We planned to enforce our 1952 death penalty (sic) by asking NCAA members to cancel games with Kentucky. That proved unnecessary because of developments that today I remember as courageous acts seldom repeated by later generations of university officials. It happened in a drab meeting room in Chicago's Sherman Hotel, where the NCAA Membership Committee, then the organization's judicial body, met to decide the Kentucky case. The unexpected happened.
Kentucky representatives, A.D. (Ab) Kirwan and Leo Chamberlain, did not cover up. They didn't need high-powered attorneys to speak for them. Unlike SMU officials three decades later, they didn't attack the 'system' or the NCAA. They stood before the committee and the NCAA Council telling the truth as they knew it.
Ab Kirwan later became my good friend and an outstanding chairman of the NCAA Infractions Committee. He served the University of Kentucky at various times as a history professor, head football coach, and acting president. To me he represented the best attitudes of chivalry and intellectual pursuit.
I telephoned Ab and Leo Chamberlain in their hotel room to tell them first of our admiration for their openness and integrity, then of the committee's verdict: cancellation of all intercollegiate basketball at Kentucky for an entire year.
Ab later told me how he and Chamberlain packed their suitcases in stunned silence and entered a taxi for the ride to the train station. Shocked and struggling to recover his humor, Chamberlain turned to his companion and said: "If we hadn't been so forthright and made such a good impression, Ab, I wonder what the penalty would have been ?"
The above is from Walter Byers memoir of his time with the NCAA.
It is interesting to me that the above punishment was largely what cast Kentucky as a 'rogue' school in the NCAA's and many in the general public's eye, especially given Kentucky's decision to keep Adolph Rupp as their head coach.
And in many ways, Kentucky continues to pay for that decision in terms of public perception still to this day. Yet Kentucky was completely open and honest with the NCAA at the time, and still got slammed.
The NCAA's heavy-handed decision has ended up leading to what we see today in terms of schools not cooperating and stonewalling wherever possible.
It's also interesting that Byers himself admitted that he fully expected UK to appeal its decision and that it would be overturned, yet Kentucky went ahead and served the punishment without appeal.
