Check out some excerpts from the article below...It just shows the media has something against UK and coach Rupp.

"Don Barksdale was a pioneering athlete in the mid-20th Century. He was a member of the Gold Medal 48 Olympic Basketball Team and the Philips Oilers Championship Team.
In 1948, he was the first African American to play with the U.S. Olympic team. He
joined the team in Basketball at the 1948 Summer Olympics. He became the first Africa-American basketball player to win a gold medal in the Summer Olympics.
Barksdale, who had been playing with the Amateur Athletic
Union’s Oakland Bittners, was given an at-large berth from the independent.



“This guy fought, fought, and fought,” Barksdale said, “and I think finally the coach of Phillips 66 [Omar Browning] had said, ‘That son of a bitch is the best basketball player in the country outside of Bob Kurland, so I don’t know how we can turn him down.’ So they picked me, but Maggiora said he went through holy hell for it - closed-door meetings and begging.”
The 1948 Olympic team had five Kentucky Wildcats basketball players who had just won the very first Wildcat national championship in the 1948 NCAA Men’s Division I Basketball Tournament. The rest of the Olympic team, consisting of the AAU Champions Phillips Oilers, and the Kentucky team later scrimmaged on Stoll Field in front of 14,000 spectators, the largest crowd to watch basketball in Kentucky at that time. Barksdale became the first African-American to play against Kentucky in Lexington. He could not stay at the hotel with the rest of the team, but instead stayed with a black host family.[3]

“[Rupp] turned out to be my closest friend,” Barksdale said. “We went to London and won all 12 games and got the gold medal.” But he had to brush off indignities just about every step of the way. . . Later, coach Rupp told Barksdale, “Son, I wish things weren’t like that, but there’s nothing you or I can do about it.” Barksdale agreed. He lived by a very simple philosophy. He wasn’t interested in protest; he was interested in playing basketball. He had faced prejudice before, and he knew that he would face it again.

Does that sound like a racist. Why does the American Sports Press get away with deriding Rupp as a racist when to a man his contemporaries both black and white say the exact opposite? Look to Duke in 1966. All White Team as well. But somehow that fact is never mentioned in all of the talk of “walls tumbling down.” When will these media types start to deal in fact. Instead they lie and cheat and defame persons with innuendo, deception, lies and half truths.

There are hundreds of stories that attest to the lie that is perpetuated by ESPN and their crew of amatuers. Yet, they refuse to back down from their slander. All the while, they canonize a guy like John Wooden whose greatest booster openly paid his players. Paid for their clothes, cars and abortions. I’m not saying that Wooden doesn’t deserve his accolades. He won and won big. But his achievements are tainted with drug money. Neither ESPN nor the NCAA will go near those stories. Wooden lived in denial as Papa Sam paid for his rosters. Either that or he was complicit in the violations. Yet, Wooden will never be investigated. What is the difference between Papa Sam and his relationship with Bill Walton and the Reggie Bush situation or the recent O.J. Mayo “scandal.”

Speak to me of hypocrisy. These supposed professionals cowardly destroy the reputation of one man after his death based on fallacies and lies. "

See Original Article Here

This is a disgrace. UK should actively tell the media to get this story corrected.

Chad