of the Texas Western College Miners and the University of Kentucky Wildcats.
Rupp and the Purple People-Eater
Two men who knew Adolph Rupp well had essentially the same answer to my question Was Rupp a Racist? Both said, Rupp would have recruited a Purple-People-Eater from Mars if he thought it would help him win basketball games.
And yet, researching my book – The Baron and the Bear: Rupp’s Runts, Haskins’ Miners and the Season That Changed Basketball Forever – I kept running into articles proclaiming Rupp’s racism as fact; indisputable as Newton’s Second Law of Motion.
The Rupp’s a Racist charge is a miner element in a book that follows two improbable teams through the ups and downs of a college basketball season to their 1966 history-bending NCAA championship game. But, because the Kentucky team (called Rupp’s Runts because the tallest starter was only 6’5”) was all-white and Texas Western played only blacks in the championship game, clearly, it had to be dealt with.
Twenty-five years after the NCAA championship game, Curry Kirkpatrick made the case against Rupp in Sports Illustrated. In his article titled The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down, Kirkpatrick wrote that Rupp “supposedly” paced the locker room after his most disappointing loss “spitting out the initials for Texas Western College: ‘TWC. What’s that stand for? Two white coaches.’” Kirkpatrick allowed as how “the story may be apocryphal,” but added, “Rupp’s feelings, however, were always right there simmering for all the world to know.”
“Supposedly?” “Apocryphal?” What kind of reporting is that?
My own reporting resulted in a very different story. Interviewing more than a dozen people who knew Rupp well, I found not a single person who believes the charge. Larry Conley, co-captain of Rupp’s Runts along with Tommy Kron, told me that Kirkpatrick asked him the question multiple times over a two week period. Larry’s answer was always the same: “There’s nothing there, Curry. I never heard the man say a racist word in his life.” One night, after Larry had done color commentary for an ESPN basketball game in Baton Rouge, he was out with the crew drinking beer and eating shrimp. Kirkpatrick asked the question again in yet another way. “That’s it!” said Larry, slamming his beer down on the table. “No more. I don’t care how you phrase it but it’s done. I told you he’s not a racist, that’s the end of it.”
That was the end of it. Nothing Larry said appeared in the SI article. Neither did the purple-people-eater line from Rupp’s Runts student manager Mike Harreld. “You could have been a three-armed purple-people-eater from Mars if you could score points and win for Adolph that would have been just fine with him,” Mike told Kirkpatrick and me. “Would he sell you and all the gold in Fort Knox for another win? He might do that. Did he care about the color of your skin? No way in the world.”
But there it was in SI, the presumed Gold Standard of sports reporting. As I wrote in my book, that single article was considered Holy Writ; a crimson thread woven inexorably into the fabric of Rupp’s long and storied basketball career; a stain on the legacy of a coaching legend. After that, writers who never spent a minute in Coach Rupp’s presence felt licensed to refer to his “long racist legacy,” sighting as prima facia evidence Kentucky’s all white team in the 1966 championship game.
“He didn’t see color,” insisted Coach Joe B. Hall, the other Rupp observer who gave me the purple-people-eater line. Hall, a Rupp assistant for seven years who replaced him when he retired, says his mandate from Rupp was to recruit the best, regardless of skin color. While the SEC continued to have unwritten rules against integration of athletics, Rupp was preparing for the change that would inevitably come by seeking advice from Branch Rickey. The General Manager who broke major league baseball’s Gentlemen’s Agreement by bringing Jackie Robinson to the Brooklyn Dodgers laid out the necessary ingredients for making change happen. Rupp’s first black player needed to be: A Kentuckian; An excellent student; a player nobody is going to keep on the bench; a player who is going to be something, especially something you need.
There were several players who matched the Rickey paradigm, but, when it came to closing the deal, said Hall, “Rupp wouldn’t get down from being the head coach to say ‘I want you, I need you’…It was, ‘you ought to want to come and play for me. I’m giving you that opportunity.’ The black kids, I think they were a little afraid of him, to tell you the truth.”
Maintaining distance from his players worked for Coach Rupp for most of his forty-two years at the University of Kentucky, until it didn’t. His inability to relate to players on a personal level played an important, sometimes decisive, role when it came to recruiting a black player to become his Jackie Robinson. It cost him Wes Unseld who went on to star at Louisville and the NBA. It cost him Perry Wallace who became the first black player to integrate the SEC while playing for Vanderbilt.
Wallace liked Rupp’s assistants, and might have gone to Kentucky if Coach Rupp had shown enough interest to meet him personally. “It wasn’t that I wanted special treatment,” Wallace told his biographer. “To have the top guy say nary a word; that was a very important consideration.”
Inept recruiter? Yes. Racist? Probably not.
“I think he took a hit for the whole south,” says Mike Lewis, a white Duke player Rupp once tried to recruit. “Unfortunately, he was out front: he was the guy that was easy to target because of his success and everything. I hated to see him painted with that board brush of racism. I don’t think it was fair."
In his book about the 1965-66 season – And the Walls Came Tumbling Down – Frank Fitzpatrick wrote, “The Kentucky coach possessed the power to push for change and he didn’t use it.” Maybe so, but the same might be said of all presidents before Lincoln and all Baptist ministers before Martin Luther King.
“We’re all a product of the times in which we live,” said Thad Jaracz, sophomore center on the Runts who played three years for Rupp. “It takes a real visionary to step out of those times and be somebody totally different. There are people like that, some of the Civil Rights leaders. Some of them were like that. You look at great scientists, great military guys. There are always people who can step outside. Adolph wasn’t one of those guys. Adolph was a basketball coach and he wanted above all else to beat people. And so to think that he would not want to get the best people to beat people with is just ludicrous. He was living within the confines of the situation he was in, the SEC (where athletics was a whites-only activity). It’s always been interesting to me. All of a sudden he becomes this pariah for the segregation of college sports. I just never saw that.”
Larry Conley got involved in Rupp’s attempt to recruit Unseld, driving to Louisville for a little one-on-one persuasion. He told Unseld: “If you come, I think we have a chance to win the national championship.” But what might have been ran up against a harsh reality. After receiving threats in the mail, including a dead chicken, Unseld told Larry, ‘I don’t want to be the first one.”
How good would Kentucky have been that year with Wes Unseld on the team? Larry’s answer: “Two games better.”
Don Haskins, The Game Changer
At the memorial service one speaker put the question: “How many of you guys played for Coach Haskins? If you did stand up.” Fifty or sixty former Texas Western players from before and after the school became The University of Texas El Paso (UTEP) stood. “Now, here’s the next question. How many of you liked Haskins when you played for him?” Everybody sat down. Mission Accomplished. For Donald Lee Haskins (The Bear to his players), it had always been an article of faith. “If your team likes you you ain’t going to be worth shit. You don’t want them to like you, you want them to respect you.”
For Haskins, who learned his coaching techniques while playing for the legendary Oklahoma A&M coach Hank Iba, the fun in basketball came from winning. Winning was a product of hard work; grueling practices (without water breaks); tedious, repetitive drills; and conditioning.
Conditioning was important because a Haskins practice ran two, three, sometimes four hours with the concentration on defense. “The defense was like a zone,” said David Lattin, the 6’6” center on Haskins’s 1966 NCAA championship team, “but it wasn’t a zone because you followed your man through.” Follow is too soft a word. A Haskins player learned to fight through screens. You didn’t switch. You didn’t go behind. You fought your way through. “He had rigid, specific rules,” said Steve Tredennick, a point guard who graduated a year before the big game. “You followed them or you sat.”
In his book, Glory Road, Haskins said his practices were like boot camp. “You make it so hard on them – you make them hate you so much – that they don’t have the time or energy to turn on each other – sort of a band of brothers against the bastard.” “I hated Haskins,” said Willie Worsley, a starting guard in the championship game. “I was afraid of him and I hated him at the same time,” said Harry Flournoy, the team’s leading rebounder. “I didn’t know he had a sense of humor until after I graduated.”
With four outstanding players up from the freshman team the Texas Western Miners were looking good heading into the 1965-’66 season, but Haskins never let on that this team might be special. “You guys are the worst looking bunch of athletes I ever saw,” he told them. “Just a pitiful bunch. I doubt if we’ll win even half our games.”
Haskins’s biggest concern as his team moved through the season racking up win after win was their tendency to play full out for a while, build up a lead and then coast. “My guys could play so good on defense it was ridiculous,” Haskins wrote. “Eventually we would have this huge lead and they’d stop trying.”
Even though Haskins was always harping on them about their intermittent lack of effort, there was every reason to believe they would enter the NCAA tournament, along with Kentucky, as the only undefeated basketball teams in the country. On the other hand, Haskins wrote, “We were so overconfident. I knew we were fixin’ to get our ass blistered in some game. I just didn’t know when.”
The when was their final game of the regular season. They had beaten Seattle in El Paso two months before by a comfortable twelve points, and were on something of a roll as they arrived on the West Coast. Besides, after the news from Knoxville that Kentucky had suffered its first loss of the season to Tennessee, the Miners felt invincible.
They weren’t. Seattle won 74-72.
Later Haskins would call it “a good loss,” the kind of a wakeup-call the team needed, but right after the game The Bear was in full grizzly. “Do you know what just happened?” he growled. “You had a chance to be the only unbeaten team in the country…” Looking around the locker room at his dejected players, he softened his tone. “Okay, you’ve lost one game. You can go out there, win the next five and win it all.”
That’s just what happened, but there were times along the way when the dream of a national championship flickered like a candle in the wind. There was the overtime win against Cincinnati followed by a double-overtime win against Kansas the following night. Even after Texas Western beat a good Utah team in the semi-finals, the smart money was on Kentucky to run them off the floor.
That Adolph Rupp would add a fifth NCAA title to his impressive resume was a given after Kentucky beat Duke in their semi-final matchup. Reporters called it “the real championship game” and “the perfect end to a long season.” One writer went so far as to suggest that if the Miners beat the Wildcats “they better be prepared to take a saliva test.”
“They disrespect us even though we’re ranked number three,” said Willey Worsley. “That got to us more than anything else. Absolutely! No doubt about it.” Worsley had come off the bench all season long, but after watching the Duke game, Coach Haskins made a change. What he needed to disrupt the flow of Kentucky’s game was quick. It would be five-six Willie Worsley guarding six-three Larry Conley, Kentucky’s play- making forward. “It shouldn’t have worked,” said Conley, “but it did.”
Another Haskins change, dropping three men back whenever Texas Western shot the ball, served to quash Kentucky’s vaunted fast break, forcing the Wildcats to play the deliberate style of game that Haskins favored. It was yet another Haskins change that made the win truly historical.
Against Kentucky’s all-white lineup, Texas Western played its best seven players who just happened to be black. There was no mention of race in the post-game news conference, but the game came to be regarded as an important milestone in civil rights.
“Miners weren’t just champs on the court” said President Obama fifty years later, “They helped change the rules of the game off it. They didn’t know it at the time, but their contribution to Civil Rights was as important as any other.”
“I’m glad everybody feels that way,” said Coach Haskins when he was complimented for his role in changing the game, “but I’m just an old country boy who wanted to coach, and it just so happened that things worked out for all of us.”
At the coach’s memorial service some four decades after the championship season there was one final question for his former players. “How many of you loved Coach Haskins after you quit playing for him?” Every former player stood back up. “That tells the story,” said Nolan Richardson who played for Haskins during the coach’s first two seasons at Texas Western and became a Hall of Fame coach himself. “You didn’t love him while he is working your butt off, but you appreciated what he’d done for you when it was over. We hated him together and we loved him together.”
Rupp and the Purple People-Eater
Two men who knew Adolph Rupp well had essentially the same answer to my question Was Rupp a Racist? Both said, Rupp would have recruited a Purple-People-Eater from Mars if he thought it would help him win basketball games.
And yet, researching my book – The Baron and the Bear: Rupp’s Runts, Haskins’ Miners and the Season That Changed Basketball Forever – I kept running into articles proclaiming Rupp’s racism as fact; indisputable as Newton’s Second Law of Motion.
The Rupp’s a Racist charge is a miner element in a book that follows two improbable teams through the ups and downs of a college basketball season to their 1966 history-bending NCAA championship game. But, because the Kentucky team (called Rupp’s Runts because the tallest starter was only 6’5”) was all-white and Texas Western played only blacks in the championship game, clearly, it had to be dealt with.
Twenty-five years after the NCAA championship game, Curry Kirkpatrick made the case against Rupp in Sports Illustrated. In his article titled The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down, Kirkpatrick wrote that Rupp “supposedly” paced the locker room after his most disappointing loss “spitting out the initials for Texas Western College: ‘TWC. What’s that stand for? Two white coaches.’” Kirkpatrick allowed as how “the story may be apocryphal,” but added, “Rupp’s feelings, however, were always right there simmering for all the world to know.”
“Supposedly?” “Apocryphal?” What kind of reporting is that?
My own reporting resulted in a very different story. Interviewing more than a dozen people who knew Rupp well, I found not a single person who believes the charge. Larry Conley, co-captain of Rupp’s Runts along with Tommy Kron, told me that Kirkpatrick asked him the question multiple times over a two week period. Larry’s answer was always the same: “There’s nothing there, Curry. I never heard the man say a racist word in his life.” One night, after Larry had done color commentary for an ESPN basketball game in Baton Rouge, he was out with the crew drinking beer and eating shrimp. Kirkpatrick asked the question again in yet another way. “That’s it!” said Larry, slamming his beer down on the table. “No more. I don’t care how you phrase it but it’s done. I told you he’s not a racist, that’s the end of it.”
That was the end of it. Nothing Larry said appeared in the SI article. Neither did the purple-people-eater line from Rupp’s Runts student manager Mike Harreld. “You could have been a three-armed purple-people-eater from Mars if you could score points and win for Adolph that would have been just fine with him,” Mike told Kirkpatrick and me. “Would he sell you and all the gold in Fort Knox for another win? He might do that. Did he care about the color of your skin? No way in the world.”
But there it was in SI, the presumed Gold Standard of sports reporting. As I wrote in my book, that single article was considered Holy Writ; a crimson thread woven inexorably into the fabric of Rupp’s long and storied basketball career; a stain on the legacy of a coaching legend. After that, writers who never spent a minute in Coach Rupp’s presence felt licensed to refer to his “long racist legacy,” sighting as prima facia evidence Kentucky’s all white team in the 1966 championship game.
“He didn’t see color,” insisted Coach Joe B. Hall, the other Rupp observer who gave me the purple-people-eater line. Hall, a Rupp assistant for seven years who replaced him when he retired, says his mandate from Rupp was to recruit the best, regardless of skin color. While the SEC continued to have unwritten rules against integration of athletics, Rupp was preparing for the change that would inevitably come by seeking advice from Branch Rickey. The General Manager who broke major league baseball’s Gentlemen’s Agreement by bringing Jackie Robinson to the Brooklyn Dodgers laid out the necessary ingredients for making change happen. Rupp’s first black player needed to be: A Kentuckian; An excellent student; a player nobody is going to keep on the bench; a player who is going to be something, especially something you need.
There were several players who matched the Rickey paradigm, but, when it came to closing the deal, said Hall, “Rupp wouldn’t get down from being the head coach to say ‘I want you, I need you’…It was, ‘you ought to want to come and play for me. I’m giving you that opportunity.’ The black kids, I think they were a little afraid of him, to tell you the truth.”
Maintaining distance from his players worked for Coach Rupp for most of his forty-two years at the University of Kentucky, until it didn’t. His inability to relate to players on a personal level played an important, sometimes decisive, role when it came to recruiting a black player to become his Jackie Robinson. It cost him Wes Unseld who went on to star at Louisville and the NBA. It cost him Perry Wallace who became the first black player to integrate the SEC while playing for Vanderbilt.
Wallace liked Rupp’s assistants, and might have gone to Kentucky if Coach Rupp had shown enough interest to meet him personally. “It wasn’t that I wanted special treatment,” Wallace told his biographer. “To have the top guy say nary a word; that was a very important consideration.”
Inept recruiter? Yes. Racist? Probably not.
“I think he took a hit for the whole south,” says Mike Lewis, a white Duke player Rupp once tried to recruit. “Unfortunately, he was out front: he was the guy that was easy to target because of his success and everything. I hated to see him painted with that board brush of racism. I don’t think it was fair."
In his book about the 1965-66 season – And the Walls Came Tumbling Down – Frank Fitzpatrick wrote, “The Kentucky coach possessed the power to push for change and he didn’t use it.” Maybe so, but the same might be said of all presidents before Lincoln and all Baptist ministers before Martin Luther King.
“We’re all a product of the times in which we live,” said Thad Jaracz, sophomore center on the Runts who played three years for Rupp. “It takes a real visionary to step out of those times and be somebody totally different. There are people like that, some of the Civil Rights leaders. Some of them were like that. You look at great scientists, great military guys. There are always people who can step outside. Adolph wasn’t one of those guys. Adolph was a basketball coach and he wanted above all else to beat people. And so to think that he would not want to get the best people to beat people with is just ludicrous. He was living within the confines of the situation he was in, the SEC (where athletics was a whites-only activity). It’s always been interesting to me. All of a sudden he becomes this pariah for the segregation of college sports. I just never saw that.”
Larry Conley got involved in Rupp’s attempt to recruit Unseld, driving to Louisville for a little one-on-one persuasion. He told Unseld: “If you come, I think we have a chance to win the national championship.” But what might have been ran up against a harsh reality. After receiving threats in the mail, including a dead chicken, Unseld told Larry, ‘I don’t want to be the first one.”
How good would Kentucky have been that year with Wes Unseld on the team? Larry’s answer: “Two games better.”
Don Haskins, The Game Changer
At the memorial service one speaker put the question: “How many of you guys played for Coach Haskins? If you did stand up.” Fifty or sixty former Texas Western players from before and after the school became The University of Texas El Paso (UTEP) stood. “Now, here’s the next question. How many of you liked Haskins when you played for him?” Everybody sat down. Mission Accomplished. For Donald Lee Haskins (The Bear to his players), it had always been an article of faith. “If your team likes you you ain’t going to be worth shit. You don’t want them to like you, you want them to respect you.”
For Haskins, who learned his coaching techniques while playing for the legendary Oklahoma A&M coach Hank Iba, the fun in basketball came from winning. Winning was a product of hard work; grueling practices (without water breaks); tedious, repetitive drills; and conditioning.
Conditioning was important because a Haskins practice ran two, three, sometimes four hours with the concentration on defense. “The defense was like a zone,” said David Lattin, the 6’6” center on Haskins’s 1966 NCAA championship team, “but it wasn’t a zone because you followed your man through.” Follow is too soft a word. A Haskins player learned to fight through screens. You didn’t switch. You didn’t go behind. You fought your way through. “He had rigid, specific rules,” said Steve Tredennick, a point guard who graduated a year before the big game. “You followed them or you sat.”
In his book, Glory Road, Haskins said his practices were like boot camp. “You make it so hard on them – you make them hate you so much – that they don’t have the time or energy to turn on each other – sort of a band of brothers against the bastard.” “I hated Haskins,” said Willie Worsley, a starting guard in the championship game. “I was afraid of him and I hated him at the same time,” said Harry Flournoy, the team’s leading rebounder. “I didn’t know he had a sense of humor until after I graduated.”
With four outstanding players up from the freshman team the Texas Western Miners were looking good heading into the 1965-’66 season, but Haskins never let on that this team might be special. “You guys are the worst looking bunch of athletes I ever saw,” he told them. “Just a pitiful bunch. I doubt if we’ll win even half our games.”
Haskins’s biggest concern as his team moved through the season racking up win after win was their tendency to play full out for a while, build up a lead and then coast. “My guys could play so good on defense it was ridiculous,” Haskins wrote. “Eventually we would have this huge lead and they’d stop trying.”
Even though Haskins was always harping on them about their intermittent lack of effort, there was every reason to believe they would enter the NCAA tournament, along with Kentucky, as the only undefeated basketball teams in the country. On the other hand, Haskins wrote, “We were so overconfident. I knew we were fixin’ to get our ass blistered in some game. I just didn’t know when.”
The when was their final game of the regular season. They had beaten Seattle in El Paso two months before by a comfortable twelve points, and were on something of a roll as they arrived on the West Coast. Besides, after the news from Knoxville that Kentucky had suffered its first loss of the season to Tennessee, the Miners felt invincible.
They weren’t. Seattle won 74-72.
Later Haskins would call it “a good loss,” the kind of a wakeup-call the team needed, but right after the game The Bear was in full grizzly. “Do you know what just happened?” he growled. “You had a chance to be the only unbeaten team in the country…” Looking around the locker room at his dejected players, he softened his tone. “Okay, you’ve lost one game. You can go out there, win the next five and win it all.”
That’s just what happened, but there were times along the way when the dream of a national championship flickered like a candle in the wind. There was the overtime win against Cincinnati followed by a double-overtime win against Kansas the following night. Even after Texas Western beat a good Utah team in the semi-finals, the smart money was on Kentucky to run them off the floor.
That Adolph Rupp would add a fifth NCAA title to his impressive resume was a given after Kentucky beat Duke in their semi-final matchup. Reporters called it “the real championship game” and “the perfect end to a long season.” One writer went so far as to suggest that if the Miners beat the Wildcats “they better be prepared to take a saliva test.”
“They disrespect us even though we’re ranked number three,” said Willey Worsley. “That got to us more than anything else. Absolutely! No doubt about it.” Worsley had come off the bench all season long, but after watching the Duke game, Coach Haskins made a change. What he needed to disrupt the flow of Kentucky’s game was quick. It would be five-six Willie Worsley guarding six-three Larry Conley, Kentucky’s play- making forward. “It shouldn’t have worked,” said Conley, “but it did.”
Another Haskins change, dropping three men back whenever Texas Western shot the ball, served to quash Kentucky’s vaunted fast break, forcing the Wildcats to play the deliberate style of game that Haskins favored. It was yet another Haskins change that made the win truly historical.
Against Kentucky’s all-white lineup, Texas Western played its best seven players who just happened to be black. There was no mention of race in the post-game news conference, but the game came to be regarded as an important milestone in civil rights.
“Miners weren’t just champs on the court” said President Obama fifty years later, “They helped change the rules of the game off it. They didn’t know it at the time, but their contribution to Civil Rights was as important as any other.”
“I’m glad everybody feels that way,” said Coach Haskins when he was complimented for his role in changing the game, “but I’m just an old country boy who wanted to coach, and it just so happened that things worked out for all of us.”
At the coach’s memorial service some four decades after the championship season there was one final question for his former players. “How many of you loved Coach Haskins after you quit playing for him?” Every former player stood back up. “That tells the story,” said Nolan Richardson who played for Haskins during the coach’s first two seasons at Texas Western and became a Hall of Fame coach himself. “You didn’t love him while he is working your butt off, but you appreciated what he’d done for you when it was over. We hated him together and we loved him together.”