Denny Crum discovered a new dream -- and made me fall in love

The legendary Louisville coach died on Tuesday at the age of 86. His accomplishments and unusual career path changed a basketball program, a university, a city and a community

More than 20 years later, I can still remember the look on my father’s face.

In our family’s living room, we sat around the television and watched the final seconds tick away on another season for the hometown Louisville Cardinals. It was something we did together countless times, using a shared affection for a sport and a team to make the doldrums of winter be slightly more bearable.

But March 7, 2001 wasn’t just another night.

With a 74-61 loss to a forgettable UAB team in the first round of the Conference USA Tournament, one of the worst seasons in the history of Louisville basketball was mercifully over. Ghastly as that 12-19 record was, there was something else on the minds of the 18,000 fans gathered inside Freedom Hall and the hundreds of thousands beyond its walls following along. Denny Crum had just coached the Cardinals for the final time.

It was an underwhelming end to a career that was anything but. Crum had not only built Louisville basketball, but, for all intents and purposes, he was Louisville basketball, leading the Cardinals to two national championships and six Final Fours over the course of a distinguished 30-year run at the school.

To 11-year-old me, none of that really mattered, at least not in that moment. I had heard enough about Crum in my brief life. He wasn’t necessarily the subject of bedtime stories, but my dad made it known to me once I started to show an interest in basketball – this guy with the red sport coat gripping onto the rolled-up program was special.

The version of Crum’s program I grew up with, though, fell short of that lofty portrayal. Outside of a surprise Elite Eight run as a six-seed in 1997, the Louisville I knew was a middling program that would lose its first game in the NCAA Tournament, if it even made the field at all. It reached a nadir in 2000-01, with Crum revealing days before that final game that he would be stepping down at the end of the season.

So as I watched him walk off the court one final time, and overcome with the excitement that Rick Pitino was likely to replace him, I didn’t think all that much about what was about to come out of my mouth.

“Good,” I said. “We can finally be done with that old man.”

After a few seconds of uncomfortable silence, I turned around to my dad. His face was an emotive canvas, a mix of disapproval and disappointment, with a tinge of anger. I had never seen anything quite like it from him before and haven’t since. 

He understood something I very clearly didn’t.

Crum died on Tuesday at the age of 86, leaving behind a legacy and coaching resume as rich as virtually anyone who has ever paced a college sideline. The occasion, somber as it was, served as an appreciation for the man and everything he did. For much of the country outside of Kentucky, it was a final recognition of a coach who, for whatever reason, is too often underrated and overlooked among the sport’s all-time greats.

I didn’t need the reminder, though. Two decades later, I grasped what I was understandably-but-woefully unable to on that fateful night in 2001. This man, more than anyone else, was why I loved college basketball.

Building a powerhouse

Crum leaving such an indelible mark on a basketball program wouldn’t have been a surprise to many. After all, this is the man who none other than John Wooden said was the most cut out to be a coach of any player he ever coached.

But doing so Louisville? That might have been a little harder to believe.

Crum spent the first 34 years of his life in the greater Los Angeles area, growing up in the San Fernando Valley before playing for and later coaching under Wooden at UCLA. He was alongside his mentor for the zenith of the Bruins’ dynasty, helping coach Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and recruit Bill Walton. 

A head-coaching career was less a question than an inevitability. When Louisville was looking for a replacement for John Dromo, who resigned from his post after suffering a severe heart attack during the 1970-71 season, Wooden’s protege was a logical choice, even if it came with some doubts.

“It may not be so simple to accomplish because Denny Crum is likely to learn something next year – that something other than 2,104 miles separate Louisville and Los Angeles,” George Lapides wrote in the Memphis Press-Scimitar in June 1971. “He may even learn it the hard way.”

He never did.

In Crum’s first season, the Cardinals went 26-5 and made the program’s second-ever Final Four. Three years later, they made it back.

His success drew outside interest, the kind that could have made the odd marriage of a southern Californian and a school in Kentucky a brief one. 

One suitor in particular stood out. Shortly after narrowly defeating Crum and the Cardinals in the 1975 Final Four, Wooden abruptly announced he would be stepping down at the end of the season. Not wanting the burden of replacing a legend, Crum balked at the opportunity, but two years later, after Gene Bartow resigned from UCLA to go to UAB, he was offered the job. This time, he could come home to his alma mater without having to live so directly in Wooden’s immense shadow.

Even his boss, Louisville athletic director Dave Hart, intimated he thought that his coach might soon be gone.

“I think he’s a very logical choice for them,” Hart said in 1977, according to the Associated Press. “He’s the best alumnus they’ve got out in the field and he’s got the second-best record of any coach in the country. Denny is closer to this type of thing now than he’s ever been. Every guy seems to have his eye cocked at his alma mater.”

The move many assumed to be preordained never happened, though. Crum opted to stay.

UCLA was hardly the last place to try to enlist his services. At the college level, Illinois and Purdue offered him, as did the New York Knicks and then-San Diego Clippers in the NBA, where his calm temperament and tactical wit would have set him apart from the hordes of other successful college coaches who made the leap to the pros and failed.

But what few would have foreseen as a dream job when he took over in 1971 became just that.

“What I never expected when I originally took the job here was the love I developed for this university and the people of this city,” Crum once said. “After a while, there was just no place else I wanted to be.”

With his feet firmly planted in his new home, Crum transformed the Cardinals from what they had been – a strong, but largely regional program – into a national powerhouse. 

In the 22 seasons before Crum’s arrival, Louisville finished a season ranked just six times. Crum managed the feat in nine of his first 12 seasons. The Cardinals made the NCAA Tournament in 23 of his 30 seasons at the helm and finished with a losing record just once in his first 26 years.

He’s one of only 15 men’s basketball coaches with multiple national championships and his six Final Fours are tied for seventh. That pair of titles, won in 1980 and 1986, earned Louisville recognition as “the Team of the 80s.” Georgetown may have been more culturally relevant and significant, but nobody in that decade was as successful on the court as the Cardinals.

Crum didn’t just compile wins. He served as a trailblazer, someone who helped change and better the sport.

At his first Final Four, he played an all-Black starting lineup, the second time ever that had occurred at college basketball’s marquee event. They weren’t players he had recruited, but in an age when many coaches and programs feared doing so, Crum didn’t, even at a southern school. For years, the Cardinals were known derisively as the “Black Birds,” but they stood as a beacon of opportunity and promise for Black players, particularly compared to in-state rival Kentucky.

There was some kismet, too. In 1976, the NCAA ended its ill-conceived outlaw of the slam dunk. That fall, a local freshman phenom named Darrell Griffith arrived on campus and soon enough, Louisville embraced the rule change in a way few other programs did. Led by Griffith, its 1980 title team was dubbed “The Doctors of Dunk”, turning what had been a largely ground-based, staid game into an aerial ballet. Though they ultimately fell by 13, the Cardinals’ 1983 Final Four loss to Houston is regarded by some as one of the most captivating games in college basketball history, a revolutionary event in which there were 14 dunks, including six in a row at one point. Hank Nichols, an official who worked the game, said “At times, I thought I was in the London blitzkrieg.”

Perhaps his greatest achievement, even more than his titles, was solving what often felt like a geopolitical struggle by helping bring back Louisville’s rivalry with Kentucky. The two hadn’t played since 1959, but after years of lobbying and poking the proverbial bear in Lexington – only to be met with resistance – the two met by chance in the 1983 NCAA Tournament, with a trip to the Final Four on the line. Louisville won in overtime and having built the Cardinals up to a point where they could no longer be ignored or disregarded as a lesser program, the two have played every year but one since, as mandated by state law.

He did it his own way, too, not just by eschewing UCLA for what was an upstart program, but in the manner he went about doing it.

He was calm without being standoffish, confident without being off-putting. He collected western novels by Louis L’Amour, bred horses and was among the founders of Louisville’s alt-weekly newspaper, the Louisville Eccentric Observer. At 68 years old, he competed in the World Series of Poker. In stark contrast to many of the game’s top coaches, including his successor at Louisville, he gleefully faded to the background to allow his players to shine.

"He's not a showman,” Wooden once said of Crum. “Some coaches want to be seen. I wanted people to come watch my players. I think Denny's that way."

A lasting legacy

The 1986 championship, when Louisville and freshman star Pervis Ellison defeated Duke and a then-39-year-old Mike Krzyzewkski competing in his first Final Four, would unexpectedly be Crum’s last trip to a Final Four.

In the years that followed, the program he had lifted to such great heights gradually began to dip.

His version of Wooden’s high-post offense – a scheme built around tall, athletic guards and interior scoring – became less effective after the NCAA adopted the 3-point line for the 1986-87 season, the year after his second and final title. Wade Houston, Crum’s longtime top assistant and ace recruiter, left in 1989 to become Tennessee’s head coach and took his son, Allan, a future NBA all-star, with him. 

Late in his career, Louisville was the subject of two separate NCAA investigations. In 1990, a report from the Louisville Courier-Journal found that from 1981-90, only six of Crum’s 37 scholarship players graduated within the NCAA’s allotted five-year window. A few months later, the Cardinals were one of the subjects of a 60 Minutes story on how top Division I universities had little regard for the academic successes or failures of its major-revenue athletes. Louisville responded by imposing stricter academic requirements of basketball players.

“We have a problem with basketball,” university president Donald Swain told the Courier-Journal in Sept. 1990. “I think we all know that.”

Eventually, losses mounted in a way they never had before in his career. A man who was for so long ahead of the game had watched it start to pass him by.

With a 62-62 record in his final four seasons, new athletic director Tom Jurich refused to extend Crum’s contract, which had two years remaining on it after the 2000-01 season. He believed, not unfairly, the program had fallen in a rut and with Pitino available after resigning from the Boston Celtics, an obvious solution had presented itself.

After a tense standoff, Crum eventually accepted a buyout that would pay him $7 million over 15 years.

“You could just tell the stress was taking a toll on him,” longtime Louisville trainer Jerry May, who had been in his post since 1971, told the Courier-Journal in March 2001. “People kept asking him about things he had no answers for.”

He wasn’t bitter about his ouster, at least not outwardly. He still devoted his time and energy to the university and regularly attended home games, though it often seemed as though he was kept at a certain distance away. Two years after his ignominious and awkward final season, Louisville rose as high as No. 2 in the national polls and two years after that, it was in its first Final Four since 1986. A program that had been Crum’s for so long was unquestionably Pitino’s – and would be for a dozen more years.

For someone who missed the program’s 1980s heyday, my experience watching Crum’s teams probably wasn’t all that different from someone whose only recollection of Michael Jordan’s career was watching him on the Wizards. He wasn’t bad, but he was decidedly more flawed and human than the mythical figure he was often painted as.

I really only knew of Crum through stories, making him an amalgamation of memories that weren’t my own neatly packed into a kind-looking sexagenarian. My connection to the program was through Pitino, the savior who gave me and my friends the thrills and joy that Crum’s teams provided for earlier generations.

But what I failed to realize for so many years was that without Crum, there was no Pitino, who had any number of desperate admirers eager to woo him back to the college level and who wouldn’t have been attracted to the Cardinals without everything Crum had built.

And it didn’t end there. Without Crum and everything he birthed in his uncommonly long tenure, it’s unlikely the Cardinals ever become one of college basketball’s most decorated programs. Were it not for him, Kentucky is probably a state with a singular historic powerhouse and its smaller, urban cousin that hopelessly chases after it.

That intrigue and allure, and the drama and stakes that came with it, are what first pulled me into sports and led me to think writing about them might be a viable career path. But with age, and the numbing effect of scandal after scandal engulfing the program, the fervor I once had for Louisville slowly waned. By the time I started covering Pitt, one of the Cardinals’ ACC rivals, it disappeared. There were often times when the two sides played that I would be rooting in my head and heart against Louisville because I knew there was a more compelling story to write if the Cardinals lost.

Beneath that cynicism, though, are the cherished memories and the passion that created them.

Coming to obsess over college basketball is an act of osmosis in Louisville, a large-on-paper-but-small-in-spirit city with no men’s professional teams. There’s the Derby, sure, but that’s just one day a year (and two minutes of that day, at that). It’s a place that, for better or worse, cares deeply about whether a group of 18 to 22 year olds can put a leather ball through a 10-inch metal circle.

Every now and then, I get asked about why I’m still so drawn to college basketball. It’s a fair question. The quality of play is significantly worse than it is in the NBA, despite what some of my friends and family back home might try to claim. The transfer portal and the NBA Draft age limit have turned rosters into revolving doors, making it harder to develop emotional ties to teams and programs that aren’t your own.

But if you peel back enough layers and connect enough dots, the answer is simple enough – I love the sport because of Denny Crum.

(Photos: Associated Press, University of Louisville)