You knew it was a matter of when, not if.
When the Black Lives Matter movement took hold, sparking needed change, it was inevitable the discussion would come around to Adolph Rupp and the downtown Lexington arena that bears his name.
Sure enough, the faculty of UK's African American and Africana studies program sent an open letter to president Eli Capilouto calling for 10 changes, the last (and least important) of which was that the university should rename Rupp Arena.
"The Adolph Rupp name has come to stand for racism and exclusion in UK athletics and alienates Black students, fans, and attendees," it said in the letter.
You won't find me objecting if the name is changed, but you won't find me casting a vote in favor of it, either. On the one side, there is the undeniable fact that in 42 years as Kentucky's basketball coach, Rupp coached just one Black player. On the other side, there's Jim Tucker.
Having been born in Paris, I heard the story of Tucker, a terrific basketball player in the late 1940s for Paris Western High School, the town's segregated all-Black school. When Rupp saw Tucker play at the "Black" state tournament, he was impressed enough to tell both his friend, Western coach William "Chief" Reed, and Tucker that Tucker had college potential.
"He said to me, 'I'd like you to come to Kentucky, but you know our situation here (as part of the segregated Southeastern Conference),"' Tucker recalled for the "Adolph Rupp: Myth, Legend and Fact" documentary in 2005. "'But what I'd like to do is contact some of my friends in the coaching community and see if they might have an interest in you because I think you have the ability to become an All-American and a good basketball player.'"
Indeed, Rupp's friend Chick Davies offered Tucker a scholarship at Duquesne, where Tucker earned All-American honors before playing for the NBA's Syracuse Nationals. He attended Harvard Business School and was a corporate executive with Pillsbury before passing away in Jacksonville this past May at age 87.
In 1953, while Tucker was at Duquesne, the Bourbon County Citizen ran a picture of Rupp as guest speaker at the Western High School basketball banquet after the team had won a national tournament.
Rupp's biggest fault was that he could have been a leader in integrating college athletics, but he was not. It would be another decade before he began seriously recruiting Blacks to play in the segregated SEC, and 1969 before he signed a Black player, Louisville Shawnee's Tom Payne. That was three years after all-white UK's loss to Texas Western's all-Black starting five in the 1966 national title game, but it was one year before Bear Bryant signed his first Black football player at Alabama.
Yes, there are various reports of Rupp using the N-word. And to say he was a product of his times is no excuse. He had coached Black players in high school and on the U.S. Olympic team. He had coached against them without objection outside the SEC.
In Andrew Maraniss' book "Strong Inside,' about Vanderbilt's Perry Wallace, who in 1967 became the first Black basketball player in the SEC, Wallace recalls playing for Rupp in a 1970 all-star game.
"He was extremely welcoming and gracious," Wallace said. "In our talks, I discovered something compelling that I knew many people would not understand. For all his reputation as a classic racist power figure ... what I could see in those short talks and moments was an American man. Yes, white. But more important, a product of all of America's good, bad and ugly."
If the "ugly" is enough to remove his name from Rupp Arena, so be it, but the name isn't there because he was or was not a racist. It's there because he built one of the game's most storied programs, winning over 800 games and four national titles.
And in the 44 years of the building's existence bearing his name, UK has won four more titles with teams starring Black players. To me, there's a certain poetic justice in that _ that basketball has moved forward, that times have changed, and for the better. And they must keep changing. I would like to think Adolph Rupp would have changed, too.
