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Tommy Kron, a key player for the famous University of Kentucky basketball team known as “Rupp’s Runts” died today in Louisville.

Kron, who was 64, died at home after a lengthy battle with bladder cancer.

He was a guard for the 1965-66 team, which got its nickname because its tallest starters, Kron and center Thad Jaracz, stood 6-feet-5.

Kron averaged 10.2 points a game for that team, which lost to Texas Western 72-65 in the national championship game. The game marked the first time an all-black starting lineup faced an all-white starting lineup in the finale - a historic moment that teammate Pat Riley called “college basketball’s Brown vs. Board of Education.”

The defeat probably made “Rupp’s Runts” – already a wildly popular collection of overachievers – even more popular in Kentucky. Larry Conley, a 6-foot-3 forward, remarked 20 years later that the team probably earned more fame for losing that game than it had won.

Kron arrived at UK from Tell City, Ind., in 1962. He averaged 12.3 points a game as a junior and 10.2 as a senior. His career high was 30 against Syracuse in 1964.

Kron had a hand in some lesser known UK basketball history. Coach Adolph Rupp was an ardent devotee of man-to-man defense – he believe in personal accountability. But when he relented and resorted to a 1-3-1 zone defense, he chose Kron as the point man. But Rupp refused to call it a zone. It was, he said, “a stratified transitional hyperbolic parabaloid.”

UK went 63-18 during Kron’s career from 1964-66. His sophomore team, with Cotton Nash as the star, was briefly ranked No. 1 in the country. His senior team – with Riley and Louie Dampier as the stars – enjoyed a longer run at No. 1 – winning 27 of its first 28 games before falling in the finale.

Texas Western’s rise was portrayed in the 2006 movie “Glory Road.”

“I enjoyed it very much,” Kron said of the movie. “I thought it was great, very entertaining….”

Kron took a larger view of the film than some UK partisans might have, watching their team play the foil.

“The whole focus was on those [Texas Western] guys and how they overcame prejudice and racism, and how they won the national championship,” Kron said. “And that’s a hell of a story.”

That game marked Rupp’s last trip to the Final Four. The next season, minus Kron and Conley in the lineup, UK went 13-13 – the closest Rupp came to a losing record in his 41 seasons at UK.

Kron played one season with the St. Louis Hawks and two with the Seattle SuperSonics before finishing his pro career in a one-year stint with the Kentucky Colonels. His second season in the pros was his best. He averaged 9.7 points a game in 76 games.

"Rupp's Runt" Tommy Kron dies