Kentucky’s Rupp Arena: A College Basketball Mecca With A Complicated Racial Past

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The Kentucky Wildcats have dominated the competition playing at Rupp Arena, named after U.K.’s most famous coach: Adolph Rupp. Now the campus is debating whether that name should be changed.

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Thousands of people pack Rupp Arena for each University of Kentucky home basketball game. Many fans probably don’t know the complicated racial past of the arena’s namesake: Adolph Rupp.

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Andy Lyons/Getty Images

Thousands of people pack Rupp Arena for each University of Kentucky home basketball game. Many fans probably don’t know the complicated racial past of the arena’s namesake: Adolph Rupp.

Andy Lyons/Getty Images

«I had to do a complete 180 on my opinion that Rupp was indeed a segregationist. I came to realize he was not,» Gabriel said. The documentary is called «Adolph Rupp: Myth, Legend, and Fact.»

But he acknowledges other failings, including that Rupp was known to have used racial slurs.

Confusing and complicated

«That’s what makes it so confusing,» Gabriel says. «He was active in trying to sign Black players, and yet on the other hand it’s been documented that he used inappropriate language.»

It’s partly this complicated picture of Rupp that has dampened debate in Lexington, a progressive college town that removed two Confederate statues in 2017 just blocks from Rupp Arena. The timing has quieted things, too, with school on summer break when the letter was written, and the coronavirus pandemic keeping students away from campus.

Still, students have shown an openness to the change. An op-ed published in the student newspaper in July supported the name change. Sophomore Chandler Wilcox, who is white, says most of his classmates seem to be open to what he calls «listening and learning.»

«Let’s do the research. Let’s figure out, looking back, is there enough evidence to prove that Adolph Rupp intended on not allowing African-Americans in the program? Was he, in fact, racist?» Wilcox says.

In Rupp’s failures to sign a Black player sooner, history professor Derrick White sees a man who set an unfairly high bar for finding a Black player, and whose interactions with Black players and their families clearly left them looking to attend school elsewhere — the result, White says, of what he calls a «racially hostile personality.»

«It’s not so much about the cartoonish, simplistic, racist narrative of Rupp as a Klansman, but rather, Rupp sitting as a sophisticated manager on top of this system of segregation,» he says.

At the end of the day, White says, in sports, coaches are judged for their results.

«We don’t give them credit for just showing up to the game, right? We give them credit if they win,» White says. «The results are that [Rupp] had one Black player in 42 years.»

Since the demands from the African-American and Africana Studies faculty were publicized about a month ago, the conversation on campus has died down, overtaken by worries about reopening amid the coronavirus pandemic and whether the fall football season will go on.

The University of Kentucky has already responded in some ways to the letter. The school announced earlier this month that it would commit $10 million over the next five years to study issues of race and inequality and says it is meeting with the faculty to group about other concerns about equity and inclusion.

On the Rupp name, no word yet.

• adolph rupp
• college basketball
• University of Kentucky