A real Man of God Malice in Wonderland a real man of god

LOYAL

TO

THE

LEGEND

LEXINGTON

1993




The famous brown suits still hang in his closet. The chair where he used to read The Wall Street Journal and greet his grandchildren still occupies the living room. The new, red silk pajamas his wife never got to give him for Christmas lie folded in a box in the spare bedroom.

There's even a listing still in the Lexington phone book: Adolph F. Rupp. But it's not a line to hoops heaven.

This is strictly purgatory.

Fifteen winters after Rupp's death, his memory languishes amid published accusations that he was a racist. Even if Rupp's sins were real -- and his family vehemently denies they are -- the Baron no longer is around to expiate them. His family is, however.

Quietly, the family suffers -- right along with Rupp's image.

Of all the things Rupp left behind, the legendary coach is best reflected in his family in Lexington -- in grandson Chip's biting sarcasm and keen basketball mind; granddaughter Farren's gentle devotion to family; son Herky's face and drawl; and widow Esther's abiding love of basketball.

Yet none of the writers who have savaged Rupp's reputation in the last two years has asked any members of his family for the other side of the story, Herky says. It's as close to the other side as anyone can get anymore.

It hurts to watch helplessly as Rupp's memory is tarnished, Herky says.

"Nobody bothers to check with us. You're just non-existent," he says. "It's as if when Daddy died, the entire family died."

The Rupps want to bury the dead, to see Adolph laid to rest in peace once again. It's the toughest part about loving a local hero: Heroes die more than once.

The last game
Fifteen winters have passed since the death of Adolph Frederick Rupp, the man who for decades dominated Southeastern Conference basketball. His name appears on the floor of the arena in downtown Lexington where the SEC Tournament is being played this weekend.

His family gathers in the den of his son's house on the south side of the city to watch . . .

Fifteen basketball seasons ago, not far along in the 1977-78 basketball season, some of the same family members huddled around a radio, listening to a Kentucky basketball game. The radio was in a hospital room. The man in the bed was Rupp.

The Baron of the Bluegrass, the master of the fast break, the man who compared having to stop for red lights to losing to Tennessee, was comatose.

As his family kept vigil, the voice of longtime Wildcat announcer Cawood Ledford filled the room with play-by-play of the Kansas game. Kentucky was ahead, and the University of Kansas, Rupp's alma mater, was running out of time.

So was Rupp. Herky remembers there being 14 seconds left in the game when Adolph lost his battle with cancer.

Fifteen years is a long time in college basketball. Today's coaches rely on relentless TV exposure to burn their images on the MTV generation from which they recruit. Those who haven't been on ESPN in a year aren't famous anymore.

Fifteen years is a lifetime.

Since Rupp died, the Wildcats have had three coaches, won an NCAA title and came perilously close to the death penalty for alleged recruiting violations.

To the new breed of fan, Rupp is little more than a place to play basketball, Farren says. When Chip handed his credit card to a twentysomething gas station attendant last year, her face lit up.

"Oh! Rupp!" she said. "Like the guy who used to coach here?"

That was my grandfather, Chip told her.

The clerk was overcome.

"He was the greatest guy who ever coached here," she said breathlessly.

"Next to Rick Pitino."

The Rupps laugh at that one, although the implications are unsettling. As fickle as memory can be, it beats the alternatives. A whole new generation of basketball fans who never saw Rupp coach must rely on the subjective accounts of others when judging the man's legacy.

Many of the stories, especially the more recent ones, have not painted a pretty picture. Was Rupp a racist? It's not a new debate. Still, his critics have assumed a more biting tone. Their broad and unflattering characterizations of the Baron infuriate his survivors.

For Rupp's failure to recruit many black players, Sports Illustrated called the coach a "white supremacist."

That rankles in the big ranch house on Beechmont Drive. "These people never knew my father, and they didn't grow up in Kentucky," Herky says.

Herky, a retired teacher and high school coach who spends his days managing the business of the family's cattle farm in Bourbon County, projects a laid-back image. But his frustration leaks out when he talks about the attacks on his father.

"How can George Will be that ignorant and that dumb?" he says.

Will wrote in 1991 that Rupp had been "a great coach but a bad man." Only a few days earlier, Curry Kirkpatrick of Sports Illustrated had described Rupp in a long feature story as "a charming p.r. rogue (whose) politics leaned more toward the KKK."

When Herky's wife, Linda, pulls out that issue of Sports Illustrated, Farren makes a noise of disgust in her throat, then sighs.

"I don't see how you can even say what they say in there," she tells her mother. "I don't see how you can even say what they say."

A 'victim of the times'?
What would Rupp say if he could read what's been written about him since his death? How badly would the irascible coach with the razor-sharp tongue lash his critics?

Pointless questions. "They never would have written it while he was alive,” Farren says.

"Dad and Mom and my sister, Farren, they get very upset about it," Chip says. "It doesn't bother me. I knew him. He wasn't a racist. He was a victim of the times."

The times were such that simply playing for Kentucky was a vaguely dangerous proposition, Herky says. The Wildcats, with their glorious tradition, were reviled throughout the Southeastern Conference. Road trips to tiny southern towns such as Auburn and Starkville were tense and volatile.

"It was bad enough being white," Herky says, "simply because they hated Kentucky, because we won all the time. That alone was enough to get you killed."

Rupp was concerned about taking black players into the sweltering cracker-box gyms in Mississippi and Alabama, Herky says.

Lexington, the northernmost city in the SEC, was not much better. "It really should have been Atlanta, Ga.," Linda Rupp says.

"Lexington is a Southern town," Herky says. "There is prejudice."

Former UK sports information director Russell Rice said Rupp was concerned about taking black players on the road in the SEC. He worried that he wouldn't be able to find a place where they would be allowed to eat or sleep.

"He thought he might be putting them in danger."

Rice recalled Rupp's recruiting at least 10 black players, including Perry Wallace, who in 1967 became the SEC's first black player. Wallace signed on with Vanderbilt.

Only one black player, Tom Payne of Louisville, signed and played for Rupp. Although Payne became UK's first black player -- he took the court in 1970, two years before Rupp retired -- he was not the first to sign with Kentucky, Herky says.

Rice said Rupp told him in 1967 that Felix Thruston of Owensboro was coming to Kentucky. But Rupp warned Rice "not to let the word out in case something happened" to change Thruston's mind, Rice said.

Something did happen, although Rice is not sure what. "He signed but ended up going out west. I don't know what happened to him."

UK, like every other SEC school, was not attractive to black recruits, Herky says. "Who wanted to be the first black to play in Mississippi or Alabama?"

Rupp bristled when UK president John Oswald told him to recruit more black players. But that was only the reaction of a strong-minded man who "didn't do anything he didn't want to do," Herky says.

"He wanted good players, black or white. He didn't give scholarships for political purposes."

The Rupps get started talking about this and they go on and on into the wee hours of the morning, when nothing but West Coast games and ice hockey can be found on ESPN.

They bring out old photos of Rupp's Freeport, Ill., high school team in 1927, which included a black player. They bring out The Rupp Tape, a cassette on which Rupp tells the story of his life in interviews with Rice.

Their voices rise.

This hurts.

The Rupps are a close family. They loved the old man -- Chip and Farren called him Pop -- and they revere his memory. They resent remarks by Rick Pitino in his new book, Full-Court Pressure, in which the popular UK coach seems to perpetuate Rupp's racist image with a sly, back-handed comment.

Pitino writes that "Adolph might not agree" with "what we're trying to do at Kentucky."

Apparently, Pitino is referring to recruiting black players. The Kentucky coach implies in his book that Rupp is the reason UK has a hard time signing Louisville talent.

Herky almost called a news conference to respond to the book. The others are more upset about the magazine articles.

"You can't label people like this and wreck people's lives," Linda says. It's unfair to dismiss a complex man in simplistic terms, the Rupps say.

Rupp spent much of his spare time reading Forbes magazine and Kipling, visiting the Shriners Hospital for Crippled Children and handing out free passes to the Shriners' circus to inner-city children of all races.

The Sporting News columnist Dave Kindred, a former sports editor for The Courier-Journal who covered Kentucky basketball for years, cited Rupp's "good-hearted" work for the Shriners when he came to the coach's defense on Dec. 22, 1991.

Kindred wrote that he was "not buying" Kirkpatrick's and Will's descriptions of Rupp.

"The whole thing is," Farren says, "if Pop was prejudiced, part of that would have been instilled in us, and it wouldn't have bothered us."

Chip Rupp's dream
It's the final game of the 1993 42nd District Tournament. Lexington Catholic vs. Sayre. Herky, Linda and Farren sit on the top row of bleachers at Catholic's gym, backs against the wall. Chip sits far below, on the home team's bench.

This is as close as Adolph "Chip" Rupp III comes to his dream of being a big-time coach. He is a volunteer assistant for Catholic.

Chip, who at age 26 has been "waiting to be a basketball coach as long as I live," sells spinal implants instead. He thinks it has something to do with his name. Coaches generally are an egotistical lot and don't want to be upstaged.

"They don't want to take on some spike-haired kid named Rupp," Chip says.

Being related to a legend has its ups and downs. The ups include dancing on your name. Farren -- a member of UK's halftime dance troupe, the UK Pom Squad, until graduating last May -- can boast of having graced the Rupp Arena floor with footwork as fancy as Jamal Mashburn's or Travis Ford's.

"It was an eerie feeling," she says, smiling. "I was the tallest on the squad, so I was right in the middle, dancing right on the words, 'Rupp Arena.' "

Most of the time, however, being a Rupp means little -- good or bad. "We feel like the invisible family," Herky says.

Despite their frustration over the Baron's treatment in the national media, the Rupps have remained largely silent. Unless you've paid close attention, you might not have realized five members of Rupp's family still live in Lexington.

So it was with a gas station attendant who could not believe Linda was related to Rupp -- or that The Man in the Brown Suit had any relatives remaining in Lexington.

"I don't know where they think I ought to be," Linda says, "or what I ought to be doing."

It's all in your perspective. Fifteen years might seem like a long time to the average fan, but the Rupps don't see it that way. It seems to them as if Adolph died only yesterday. "Time kind of stood still for us," Linda says.

Rupp's widow, Esther, has kept the house the same as Dec. 10, 1977, the day the coach died. The brown suits still hang in the closet, the plaques still hang on the walls.

The plush, blue chair he sat in whenever he attended a UK game sits in Chip's old bedroom.

"A lot of things make it seem like he's still here," Herky says. The Rupps have tried to hang onto things that might someday be museum pieces.

Meanwhile, they root for the Cats. "First of all, we're Kentuckians," Herky says. "We love the state, we love UK."

You won't catch them jumping up and down, yelling and cheering. They watch games analytically. They can't help it. It's the coach in them.

"Did you watch the game?" Esther will say.

"They didn't rebound too well, did they?"

After Lexington Catholic's team, wearing a hauntingly familiar shade of blue, beats Sayre for the district title, a friend of the family spots the Rupps as he makes his way down the bleachers.

"Got a coach in the family -- another one," the man says, nodding toward Chip as he shakes Herky's hand.

"He's got it in his system," Herky says in that drawl.
SCALPING

IS

THE

TICKET

NASHVILLE

1993




"I'm a businessman," M.C. McCabe says. His business suit is a Super Bowl jacket, a World Series shirt and brand-new Kentucky Wildcat basketball shoes.

If that seems unorthodox, consider this: The business McCabe is doing on the streets of Nashville is illegal in some states -- including Kentucky.

He's a ticket scalper.

McCabe, 37, of Minneapolis, chose to hang out at the NCAA Tournament Southeast Regional this weekend because this is where Kentucky -- that big-name team with the rabid fan following -- is playing.

"Instead of buying gold and waiting for it to go up in value, I bought some Kentucky gold," McCabe says, holding aloft a stack of tickets more than 6 inches thick.

Welcome to Tennessee, where ticket scalping is legal and businessmen such as McCabe can do their job in peace.

The classified sections of both Nashville newspapers have been bloated with items advertising tickets for sale -- precious few of them at the $25 face value.

And the sidewalks and hotel lobbies have been swarming with scalpers, many of whom go about their work brazenly and some of whom advertise their goods with hand-lettered signs.

Scalpers, many of whom appeared to be advertising seats in the Vanderbilt University alumni section at Memorial Gymnasium, were asking as much as $300 a ticket.

One had left printed fliers at the front desk of the Marriott, where the Kentucky team and many of its fans are staying.

"HEY KENTUCKY FAN!" the flier said. "If you are willing to pay $300 each for two seats . . . then you want to see the tournament more than I do. Call Mike. . ."

"The scalpers have been out hot and heavy," said Clara Crouch of Louisville, who sat yesterday afternoon among fellow Kentucky fans as they watched tournament games in the Marriott bar.

"When you come out of the arena, there are scalpers on both sides, rows and rows of them."

To many Kentucky fans who came to Nashville looking to trade for better tickets on the street, the scalpers are a source of frustration.

"When you tell 'em you just want to give them face value, they're not interested," said Doris Hardin of Louisville. It angers her.

But McCabe, who has a federal tax number for his business, says he is just making a living.

"There's really nothing wrong with it," he says. Those who sell cars and houses name their price. "They're entitled to earn. This is America."

In case you hadn't guessed, McCabe is a different kind of ticket scalper than those Kentuckians are used to. He carries business cards, cuts deals on his cellular phone while negotiating traffic, stays in a room at a posh hotel and makes enough money doing it to put his two children through private school.

He is articulate and shrewd. And in case you're thinking of taking those tickets from him by force, you should know he holds a black belt in karate.

This is a full-time job for McCabe. His Alternative Sources Inc. across the Minnesota border in Hudson, Wis. -- where scalping is also legal -- offers tickets to concerts, sports and tours.

"As you can see, business is good," he says as he pulls his Ford Explorer around the front of the Marriott. McCabe is on his way to the Vanderbilt campus to give some of his employees on the streets there a new supply of tickets.

Because no games were played yesterday, scalpers and their customers were scarce around the gym. But McCabe's workers had sold 10 seats in an hour just by flagging down motorists, he said.

McCabe, who bought hundreds of tickets in advance, started out with 500 for tonight's game. By late yesterday afternoon he was down to about 350. He didn't expect to have any trouble selling the rest by game time.

At McCabe's asking price of $50 to $125, that would mean total sales of between $17,500 and $43,750 in less than 24 hours.

McCabe didn't have such good luck with the first-round Kentucky game, however. "I ate these," he said, pulling a 6-inch stack of tickets out of a shoebox.

He blamed competition from Kentucky's state high school basketball tournament in Lexington.

McCabe's business is a gamble in some respects, although he does his homework. He bought the tickets to Nashville before he knew whether the Cats would be sent here.

"I was expecting to take a hit on one of the three days," he says.

On the Vanderbilt campus late yesterday afternoon, McCabe went to work on tonight's game.

"You guys looking for tickets?" he asks Rick Johanning of Washington, D.C., as Johanning and his friend, Bruce Clark, walk down the street in front of the gym.

McCabe leans against his idling Ford Explorer as he holds the tickets fanned out in front of Johanning.

"How much you sellin' 'em for?" asks Johanning, a product of Murray State University in Western Kentucky and a devoted Big Blue fan.

"Fifty each," McCabe says.

"Fifty each?" Johanning asks.

He mulls it over. They really don't want to pay more than $25 a ticket, he tells McCabe.

McCabe shakes his head. "That's face value," he says.

BLOOD,

SWEAT

AND

CHEERS

CYNTHIANA

1993
She is the spitting image of her father. Her soft, brown eyes, the chisel of her face, her tiny stature. He's given her everything, it seems. Look carefully at Jennie Doan. It's as close as you'll come for a while to seeing Bennie Doan at a Harrison County basketball game.

Tonight the father is bagging groceries 18 miles away in Georgetown while the daughter does handsprings down the sideline.

He is venturing into the frigid night cradling sacks of food while she gets in formation with the other cheerleaders for an elaborate pre-game dance.

He hears a polite "Thank you" in the dark while she basks in the applause of an adoring crowd.

"It hurts me that I can't go," Doan says. But he's got to work or he can't afford for his daughter to be a cheerleader. And even if he were off, he doesn't like the idea of walking into that gym, with everybody staring at him.

"Daddy, I'm afraid somebody will say something to you," Jennie said the day she asked her father to stay away from the gym.

Becoming a recluse in a town of 6,000 is not easy, but Bennie Lee Doan has been a phantom since trying to scare his daughter off the cheerleading team.

Doan's presence is felt, though. His might be the greatest lesson this school system has taught its students this school year: Ask not what price glory. Ask who pays.

"The world remains a dangerous place," a prerecorded voice blurts over the gym's loudspeaker as the pulsing dance music begins. The gym, all color and noise and motion, is a casino, where losing is exciting and winning costs more than anyone knew.


Bennie Lee Doan woke with a start from the American Dream. "I just went haywire," he said. Strapped and desperate, Doan wrote threatening letters to scare his daughter off the cheerleading team when he thought he would not be able to pay her way to a regional competition.

The handwritten letters, addressed to the principal, cheerleading coach, Doan's father-in-law and Doan's home, threatened death for Jennie if she were not removed from the team.

Doan signed them Trigger Happy.

He was sentenced Jan. 8 for "sending threatening communications through the mail." U.S. District Court Judge Karl Forester, who could have thrown Doan in prison for five years, instead gave him five years' probation.

Factors in the light sentence were that Doan posed no threat to the community and had no previous record, Forester said.

Cynthiana wasn't so lenient. When Doan got home from court, he started getting calls from fast-food restaurants. You really want this much food? they asked. A prank? Already? Doan had to cancel almost $100 worth of orders made in his name.

Since then, his apartment has become his jail cell. He doesn't venture out much except to go to work, he said. People yell things at him.

They just slapped your hand! one said. Murderer! another said. Crazy! a third said.

"I stay in the house a lot," Doan said. "I'm ashamed of what I did. The worst thing of all, I think, is that people won't let it die."

They call him on the phone, they yell at him on the street, they scream from passing cars. Strangers hurled a rock through the window of his home and splattered his car with tomatoes.

Now comes the clincher: Late last month, Charley's Autos Sales of Cynthiana filed suit against Doan in small-claims court for $1,500. The suit, filed Jan. 26, claims Doan defaulted on payments on a car he and his wife bought two years ago.

Doan thinks the dealership targeted him after seeing his Jan. 21 appearance on the TV tabloid show, "Maury Povich."

"They probably think I got some money out of these shows," Doan said. But he cannot profit from his crime -- judge's orders. He said he has turned down book and movie offers and received nothing from TV appearances.

"It just seems like when you're down, people want to keep you down," he said.

But Sheila Carroll of Charley's Autos said the decision to sue was strictly a business consideration. "It's not a vendetta against Bennie," she said. "I didn't even watch him on television.

"I feel sorry for Bennie and his family."

Unofficially, the Doan family began 17 years ago with a stolen glance across the Spark's Super Value.

That's where Bennie first caught the eye of the woman who would be his wife -- he in frozen foods, she behind a cash register. She grinned at him! "That girl -- I tell ya," Bennie thought, rolling his eyes.

Julia Doan grinned at her husband again last week as she handed him the car keys across the counter of the Georgetown McDonald's where she works. He had just finished work and come to get the couple's only car so he could go home.

The Doans live from paycheck to paycheck. No need for a bank account. They grossed $14,000 last year, but every penny was spent before it was earned. They had to get help paying their last electric bill.

Julia made $2,000 for appearing on the TV tabloid show, "Inside Edition." Bennie Doan's attorney, Benny Hicks of Lexington, persuaded the judge to let Julia keep it because she had received the money before sentencing.

Bennie said his wife used the money to pay bills and buy Christmas presents for the couple's two daughters: Jennie, 15, and Sarah, 12. "The kids hadn't had Christmas in six years," Bennie said. They got clothes.

Their father got a University of Kentucky sweat shirt.

Doan said his "bad side" wrote the letters. "They say everybody has a bad side. I don't know."

Of this much he is certain: The pressure to provide for his family suddenly grew too great. Looking for a new job, fixing the family's wrecked car, trying to find decent, affordable housing.

It didn't help that Doan was not taking his anti-depressant medication, BuSpar. But he could not afford to refill the prescription.

"The cheerleading -- it was the straw that broke the camel's back," he said.

Doan, already burdened by a commitment to pay $300 to $800 each year for his daughter to be a cheerleader, felt angry and overwhelmed when Jennie did not shoulder her share of the responsibility. She relied on her family to raise the $250 she needed for a trip to a regional cheerleading competition in Nashville, he said.

"She told me on the Saturday night before I wrote the letters, she said, 'Dad, you've got to come up with the money some way. You'll let the team down,' " Doan recalled his daughter saying.

"She put a guilt trip on me. I fell for it."

Doan's daughter and wife did not want to be interviewed.

One Sunday morning in September after driving his wife to work, Doan returned home and saw the form his daughter was supposed to have filled out each time she sold a pizza kit as part of a fund-raiser.

There were three names scrawled on it -- four, tops. Bennie knew he had sold some. And his younger daughter had, too, hadn't she? But what about Jennie?

He sat down at the kitchen table and stared at the form. Five minutes passed. Then 10. Then 20. After half an hour, Doan rose from the table, got some notebook paper and a pen and began to write.

Tears streamed down Doan's face as the pen traced its wayward path across the paper.

"Do you want to go to a funeral?" he wrote. "Get her off the team at once!"

Doan said he did not recall writing the letters until he woke with tears in his eyes at 3 a.m. the next Thursday, Sept. 24.

"I don't know how somebody could write something like that," he said.

Doan took a break from work that morning and called Cynthiana Police Chief Joe Barkley to confess.

Barkley thinks Doan remembered all along that he had written the letters. In a meeting with parents, police, FBI and school officials the night before his confession, Doan had appeared nervous, Barkley said.

Police made it clear they had a suspect. When the meeting ended, Barkley said, Doan approached him.

"I suppose you're gonna want to talk to me," he said.

"Yeah," Barkley told him coolly, like a cat toying with a mouse. "But not right now."

Barkley regrets the media circus Doan's crime created. "The whole thing got blown out of proportion," he said.

"The man had no intention of ever hurting anybody. He just was asking for help in the only way he knew how."

Barkley said he thinks Doan was more victim than criminal.

"A whole lot of the blame belongs right there in the school system, where they put the pressure on for these things."

The Doans will undergo family counseling, Bennie said.

Ever so slowly, father and daughter are patching things up. Jennie wouldn't speak to Bennie at first, but three days before his sentencing they had a tearful reconciliation. Both apologized and promised to do better.

"She told me last night, she said, 'Daddy, I love you.' " Doan said last week. "It just about broke my heart.

"She understands."

They still live in different worlds. Doan's is a life devoid of three-pointers, breakaway slam dunks and cheering. He is a grown man. He goes to work. He goes home. He sits and listens to the end of the game, and in his mind he can see his daughter leading cheers as the team's star senior, Jerry Fogle, breaks a 31-year-old school scoring record.

It's a cold February night, but the 'Breds are hot, lifting their record to 17-9. It has been a good season.

After the game, Jennie dances with her boyfriend. And as much as she looks like her father, there are these glaring differences: He has a 5 o'clock shadow. And she has a spark in her eyes.