The oldest tournament?

I was wrong the other night when I said the Adolph Rupp Invitational (in its 39th year) was probably the oldest tournament in the state.

Today I’m at an even older tournament – the Bluestem Classic in El Dorado, now in its 41st year.

But the Rupp still provides me with a great story I want to share.

When Rupp, a 1919 graduate of Halstead High, was growing up on the family farm, he and his brothers played with a basketball made of rags stuffed into a gunny sack sewed up by their mother.

You gotta love the game to play with that kind of ball. They must have been great passers, because they certainly couldn’t work on a cross-over dribble with a ball made of rags in a gunny sack.

Halstead High created a Hall of Fame and inducted its first class last December. The charter members were Rupp and Conrad Nightingale, who was a track and field great at Halstead and went on to Kansas State and to run the steeplechase in the 1968 Olympics.

Rupp, who became one of college basketball’s winningest coaches at Kentucky, died in 1977 and the last member of his family in the Halstead area, a cousin, died about a year ago. But one of his grandsons came to the Hall of Fame Induction, as did Nightingale, now a veterinarian in Bandera, Texas.