Published in Inside Kentucky Sports, November 1972, page. 6

by ADOLPH RUPP

I can never watch the approach of another high school basketball season without thinking back to my own playing days. Contrary to what you may have heard, I was not around to hold the peach basket when Dr. Naismith nailed it up, but I have watched this thing a few years, and it's changed, believe me.

I don't mean just the conditions, but the players themselves. They're bigger, they're quicker, and so much smarter than we were - well, than some of us were. Their attitudes are different, too. You take a gifted athlete now, he's no longer in the game just for the fun of it. The influence of the professional game has spread all the way down through the colleges to the high schools.

I made the statement that as long as I am president of the Memphis Tams we will not take a boy who has yet to finish his competition at the university level. What's this got to do with high school players? Well, wait a minute and I'll tell you.

The Memphis franchise has been guilty of two recruiting violations-I call them violations, at least. They pilfered Johnny Neumann from Ole Miss and David Brent from Jacksonville before those boys had finished college. I don't think that sits very well with the schools that lost those boys.

At Kentucky, we lost Tom Payne to the Atlanta Hawks and, of course, I lost the first one in LeRoy Edwards back in 1935. So I've had two of my boys taken - they were mighty fine basketball players, one an All-American and the other All-Conference.

What all this amounts to is that professional basketball has a no-cost farm system. We shouldn't abuse that system by jerking these boys into the pros before they have finished college. I said this in a press conference in Memphis and Mr. Finley (Memphis Tams owner Charles O. Finley) got up when I was finished and said he certainly was glad to hear me say that.

He said the Memphis Tams are not going to do that. There are two ways to build a team. We can buy one or we can build one. Coach Rupp is going to build one, he said. He's my man.

Since then I think we have been able to impress on the other teams the fact that we must have good working relations with the colleges -- there is just no way either system can survive intact with all the bitterness that this raiding caused.

A lot of people said I was selling out when I came to the pros, that I was turning my back on the colleges. This is just wrong. After you give your life to the college game, there is no way you can turn your back on it. One of the reasons I am associated with professional basketball is because it is one of the best ways I know to be a positive influence on the college game. I can tell you one thing, this recruiting from the colleges is going to get a lot saner.

What's this got to do with high schools? Well, when this pro raiding was in full swing, I remember some people asking, "What next? Will the colleges start raiding the high schools?"

Of course that idea is preposterous. But when you stop to think about it, there's a kind of similarity between the two. Any school - a college or high school - owes it to a boy to set him in the right direction, to give him a sense of values.

Now, how can you do that when the talk always comes back to money? When a young high school kid sees the pros dangling that kind of money in front of college players, he starts to wonder what the college is going to offer him, monetary or otherwise.

I think what we have done at Memphis will spread. It can restore the sanity and the security the college game needs. It can reverse this notion of personal gain that fills so much of sports today. You watch.

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