Published in Sport Magazine, January 1954, pp. 10-11, 88-89

by Jimmy Breslin

THE loud explosions you hear in the vicinity of Lexington, Kentucky, these early winter evenings originate at the University's $4,000,000 coliseum where the school's basketball team is back in business again after a year of enforced idleness. Kentucky's absence from the college basketball wars during the 1952-53 season was not its own idea. It came as the result of a disciplinary rap by the NCAA, which charged the school with a variety of violations of the written purity code. Kentucky accepted the probation by dropping the varsity sport for a year and then settling down to a long winter of burning resentment.

Some of the folks in Kentucky were convinced the suspension was just the NCAA's way of keeping the Wildcats from running off with another basketball championship. University officials were sullen if not silent about the penalty, terming it "far more harsh than any that has ever been inflicted upon a member for violation of NCAA rules in the past." Adolph Rupp, the basketball coach, sat in his gleaming office in the huge new coliseum on the campus and plotted ways of getting even for the rap which he considered unjust.

Rupp admits bitter resentment of the NCAA action which ruled his team off the court last season. His goal now: the NCAA title.

The Baron is out to get even in the best way he knows how - on the basketball floor. He has assembled a team which may be as strong as any he has had at Kentucky. The club has been running and shooting and dribbling for a year now, waiting for the chance to get back into competition. The players, innocent victims in the disciplinary action, are ready to burn up every court in the land - and their coach is eager to show the way.

"There's not going to be any of this point-shaving business by Kentucky this year," he says. "When we run up one of those 95 or 97-point totals against a team - we used to do it often - and there's still a couple of minutes left to play, I'm not going to pull my boys up and have them stand around at midcourt and try to hold the score down so we don't humiliate somebody. We'll just keep playing our game and let those 100-point scores fall where they may. We used to try to be nice about things like that, but those days are gone. We'll play our game right to the last second.

"When the suspension was announced, I said that I wasn't going to rest until the man who said Kentucky couldn't play in the NCAA hands me the national championship trophy. Well, I'm not resting this year - and neither are my boys."

With 12 months to prepare for this season, Rupp has carefully primed and propped his 16-man varsity for the effort of their athletic lives. A veteran lineup, headed by sure-fire All Americans Cliff Hagan and Frank Ramsey, will be Kentucky's answer to the criticism leveled at the school in the past. There is little doubt that coach Rupp considers this year the most important in his career. On the receiving end of so much bad publicity in the past, he makes little effort to hide the fact that he has been itching to turn loose his 1953-54 squad of sharpshooters.

Rupp now is in his 23d year as head basketball coach at Lexington. He has compiled a record of 471 victories and only 82 defeats. For all the things said about Rupp, nobody ever has argued that he isn't one of basketball's top-notch coaches.

"Everybody wants to know what kind of a team I have and how we feel about returning to basketball," he said recently. "Well, I have a team in which I place a lot of confidence. As for our returning, of course I feel fine, and so do my boys. But I'm not telling any secrets when I say I don't think there was a reason in the world for us not playing last year. Anybody who knows the first thing about the University of Kentucky can tell you that. Of course, a lot of people in places like Boston and San Francisco - people who haven't even come near the school - seem to think we should have been punished for one thing or another. But all this is old stuff now. All I care about is my team and the 24-game schedule we have ahead of us. That's all that matters."

The schedule is somewhat of a sore point with Rupp. LSU notified the Southeastern Conference, after this year's schedule was drawn, that it would not meet Kentucky unless the Wildcats played at Baton Rouge. "They wanted us to give up a whole batch of home games," Rupp says.

"It's bad enough we had to sit out a year, but now they want us to spend the next season as a traveling team." LSU is in the conference's southern section, the league dividing its member teams into four divisions for scheduling purposes. "Under the agreement the conference has made, the southern teams - Ole Miss, Tulane, Mississippi State and LSU - were to play at the northern schools this year. That meant we were to have four home games which LSU wanted us to give up. They wanted us to travel south. They're the conference champs now - because we were sitting on the sidelines last year. It was the first time in ten years that Kentucky didn't win the title. It looks to me like LSU just doesn't want to play us.

"I think the whole argument is silly. But it made headlines and that's the way things have been going for a lot longer than I care to remember. Why, I've read things about myself and about the school which are so far from truth that they're laughable - if they weren't so downright vicious. Take that crackpot law suit earlier this year. The fellow who filed it came to and tried to settle for $300 - just pure blackmail. I threw him out and let him go ahead with his suit. The next thing I know my name is being linked with Frank Costello in papers all over the country. Sure, ifs absolutely fantastic. But that's what has been happening to me. The same week, this fellow who put in the suit against me came up with one to copyright the United Nations name. Claims he invented it. But all he had to do was mention me and my name was all over the papers. I'm not going to talk about anything any more. I'm just going to sit here and tend to my knitting."

By his knitting, Rupp means one of the finest-looking squads in Kentucky's star-studded basketball history. Tall, talented and deep, the Wildcats appear to have the stuff of champions. Rupp likes to talk about them. "Let's take a look at this team," he says. "Let's see where we got 'em from, what they do down here in school, and what they do on a basketball court. Let's just see how bad we are and how we've gone out and found the best players money can buy. Let's just see who's telling the truth.

"To begin with, let's see where these boys come from. We can get an idea of the kind of Vicious' recruiting we had to do to get them. We have Hugh Coy. He's a fine sophomore prospect. We had to go all of 18 miles, to Richmond, Kentucky, to get him. Or maybe he just came here because he lives in the state. Of course, with our system here, that's supposed to be impossible. We're supposed to recruit them all. "Dan Chandler is another soph. He comes from 'way out of our territory, too. He comes from Versailles, Kentucky, and that's 12 miles away. Our two All-Americans, Hagan and Ramsey, are from Martin and Madisonville, right here in this state. Out of 22 varsity and freshman players, only two are from out of state. But you never hear much about that, do you?"

Only Tsioropoulos, graduate student from Lynn, Massachusetts, and Jess Curry, a soph from Portsmouth, Virginia, didn't learn their high school basketball in the Blue Grass country. "We don't have to go to Indiana and New York for boys," Rupp comments. "Why we don't even have to look. These boys come to us ... they come to their state university. Why shouldn't they?"

When Rupp told us about the background of his team, he pulled out records and papers to document his words. It's a team he has an intense pride in, a team he feels makes Kentucky's critics look silly - or look like liars. "All of our players are on a normal student grant-in-aid scholarship here, the same as every other school," the Baron says. "This type of scholarship allows the boy books, room, board, tuition and $15 a month in spending money, most of which is used up in laundry bills. Take Hagan, Ramsey and Jerry Bird. They're pretty important boys to the team. Well, to get some spending money, they went out and dug ditches all last summer on a river-diverting project at Wichita, Kansas."

As for Hagan, Ramsey and Tsioropoulos, the boys who were supposedly seniors last year, Rupp has a ready explanation. "Hagan has been in school only three and a half years," he says. "He can't graduate until June because he entered school in a midyear and has to complete his Reserve Officer Training. He has until June for that. Ramsey just wanted to stay. He feels he was robbed of his last year of basketball by the suspension. You try and stop him from playing again. It will mean he will play four years of college sports within a five-year period. Plenty of schools have boys doing that. But we're the only ones who really stir up talk about it. Ramsey comes from a well-to-do family and he wants to remain in school. Tsioropoulos is a graduate student and has a year of eligibility left. He's going to play it. Is there anything wrong there ? You bet there isn't. But try and tell it to somebody."

Rupp is on his favorite subject when he talks about the criticism Kentucky has taken about free-riding athletes. He'll dig into his desk and take out a newspaper clipping which tells about Kentucky players taking such courses as "canoe handling." It doesn't take much imagination to figure out Rupp's reaction to barbs such as this.

"Here they are . . . here's my first five," he says. "I figure we'll usually start Ramsey, Hagan, Tsioropoulos, Willy Rouse and Bill Evans. Now Evans, Tsioropoulos and Hagan are enrolled in the School of Education. And that's just what the course is ... it isn't physical education or anything like that. It simply prepares a boy to be a teacher. The specialized field comes later. The courses include psychology, biology, a language, etc. Look at the rest of the team, too. You see everything from pre-med to commerce."

Evans carried 40 credit hours last year and came away with a straight "A" average. Ramsey averaged well over a "B," as did Tsioropoulos and Rouse. Hagan also made a "B."

But that's the personal and policy side of this Kentucky team. On a strictly talent basis - in basketball matters - how does the team shape up? If there is one weak spot in Rupp's 1953-54 squad, it is the lack of an exceptionally tall man, a seven foot giant. But the Cats appear overwhelmingly fast and loaded with scoring power.

"We are plenty deep," Rupp admits. "Why, I can afford to lose my whole first team on fouls . . . Hagan, Ramsey, Tsioropoulos, they can all foul out. I'll just send in some other guys to take their places and they'll do fine for us."

On one count, the enforced layoff last year helped Rupp. That was with his freshmen - the boys who now are sophomores. "I had a good chance to spend a lot of time with them," Rupp admits. "We had all the practice time in the world. During a normal season, we don't get much of a chance to work on fundamentals. We were too busy getting set for the next game. But last year I'd spend a week on things I formerly only worked on an hour or two. I think it helped these sophs I have now tremendously."

The practice sessions the Wildcats had last year led to four exhibition mtra-squad scrimmages, which were played under game conditions - and in public view. No admission was charged. Some 35,000 spectators turned out for these four games at cage-whacky Lexington. At one workout, the evenly-split squads drew 10,000 free-loading fans, probably the South's biggest crowd of the season.

Kentucky expects to pack its 13,500-seat Memorial Coliseum this year. "I think we'll be sold out for every game we play at home - all 14," Rupp says. "The whole state is hopped up over this team. They know what it means and they know what we've been through. They all think the treatment we got last year was unjust. And they're going to turn out and show us what they think this year. And we'll show everyone what we think."

What Kentucky thinks may be revealed in the news that the athletic department ordered a new scoreboard for the Coliseum this year - one that shows total scores of 100 points or more.

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