Published in Esquire Magazine February 1943 , pg. 53, 136-137.

As Adolph Frederick Rupp, the man in the brown suit, and Rear Admiral John Downes of Great Lakes were riding in a taxicab to the Kentucky-Great Lakes basketball game at Louisville last winter, "The Baron," as he is known to his friends, remarked: "My boys are just a lot of pore Ii'l mountain boys, admiral, and I just hope your boys won't treat 'em too rough, or they might get rough, too."

That illustrates as well as any incident I know of him, Rupp's knack of making a combat out of basketball, and of grating up a profitable feud with his adversaries. Since coming out of Kansas twelve years ago he has won a large and enthusiastic following of enemies who call him "The Human Loud Speaker." During this time, his mountain boys have piled up 195 victories against 49 Iosses while meeting the best competition available from all over the country. They have won six Southeastern conference titles in the last ten years, and were the first team from the South to play in Madison Square Garden. Three times they have represented the South in the North-South Sugar Bowl game, and last March they trimmed Illinois' Big Ten champions in the Eastern NCAA play-offs at New Orleans.

On finishing his career as guard on the University of Kansas team, which was undefeated in 1923, Rupp told his coach, Dr. 'Phog" Allen, that he planned to follow coaching as a career. "The Midwest is full of good coaches, Adolph," Dr. Allen told him. "Why don't you go down South? There's some real missionary work to be done down there. If you talk basketball day and night and win your share of games you'll make a name for yourself."

The Baron has made good on all three counts. He has talked basketball incessantly; he has won his full share of victories; and he has made a name for himself. Most of Rupp's crowd-building strategy is based on the idea of getting people to talk basketball. When The Baron, an imposing and dignified figure, enters the gym there is always a chorus of boos from his renowned "heckling society." People with a grating, rasping disposition always attract much attention to themselves, command response in crowds; and regardlass of whether this is Rupp's natural charcteristic or whether he puts it on as a profitable stage presence, he always has to "take it" on the cage floor. But he is willing to take the barbs since it stimulates enthusiasm for his game. To the basketball fans of the South, Rupp is a sort of active human volcano going around spouting irritating verbiage, and naturally they simply have to leave their firesides in cold winter nights to go out and boo him.

In the past, the teams simply came and filled their engagements with each other; the papers dutifully carried an advance story and perhaps a one-column cut. The coaches exchanged perfunctory greetings and that was about all. But the man in the brown suit changed all that. Now when The Baron brings his boys to town, there is no mistaking that something prodigious is in the offing. The papers for weeks have been writing about himm and the fans and village urchins have been thinking up choice invectives to hurl.

The Baron's technique for creating these situations is simple enough. His medium is the newspapers. Rupp has one standing rule about newspapermen: "The office door is always open." His theory is this: "Some coaches blame the failures of their teams on the sports writers. This is entirely unfair. A sports writer is simply after news. If one boy stands out in the game it's natural that he should get the headlines. The winner of a horse race makes the news, not the others."

Such a man, of course, is good copy. Somehow he always manages to turn every game played by his Wildcats into a vendetta that smacks of a mountain feud. He engineers a special kind of feud for each team. Naturally he likes to go for Indiana, the seedbed of basketball. "Tomorrow," he will say, "the Philistines cross the River Jordan (the Ohio) and pass into the Holy Land." Indiana is the "Holy Land" of basketball to The Baron because of the State's proud basketball boasts, and he likes to irritate the Hoosiers.

He has a promising little mountain feud coming along with West Virginia because he made the claim that the Mountaineers dimmed the lights at his end of the court when his boys were shooting that way the year before last. "And when they got the ball and started up the floor, the lights came on as bright as a saloon on Saturday night!"

Rupp also professes to hate Roy Mundorff of Georgia Tech, whose-team rarely beats his, but there is invariably a big crowd when the Engineers come to Lexington or the Cats go to Atlanta. Mundorff is a small, waspish, highly technical chap who has been a big shot on the national basketball rules committee for years. He and Rupp always have it hot and heavy over the officials, and this is always just about the last item of business disposed of before the teams take the floor for a hitch. The only time Rupp failed to get a pregame squabble out of Mundorff was the time the Wildcats went to dedicate Tech's new gym a few years back and The Baron got himself locked up in one of those new-fangled automatic johnnies! He didn't get out to the floor until the game was nearly half over!

Students and newspapermen are reminded of a mastiff and a terrier when the burly Rupp and the midget Mundorff get going, but Mundorff isn't the only stooge for one of Rupp's profitable rows. Last year the Kentucky-Vanderbilt games at Nashville and Lexington found both the pore li'l mountain boys and their opponents getting so rough that the game was dropped for a year, though they've patched it up now and this year they meet at Lexington, January 26, and at Nashville, February 1.

But these feuds are merely skirmishes beside the feud with Tennessee. This school didn't do much in basketball until about five years ago when quiet, bespectacled Johnny Mauer, who had preceded Rupp as Kentucky's coach, went there to take over basketball.

Kentucky and Tennessee always have been bitter football rivals, and Rupp, with an eye for business, saw no reason why this rivalry shouldn't be transplanted to the basketball floor and pay dividends. Finally Major Bob Neyland, then the director of athletics at Tennessee, tired of Rupp's aspersions at the expense of the Vols and gave Mauer carte blanche to go out and get himself a basketball team. Among his scholarships, (he gave one to Bernie Mehen of Wheeling, West Virginia, who brought along his kid brother, Dick, who turned out to be even better than Bernie.

Tennessee soon began making trouble for Kentucky. The teams had broken even in their home-and-home series for the last three years, but in the 1941 conference finals at Louisville, Mauer obtained an abundance of revenge by slipping Rupp a 36 to 33 jolting.

But instead of growing sour about this new rivalry, Rupp simply cashed in on it characteristically. Now a Kentucky-Tennessee basketball game, which used to draw 1,500, packs them to the rafters at either Lexington or Knoxville. And there's no telling what these games will draw when Kentucky completes a new million dollar fieldhouse, now in the blueprint stage for the duration, which will seat 8,000.

Although beyond a doubt the most hated college basketball coach in Dixie, Rupp is a public hero in Lexington. For all his strife and contention, he takes an active and articulate interest in civic affairs, belongs to the Kiwanians and is a patron of the arts. Formerly a feudist with the footballers in his drive to stir up interest in basketball in the South, he has buried that hatchet to the extent of promoting a high school all-star ame every December for the benefit of the town's crippled children's hospital. In this activity, The Baron is being no mere Babbitt. His only son, two-year old Adolph Jr., or "Hercules," has been a semi-invalid since birth. Tough as he is in combat, the man's brusque and polemical exterior covers soft spots.

That he possesses personally the raw courage that is evident in his victorious teams is indicated by this incident of the bitter Winter of 1941. Rupp came down with the flu on the eve of the game with Clem Crowe's Xavier Musketeers of Cincinnati. The school physician ordered him to the hospital. Running a temperature of 104, Rupp went under protest. The next afternoon, however, he happened to see an optimistic statement by Crowe in the paper predicting victory.

"Where's my pants?" The Baron yelled furiously to his nurse. "I'm getting outta here I" That night, bundled up like Amundsen, he sat on the bench, quaking violently with chills. Kentucky won the ball game, but Rupp went back to the hospital to wrestle with pneumonia.

As would be expected from so dynamic a personality, The Baron dominates his teams on the floor. His players are so many marionettes in the hands of this burly man who runs the show even though confined to the bench. The fans know who's boss the moment The Baron, bowing to right and left, strides majestically in behind his players as they take the floor, meanwhile casting his contemptuous glares in the direction of his hecklers.

Prior to putting the University of Kentucky on the basketball map, Rupp coached for a year at the Marshalltown, Iowa, and five years at the Freeport, Illinois, high schools. His Freeport teams won 81 and lost 11 games.

Although he played the zone defense in college, he thinks it is now on the way out. He prefers a shifting "man-to-man" in which a player can "switch off" his man in an emergency. His teams alternate a fast and slow break, depending on the defensive setup and which man gets the ball. As Elmer Lampe, Georgia coach, says: "They'll slow-break on a few plays, and then when your defense moves up leisurely to meet them, they'll fast-break you dizzy."

The Baron's system features a five-man offense with two big fast guards who can shoot long or come down to 'set up' plays or drive in for follow shots. He likes his centers big, but will use little men, like Ermal Allen who weighed 155, at forward. Rupp was one of the fist college coaches to use the screening block in which there is no actual contact. In 1938 when Long Island University beat him 57 to 41 in Madison Square Garden, his team had numerous fouls caIled on them for screening. That is the custom in the East-to calI a foul even when there is no contact on the play. Now, however, nearly all of the leading teams use a modified screen, and it's becoming o.k.

Condition is the main thing The Baron stresses. An ideal basketbaIl player, he says, "should have the footwork of a boxer, catch and throw a baIl with the 'give' and deftness of Rabbit Maranville, and be as tireless as Glenn Cunningham." He always carefuIly watches his opponents in the warm-up before a game. He is wary of any team that handles the baIl smoothly in warm-up. "If I they don't drop it and throw it away in practice, they aren't likely to do it in a game," he avers. Although a Westerner, he uses many features of the East's open style of play. He differs, however, with Eastern coaches, notably Nat Holman, in his manner of catching the ball. Holman teaches the openhand method, but Rupp insists that the spin can be controlled better with palms cupped, as Rabbit Maranville caught pop flies.

Take good material, good competent coaching and good conditioning, and add the psychology and gab of a natural-born showman, and you have old "Rupp and Ready" and the secret of basketball's rise to glory at the University of Kentucky. The Baron has proved by demonstration that a man himself and his game can flower and thrive on controversy and contumely.

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