Former Louisville coach Denny Crum dies at age of 86

Denny Crum, the Hall of Fame coach who led the University of Louisville to two men's basketball national championships, has died.

Crum, who was 86, passed away Tuesday at this home, the school announced.

Crum, a native of San Fernando, California, played at UCLA for legendary coach John Wooden. After graduating in 1958, Crum stayed on campus to coach the Bruins’ freshman team for three years. After a six-year stint as an assistant and head coach at Pierce College in Los Angeles, he returned to UCLA in 1967 to join Wooden’s staff.

Louisville hired Crum in 1971. He succeeded John Dromo, who had retired for health reasons. Crum wasted no time turning the Cardinals into a national power, taking his first Louisville team to the 1972 Final Four. But he couldn’t get the better of his mentor, falling to Wooden’s Bruins in the semifinals.

Crum took the Cardinals to the Final Four for the second time in 1975. The third time proved to be the charm as the Cardinals claimed the program’s first title in 1980, fittingly thanks to a 59-54 win against UCLA in the championship game. Louisville raised a second championship banner in 1986, besting Duke in the title game as Pervis Ellison became the first freshman to be named the NCAA tournament’s most outstanding player.

Crum retired following the 2000-01 season. During his 30-year stint, the Cardinals posted an overall record of 675-295 for a .696 winning percentage, including 23 NCAA tournament appearances and six Final Fours.

He was inducted into the Naismith Memorial Hall of Fame in 1994. In 2007, Louisville’s home floor at Freedom Hall was renamed the Denny Crum Court, and the name was retained when the Cardinals moved into their new arena in 2010.

Following his retirement, he took to the radio airwaves in his adopted home state, cohosting the popular Joe B. and Denny show with former Kentucky coach Joe B. Hall from 2004-14.

Crum's most-memorable team was the one that won him his first national title. Three games into the campaign, star forward Scooter McCray went down with a season-ending injury. Crum told friends the Cards would be lucky to win 15 games.

But freshman Rodney McCray ably replaced his brother, and senior Darrell Griffith earned player of the year honors as the Cards roared to a 33-3 record and the Final Four.

Led by Griffith, the colorful and high-flying Cardinals — dubbed the “Doctors of Dunk” — who popularized the “high five” and spoke to one another in pig Latin — fittingly defeated Crum’s alma mater, UCLA, to win Louisville’s first national championship.

Bill Olsen, who served as assistant to Crum for nine years and later was athletic director, said Crum respected his players and didn’t shout at them from the bench.

“They were coached so well in practice that in games he could turn them loose and let them play,” Olsen said. “Under pressure, they were poised. They were a reflection of him.”

Olsen said Crum was so competitive that when French Lick star Larry Bird refused to come to Louisville for a campus visit, Crum challenged him to a game of HORSE in his high school gym. If Crum won, he said, Bird had to come. Bird smoked him, Olsen said, and Bird never came to Louisville,

Unlike many coaches, Crum had a life outside of basketball. He bred horses and golden retrievers on his 55-acre farm in Jeffersontown, collected Louis L’Amour novels, hunted and fished, including from his ranch in Eastern Idaho.

During one summer vacation, he claimed to have shot an 8-foot, 8-inch Alaskan Brown bear. “I tried to sign him,” Crum said, “but I couldn’t get close enough to get the pen in his hand.”

Crum brought some tactics with him from UCLA, including a frenetic full-court zone press and a half-court man-to-man in which defenders switched on every pick and screen.

Like Wooden, Crum insisted that a player who scored on a pass immediately acknowledge the player who made the assist, as a way to build teamwork and camaraderie.

But while Wooden won with towering centers, such as Walton and Lew Alcindor, later known as Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Crum sought out big guards, whom he would “invert” — deploying them closer to the basket where they could exploit smaller adversaries.

Despite two strokes in his later years, the second in 2019, Crum continued to be present. He was there when one of his former players from the 1986 championship team, Kenny Payne, arrived in Louisville to take over the program last year.

Follow colleges reporter Eddie Timanus on Twitter @EddieTimanus

Contributing: Andrew Wolfson, Louisville Courier-Journal

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Denny Crum, Louisville coach and Basketball Hall of Famer, dies at 86