national fame, but basketball is a simple game. Because Rupp won, he attracted good players; because he had good players, he won. It was years before any school in the South even tried to compete with Kentucky  and then it was largely futile. Rupp's teams won 83 percent of their Southeastern Conference games over 38 seasons.
As late as 1970, when the old man was sick and tired at age 69, his team took a 26-1 record into the Mideast Regional championship game. It had been a difficult season, full of injuries, player suspensions, even Rupp's serious illness with the infected foot. Someone asked how the team had done so well in adversity.
"I think what held this team together was a superhuman effort on my part," Rupp said. "Despite my illness, which looked like it might end my career if not end my health, I was able to pull the boys together. That did it  that, and the boys' extreme loyalty to me."
As vain as that sounded, it was correct. Even at 69, the old man could win games. The best damned basketball coach in the nation. In 1975. his aching foot propped up on a footstool, Rupp remembered the beginning.
He remembered the Kentucky he first saw in 1930 when he came down from Freeport, Illinois, as one of 70 applicants for the Kentucky job.
"Bear in mind that where Memorial Coliseum now stands, there were 55 little Negro one- and two-room shacks. Bear in mind that I got a cab from the Southern Depot to Alumni Gym, and we went through an awful part of town.
"They took me to eat at the university cafeteria and out the third-floor window I could see all those little Negro shacks. I wasn't used to anything like that.
"Then I had four hours to kill. I took a cab to the YMCA. In Freeport I lived at the YMCA, and I had a fine, nice room in a modern, brand-new YMCA. Well. I had a room at the Lexington YMCA that wasn't fit for a cat.
"I said. 'Good gawd almighty, what kind of place is this Kentucky?"
Back home in Freeport, Rupp decided to take the Kentucky job against the advice of his high school principal who correctly pointed out that Freeport High's gymnasium was better than Kentucky's and that Rupp's high school salary of $2,800 matched Kentucky's offer. Rupp made up his mind, he said, during a walk in downtown Freeport.
"I came to the Conoco gas station. Red Greb, the owner,
was up on a ladder adjusting a sign. He was a basketball fan. and he asked what I was doing downtown. I told him I couldn't decide what to do about Kentucky. He said, 'Adolph, you'll be a damn fool if you don't go. You can always go to a better job from Kentucky. It's rare for a high school coach to get a university job.' So I did it."
And forevermore the South was changed. The Kentucky job was open in the first place because football was preeminent. Johnny Mauer, a coach once called "the Moses of Southern basketball" because he made Kentucky the first champions of the South, had quit in a huff when the school gave a mediocre football coach a raise bigger than his. Before Rupp was done nearly 40 years later, they would build a basketball palace with 23.000 seats and name it Rupp Arena.
Gone would be the basketball barns of Auburn and Georgia. Gone would be Florida's bandbox. LSU would raise up a pleasure dome stately, and Rupp would look at Alabama's new playhouse and say, "This is the best basketball gym in the world." Where for three decades Kentucky would be the Southeastern Conference champion almost by acclamation rather than deed, the league became six- and seven-deep with wonderful teams created in the image first made real by Adolph Frederick Rupp.
That day in 1975, Rupp said he had had one misgiving on his arrival in Lexington. "The thing that bothered me was how much smarter these other college coaches would be than me just coming out of high school."
Were they smarter?
"Not smarter. But they had this experience. 1 just wondered if the style of play I brought  the fast break  could cope with theirs." Rupp smiled then. "It worked out nicely."
Like Mauer, Rupp also was an assistant football coach at Kentucky  handling the ends and freshmen. "After four or five years. I quit fooling around with football." he said. "And that's when we started dominating basketball in the South."
By 1944 Rupp was admitted to the Helms Athletic Foundation Hall of Fame. He had coached seven all-America players. And soon enough Kentucky's playmates in the South grew tired of the bully from Lexington and decided to fight back. Schools once were content to hand over basketball to an offensive line coach with games to be played in quonset huts. But now, with Rupp and Kentucky as the model/target, those same schools hired real basketball men and built arenas so glittering that Kentucky's Memorial Coliseum, an 11.500-seat wonder on completion in 1950, became just another pretty place. As the wheel of progress turned full cycle, Kentucky finally built its awesome 23.000-seat arena in 1974 and named it after the creator.
The eternal verity in Rupp's personality was his love of victory. He had no patience with namby-pambies who suggested that playing well was its own reward. "Why in hell do they keep score then?" he said. Even the sorriest opponent put Rupp to worrying, as on the night poor Alabama came to Lexington for Rupp's 1.000th game. Alabama had lost 21 straight games in the conference. It lost two nights earlier by 36 points to a team Kentucky had beaten by 16.
Someone said, "Alabama's not very good. Coach."
"Now. what makes you say that?" Rupp said. His nasal twang was even harsher than normal. His great fleshy ear lobes wiggled in time with his indignations. A scowl formed. He said. "They had Vandy down 14 points with six minutes to go , and they lost only by eight at Baton Rouge. I'm worried, you can bet on that. My stomach feels like I've swallowed a bottle of lye."
The dark clouds over Rupp's brow billowed in menace. "You'd think," the great man said, "that after 40 years I'd get used to it, but I haven't."
Kentucky that night beat Alabama, 86-71. (This article is adapted from the author's book. "Basketball: The Dream Game in Kentucky." published by the Louisville Courier-Journal & Times Co.)