Basketball

A Nashville Musical Salute for the Louisville Cardinals Basketball Team; songs written during the 1980 basketball season.

Coach Dromo discusses his life and University of Louisville basketball, particularly recruiting.

Ms. Emmons relates her experiences as a member of an industrial basketball team in the 1920s. These teams were sponsored by their companies for their advertising advantages.

Houston discusses his childhood in a segregated Alcoa, TN childhood neighborhood during the decades after World War II, emphasizing the importance of good schools and sports on his life. He describes in some detail his recruitment in 1962 to the University of Louisville to break the school’s color barrier in basketball, noting instances of lingering segregation and hostility. Houston tells of his courtship of Alice Kean, his life as a successful Louisville high school coach, and his long career as a UofL assistant, primarily responsible for recruiting. (As an aside, he compares the simpler efforts in the past to attract and keep successful athletes to the challenges of modern, big-time collegiate sports.) He then explains why he helped form the Black Coaches Association and recalls his five years as head basketball coach at the University of Tennessee. (Those years, he remembers, allowed strengthening bonds with his children, themselves successful college athletes.) Before his return to Louisville to head a successful trucking company in partnership with old UofL athlete\friend Charlie Johnson, Houston reveals that Rick Pitino offered him a basketball assistant coaching position at rival University of Kentucky. Finally, Houston reflects on continuing racial bias even when playing by the rules and warmly recalls his year or so early-on playing pro-ball in France, the basketball camps that he and his son, Allan, held in Uganda, and his abiding appreciation for the University of Louisville.

Hudson discusses her work at the University of Louisville from 1968 to 1981, as well as her education and career prior to coming to UofL. Topics include teaching in the Department of Health, Physical Education, and Recreation; directing intramural sports for women; coaching varsity basketball for women; and work as assistant athletic director for women. She also discusses charges of sex bias in the UofL athletic department filed in November 1980, with the United States Department of Education's Office Civil Rights.

University of Louisville Basketball Games National Collegiate Athletics Association (NCAA) 1980