Denny Crum, who made Louisville a basketball powerhouse, dies at 86

Denny Crum, who won two NCAA men’s basketball championships and built the University of Louisville into one of the dominant programs of the 1980s during a long Hall of Fame coaching career, died Tuesday at his home in Louisville, Ky. He was 86.

The University announced his death after being notified by his wife, Susan. No reason was given. Crum suffered a mild stroke while fishing in Alaska in August 2017 and another two years ago.

Nicknamed Cool Hand Luke for his unwavering sideline, Crum retired in March 2001 after 30 seasons at Louisville with a 675–295 record and championships in 1980 and 1986.

Crum, a former assistant under famed UCLA coach John Wooden, often donned a red blazer and waved a rolled stat sheet like a bandleader’s baton as he led Louisville to 23 NCAA tournaments and six Final Fours. He was elected college coach of the year three times.

He was inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in Springfield, Mass., in May 1994, with Wooden, his UCLA college coach and longtime mentor, at his side. Crum finished with 11 wins more than Wooden had at UCLA and was inducted into the National Collegiate Basketball Hall of Famein Kansas City, Missouri, in 2006.

Denzel Edwin Crum was born on March 2, 1937 in San Fernando, California. He played guard at Pierce Junior College in Los Angeles for two seasons before transferring to UCLA in 1956.

The Bruins went 38-14 in Crum’s two seasons as a player. He briefly served as a graduate assistant to Wooden before coaching Pierce in the mid-1960s.

Wooden hired Crum as his assistant and lead recruiter in 1968, as the Bruins were in the middle of their dynastic run to 10 NCAA championships. Crum is credited with luring future Hall of Famer Bill Walton to UCLA, and the Bruins went 86-4 and won three NCAA titles during Crum’s three seasons there.

He succeeded John Dromo as coach of Louisville in April 1971.

Up to that point, Louisville had had little postseason success, reaching only the 1956 NIT Championship and the 1959 NCAA Final Four. The Cardinals lost Crum’s first game, 70–69, to Florida, but went on to win 15 straight.

“Denny was so good I knew I wouldn’t keep him for long,” Wooden once told The Courier Journal of Louisville. “I was happy when he got the job at Louisville. I had always hoped when I retired that he would be the one to succeed me, but he left and turned out to be exactly what I thought he was.

Crum’s Cardinals won the Missouri Valley Conference—the first of its 15 regular-season league titles—and then reached the Final Four, where they met Wooden’s Bruins. At the time, Crum was the third coach to lead his team to the Final Four in his first season. But the Bruins won 96-77, en route to a sixth straight championship.

The schools met again in the semifinals three seasons later with a similar result: UCLA won 75–74 in overtime. By this time, Crum had used much of Wooden’s fundamentally focused style, but with pressing defense and a quick-breaking flair. Instead of an offense built around a dominant center, Crum used athletic guards and forwards who could finish plays with the high-flying dunks that Wooden avoided.

Crum’s philosophy saw the Cardinals become perennial NCAA tournament participants, with 20 or more wins per season from 1975 to 1979. Louisville’s breakthrough came in the 1979-80 season, when homegrown star guard Darrell Griffith and the so-called Doctors of Dunk marched through the regular season, 26-3, and won their second Metro Conference championship in three years.

Crum’s second-seeded Cardinals reached their third Final Four in nine seasons, but again stumbled upon UCLA, this time coached by Larry Brown. Louisville eventually prevailed, winning 59-54 in the championship game in Indianapolis led by the high-flying all-American Griffith.

Crum’s second title followed in 1986, when Louisville defeated Duke 72-69.

The second half of his tenure was not nearly as successful as the first. Louisville underwent two separate NCAA investigations and never returned to the Final Four under his watch.

After his retirement, Crum co-hosted a sports radio program heard in Kentucky with longtime Kentucky men’s basketball coach Joe B. Hall. Hall died last year at the age of 93.

Crum remained a respected presence around Louisville. He regularly attended Cardinals games on the KFC Yum! Center home field that bears his name. He was present at the September 2022 dedication of Denny Crum Hall, a new on-campus dormitory for athletes and students. And he sat in the front row in March 2022 for the induction of one of his former players, Kenny Payne, as coach of the Cardinals.

Complete information on Crum’s survivors was not immediately available.

The New York Times carried a report.