Word: rupp
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...nation. At the beginning of the week it looked like both teams would be hurt by illness but ailing Bob Verga of Duke and Kentucky's Conley both played. Duke was simply unable to use its power under the boards with Mike Lewis and Jack Marin against Adouph Rupp's quintet...
Obviously, the Baron hasn't changed that much. Kentucky is currently ranked No. 2 (behind Duke) in the wire-service polls, and Rupp sees no reason why his team won't be No. 1 within the next week or so. That may sound pretty presumptuous, considering that four of his five starters are holdovers from a 1964-65 squad that won only 15 out of 25 games. But then they have all had another year of Rupp. Guard Louie Dampier has developed into a deadly outside shooter (21.5 points per game). Forward Larry Conley has found his calling...
Modest & Meticulous. The Wildcats owe their sharpest claws to the fact that they have finally learned what Rupp modestly calls "the Kentucky system." Freely translated, it means run, run, run and never, never miss. A perfectionist rather than an innovator, Rupp decries such newfangled tactics as the zone press defense which he sometimes uses but insists on calling a "stratified, transitional hyperbolic paraboloid." He relies on ten offensive plays, which his team practices with a devotion to duty unseen since the Spartans of ancient Greece...
Sessions start on the dot of 3:15 p.m., last an hour or longer, and nobody is allowed to talk except Coach Rupp. "We have a requirement," he explains, "that you only speak if you can improve on the silence." Every pass, every shot, every move is charted by the Baron and his assistants-so meticulously that after one recent 59-min. 47-sec. practice, he was able to announce that his team had handled the ball 3,308 times, had made precisely five "mistakes...
Mistakes are anathema to Rupp, even when his boys are hitting 72% of their shots-as they were at halftime against L.S.U. last week. "Goddam it. Get up on the boards!" he shouted. "Goddam it. Go!" Even when the game was over and Kentucky had won by 26 points, the Baron was not satisfied. "We've got to go back to work on our defense," he muttered, studying a list of twelve mistakes committed by his Wildcats...