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 that few others, if any, will ever match. 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 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. Most of his coaching career was in the era of institutionalized segregation in the American South, but Rupp continued to resist recruiting black players even after UK's student body had integrated in the 1950s, and after other SEC schools had started recruiting and playing black players in the 1960s. Other colleges had been using black players before the 1960s (e.g., Wilt Chamberlain at the University of Kansas). Rupp did not recruit his first black player until 1970. 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 widely seen as a sign of change in the game. Many basketball historians consider that game to be a beginning of the sport's modern era. 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.
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