Friday, Jan. 28, 2005 | 10:05 a.m.
The Great
Louisville
The 12th-ranked Cardinals have belted five of their past six foes by an average of 38 points. Good luck, Tulane, on Saturday.
The Good
Al Skinner, Boston College coach
A late rally against Providence on Wednesday enabled the eighth-ranked Eagles (17-0) to stay undefeated, sharing that distinction with Duke.
Did you know that Skinner played with Julius Erving, his boyhood idol, on the New Jersey Nets in the old ABA?
The Bad
Rutgers
Ahead by 18 points at the half, the Scarlet Knights completely wilted at home in a loss to Syracuse on Monday night. The Orange, by the way, was the first in the country to 20 victories.
The Ugly
The Pac-10
Recent meltdowns by UCLA and Oregon have sullied the league's image, as only Washington (sixth) and Arizona (seventh) were among the top 20 in the recent Rating Percentage Index.
With Kansas (first), Oklahoma State (fourth) and Oklahoma (10th) in the top 10, the Big 12 has surged to become our conference of choice. ACC fans, occupy the top spot then pop off.
Thad Jaracz will not rush to the movie theater nearest him in March to view someone's latest depiction of Kentucky coach Adolph Rupp and the Wildcats' 1966 national championship game against Texas Western.
Jaracz was a 6-foot-6 sophomore center on that Kentucky team, known as "Rupp's Runts," which lost, 72-65, to the school now known as Texas-El Paso.
It was the first time a team with all-black starters played against a squad with all-white starters in an NCAA tournament title game.
Widely hailed as an epoch in the development of the game and progression of society, Rupp's reputation has been subjected to heavy doses of criticism in the decades since that game in College Park, Md.
The amount of evidence gathered to separate myth from fact, or vice versa, is immense. One Web site devotes more than 100 pages to Rupp and racism.
According to veteran college basketball writer Billy Reed, ESPN and CBS "botched miserably" documentaries of Rupp and the ramifications of that game, and books and articles on the subject have been "misrepresented horribly" over the years.
In the current issue of Basketball Times, Reed wrote that he expects the March film to be the "Hollywood version of the worst-reported story in college basketball history."
Tom Kron, a teammate of Jaracz's, told Jaracz that he recently viewed a script of the movie and reported that it reflects negatively on nobody but Rupp.
That didn't surprise Reed, who has seen facts of the game misrepresented, distorted and blown out of proportion " ... by a younger generation of journalists who weren't there," he wrote, "don't know what they're talking about and rely only on mistruths that have only gotten worse as they have been handed down over the years."
A bitter Jaracz told Reed that he's tired of having words put into his mouth.
"I mean, don't tell me what I said or thought or did," Jaracz said. "I think I know more about that than anyone."
Not that anyone cared. Nobody involved in the production of the movie contacted Jaracz for his input about that team, that time or Rupp.
"I used to give interviews about it," Jaracz told Reed. "But I stopped when I realized the reporters already had their minds made up. They didn't want to hear the other side. I finally got tired of it. ... They don't believe me when I tell them the truth, so I just don't talk about it anymore."
From his condo Thursday in Encino, Calif., legendary UCLA coach John Wooden said seeing that movie will not be high on his priority list, either.
"As far as his feelings (on race), I really don't know," Wooden said of Rupp. "I couldn't say one way or another. But most sports movies aren't very good. In my opinion, they do things. They change (facts) around.
"Like in 'Hoosiers.' I knew Marvin Wood, the coach, and he was never in trouble. He was never suspended. And the star player didn't have an alcoholic father. So many things weren't true. They do that in movies about individuals."
Kentucky defeated Duke, another all-white team from the South, in a national semifinal to advance to the title game.
"Had the Blue Devils played Texas Western for the title instead of Kentucky, revisionist historians never would have blown the game into an epic racial struggle," Reed wrote, "mainly because Duke coach Vic Bubas wasn't nearly as easy to stereotype and caricature as Rupp."
As an unsocial disciplinarian -- who made at least one of his enemies say, upon hearing of Rupp's death, he'd want to make the trip to Lexington just to make sure that it's "the Baron" in the box -- Rupp made for an easy target.
Rupp, at 76, died from cancer in 1977.
Jaracz told Reed that he never heard Rupp make a racist comment during his entire Kentucky career.
"He just wanted to win," Jaracz said. "He cared about that more than anything."
Which legendary coach Red Auerbach addressed in his current book, "Let Me Tell You a Story: A Lifetime in the Game," written with John Feinstein.
"He did hate black players -- who couldn't play," Auerbach said. "He also hated white guys who couldn't play, blue guys who couldn't play and green guys who couldn't play. He hated Jews who couldn't play, Catholics who couldn't play and Muslims who couldn't play.
"That was it. All these people who never met the guy said he was a racist. I knew the guy. I traveled with him, spent time with him. I never saw any sign from him that indicated to me that he was a racist or bigot in any way."
The face of the game started changing before '66.
In 1958, when Rupp won his last NCAA title, Seattle's Elgin Baylor was the best player on the Louisville court at the Final Four.
In '61 and '62, Cincinnati, 75 miles north of Lexington, Ky., won championships with teams led by black stars Tom Thacker, Tony Yates, George Wilson and Paul Hogue.
In '63, Loyola of Chicago had four black starters on its title team. In '64, Kentucky was upset in the NCAAs by an Ohio University team built around outstanding black players.
That spring, Rupp started recruiting Unseld. If that wooing had been successful, Unseld would have started at center against Texas Western instead of Jaracz.
Former Georgetown coach John Thompson, on an April 2002 documentary on CBS, said it is unfair to place a racist tag on Rupp.
"Adolph Rupp was not responsible for discrimination," Thompson said. "Our society was responsible for creating an environment which was conducive to accept that."
A few months after the game, Vanderbilt signed Perry Wallace and North Carolina inked Charlie Scott, two African-American pioneers in Deep South integration. The next national champion with five black starters was Louisville, in 1980.
Pat Riley, a Miami Heat executive who started as one of the Runts and later earned acclaim as an NBA coach, said on the '02 CBS segment that time had given him perspective of that '66 title game.
"Maybe (Texas Western) was playing for something a hell of a lot more significant," he said. "And if they were, then the right team won."
After Rupp failed to sign Unseld and several other black prospects, he got 7-2 center Tom Payne to become the first African-American player to commit to Kentucky's basketball program on June 9, 1969.
This wasn't a first for Rupp. Documents show he coached at least one black player during his tenure at Freeport (Ill.) High in the 1920s. Don Barksdale, from UCLA, played on the U.S. Olympic team that Rupp coached to a gold medal in London in 1948.
Throughout the 1930s, '40s and '50s, he conducted clinics with his Kentucky players at historically black colleges.
Will Robinson worked one of those in Michigan in the late '40s. At Illinois State in 1970, Robinson became the first black head coach of any major sport at a predominantly white university.
"Rupp was a great person to me," Robinson told the Lexington Herald-Leader in 1997. "You hear certain things, and everybody has their likes and dislikes, but I really enjoyed him. He told good stories and jokes, and he shared a lot of his coaching tips."
Professionally, Wooden said Rupp was one of the greatest coaches in the game's history. Personally, Wooden wasn't so fond of the Baron.
Nine days after Solly Walker of St. John's became the first black player to take part in a game in Memorial Coliseum in Lexington on Dec. 17, 1951, Wooden coached the Bruins against the Wildcats in Kentucky.
UCLA lost, 84-53.
"I remember it very well," Wooden said. "It was so disappointing. We couldn't get out of Chicago because of bad weather, and we finally left by bus. When we got to Kentucky, we were late and Rupp didn't give us a chance to warm up.
"We got dressed, then we played. I let him know it. I couldn't have hidden my feelings. I didn't call him names or anything of that sort, but I didn't think it was very sportsmanlike."
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