Joe B. Hall, longtime Kentucky men’s basketball coach, dies at 93

Kentucky defeated Mississippi and then won its next seven regular season games before embarking on its hunt for the tournament championship.

Kentucky’s basketball teams were all-white until 1970, when 7-foot-2 center Tom Payne, who is black, played in Rupp’s penultimate season.

But Hall sought out black athletes. Jack Givens, a forward, scored 41 points in the championship win over Duke. Sam Bowie, Kenny Walker and Melvin Turpin, all outstanding black players (and all of whom played in the NBA), were teammates on Hall’s 1983-84 team that made it to the Final Four. Kentucky lost to Georgetown, the eventual national champion, in the semifinals.

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

Not that Hall needed an encore of the campus game he took the place of, but many of those wins came at the Wildcats’ downtown Lexington home ground, which opened in 1976: Rupp Arena in 23,000 seats.

Joe Beasman Hall was born November 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 working on an uncle’s tobacco farm.

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