Sez MEE: Amazing what you learn channel surfing

Did you watch the Super Bowl? If so, did you watch the halftime show? I can answer these questions with a yes and a no.

Yes, I watched the Super Bowl. It featured quite an exciting finish. However, I did not watch the halftime show.

That's rather typical for me, I really don't care to watch a mini concert on TV. Instead, I do the channel change-a-roo to find something more entertaining. On Super Bowl Sunday, the more interesting show was a history of SEC basketball.

A large part of that show was highlighting Kentucky and Adolph Rupp. It's learning about Rupp that was quite interesting.

There seems to be a belief that Adolph Rupp, the namesake for Rupp Arena, home of Kentucky Wildcats basketball, was quite the racist. Although there probably is some truth to him being racist to some degree, if remarks he is said to have made are accurate, his inaction in bringing in basketball players of color appears to be more out of safety than prejudice.

Tom Payne was the first African American basketball player at Kentucky, joining the program in 1969. For the SEC, he was in a group of three players who were “first” at their respective schools. The first players of color in the SEC were Perry Wallace and Godfrey Dillard at Vanderbilt in 1966.

Before then, there was no way any school in the SEC was going to bring in black players. Although Brown v. Topeka Board of Education ended legal segregation, the practice stayed around for quite some time.

An argument against Rupp, though, is that Kentucky's football program was the first one in the SEC to integrate, doing so in 1966. So, if there wasn't an issue with football, why would there be one with basketball?

Highlighted in the show was Kentucky's 1966 loss to Texas Western in the NCAA championship game. That was when the starting lineup for Texas Western was all black and the Wildcats were all white. As things turned out, this game became a bigger deal of black vs. white now than it was then.

The show also noted that Rupp was making some efforts in recruiting black athletes for a number of years before landing Payne. One of those was Wes Unseld, a hall-of-famer who opted to stay at home and go to Louisville. The Louisville program was integrated before Kentucky's.

Also, it was also shown that Kentucky had played teams with black athletes before, including taking on a University of Seattle team that featured Elgin Baylor.

An interesting thing about Rupp is that he coached at the Pontiac Holiday Tournament. He was a high school coach at Freeport when the Pretzels played at the PHT in 1928. They lost in the quarterfinals and went home. Later that season, Freeport finished third at the state tournament.

Rupp started a player named William Mosely on his Freeport team. Mosely was the first African American to play at Freeport, and the second to graduate from that school.

After four years at Freeport, Rupp left for Kentucky in 1930.

What's interesting is that there was a different postseason tournament taking place about that time in Illinois. The Southern Illinois Conference of Colored High Schools existed from at least 1930 through the middle 1940s.

You see, there were segregated high school is Illinois from the early 1900s until at least 1967 with the closing of Sumner High School in Cairo.

It's interesting to think that Illinois had segregation for a long part of the 20^th century.

So, was Adolph Rupp a racist? Again, given the time he grew up and when he was coaching, it can be understood that there was likely something to that belief. Even so, I think he might have been given a bad rap for waiting so long to integrate his basketball program.

There were so many factors to consider when trying to integrate his program, and because he wanted to win more than worrying about political correctness, it's easy to understand why was in no hurry to make the changes.

This article originally appeared on Pontiac Daily Leader: Erich Murphy Sez MEE: Amazing what you learn channel surfing