Kentucky Wildcats Basketball: Kentucky Doesn’t Owe UTEP Anything

Mark Zerof-USA TODAY Sports

In October of 2013, while speaking to a group of fans and media, University of Texas-El Paso men’s head basketball coach Tim Floyd made the surprising announcement that UTEP and the University of Kentucky were in discussions to play each other during the 2015-2016 basketball season. His announcement generated interest around the country because UTEP used to be Texas-Western; Texas-Western won the 1966 NCAA Men’s Basketball Championship; Texas-Western started 5 African-American players in 1966 and was the first team to win the championship doing so; Texas-Western beat Kentucky to win the 1966 title; Kentucky started 5 white players; Adolph Rupp coached the Kentucky team that lost to Texas-Western and is often portrayed as a racist who refused to recruit African-American basketball players. Oh, and according to Floyd, the game would be played in January, on Martin Luther King, Jr’s Birthday, in Cole Field House on the University of Maryland campus, site of the 1966 game.

Following Floyd’s announcement, neither Calipari nor the university offered comment on a game with UTEP being planned.

Wednesday evening, Tim Floyd told an El Paso, TX news station that UK had backed out of a rematch with UTEP. Floyd said:

"“Just backed out, said that there were a lot of people up there that didn’t want the game to be played, for whatever reason, so I don’t want to throw them completely under the bus, but that’s ok, we’ll just stay with a 1-0 record against the Kentucky Wildcats in college basketball. If they never want to play again and act like the game never happened, for the reasons why it occurred are significant, then we’ll never play again.”"

Kentucky spokesman Eric Lindsey disputed Floyd’s characterization that UK backed out of a game, noting that nothing was planned. John Calipari, when meeting with reporters on Thursday, acknowledged that he and Floyd had talked but also described the challenge of scheduling a road game and noted UTEP was welcome to play in Rupp.

What this sounds like is Floyd trying to drum up support for a game he knows he probably can’t get scheduled but the media will love—after all, there’s a Disney movie about the 1966 game—and when it became apparent that UK wouldn’t schedule the game (for whatever reason), attempted to put UK in a corner and make them look like the bad guy, hoping public pressure will force them to change their minds. That Floyd told the El Paso media UK had backed out of the game, on Martin Luther King, Jr’s birthday, isn’t a coincidence.

His comments, however, are likely to have exactly the opposite effect as Floyd intended. Instead of forcing UK to schedule a non-conference game in the middle of January, Floyd has almost assuredly guaranteed that the Wildcats won’t be playing UTEP at all, in any capacity sans a matchup in the NCAA Tournament.

And the public reaction, surely to Floyd’s surprise, has mostly been to treat this as the non-story it is. With one interesting, and quite frustrating, exception. This morning on the Drew Deener Show in Louisville, Jared Stillman said that UK HAD to play UTEP in basketball to honor the tradition and history of the game. There was talk about Rupp being racist and blah blah blah. But, perhaps the most interesting comment was from a caller who said that Kentucky not playing UTEP was going to hurt Calipari’s ability to recruit black basketball players.

Wait, whaaaaaaaaaaaat?!

John Calipari has helped to make multi-millionaires out of A LOT of young black men. And those young black men have been able to take care of their families and give back to their communities with the money they’ve made playing professional basketball after leaving college. I can almost guarantee you that the following conversation will NEVER occur between John Calipari and the parents of a young black man he is recruiting:

“We’d really like your son to come play for us at the University of Kentucky.”

“Well Coach Cal, I know you’ve had a lot of guys get drafted in the first round of the NBA draft and those guys have won Rookie of the Year awards, made All-Star teams, played in the Olympics, and received multi-million dollar contracts but you didn’t play UTEP in 2016 so our son won’t be coming to UK.”

John Calipari—and the University of Kentucky men’s basketball team—doesn’t have to schedule UTEP in order to prove how far college athletics has come since the 1960s or to show how the plight of the black athlete has improved. Nor does Kentucky have to schedule this game to somehow make amends for Adolph Rupp and whatever feelings and attitudes he made have had towards African-American athletes.

There are real issues with race in this country, including with regards to college athletics. If you want to focus your outrage somewhere, do it there.