Joe B. Hall, Longtime Kentucky Men’s Basketball Coach, Dies at 93

Kentucky beat Mississippi and then won its next seven regular-season games before embarking on its tournament championship run.

Kentucky basketball teams had been all-white until 1970, when the 7-foot-2 center Tom Payne, who is Black, played in Rupp’s next-to-last season.

But Hall sought out Black athletes. Jack Givens, a forward, scored 41 points in the championship victory over Duke. Sam Bowie, Kenny Walker and Melvin Turpin, all outstanding Black players (and all of whom went on to play in the N.B.A.), were teammates on Hall’s 1983-84 squad, which went to the Final Four. Kentucky lost to Georgetown, the eventual national champion, in the semifinals.

Hall never had a losing season. His teams won eight regular-season Southeastern Conference championships, and he won 297 games while losing 100.

Not that Hall needed a reminder of the campus fixture whose place he had taken, but many of those victories came on the Wildcats’ downtown Lexington home court, opened in 1976: the 23,000-seat Rupp Arena.

Joe Beasman Hall was born on Nov. 30, 1928, in Cynthiana, Ky., where his father, Charles, ran a dry cleaning business and his mother, Ruth, had a flower shop. He played basketball and football in high school and built his strength by working on an uncle’s tobacco farm.

Hall played briefly as a sophomore on Rupp’s 1948-49 championship team, but transferred to the University of the South in Tennessee during the season to get more playing time.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/15/sports/ncaabasketball/joe-b-hall-dead.html