LOUISVILLE, Ky. (WDRB) -- Next week, the city will honor a Louisville legend — former University of Louisville men's basketball coach Denny Crum — with a public celebration of life.
But this city was, is and will always be Denny's Louisville. His wife, Susan Sweeney Crum — whom he married in 2001 — would tell you the same.
Denny and his wife Susan Sweeney Crum. Photo courtesy of Susan Sweeney Crum.
She sat at the couples' Louisville home Thursday under a covered porch nicknamed "Denny's Place" with a sense sadness, gratitude and peace reflecting on the legendary coach's final moments.
"It just would break my heart to see it be so hard for him," Sweeney Crum said. "So, even as hard as it was to be with him Monday morning and go through it, he's a whole and healthy and happy person. He's greeted by a whole lot of wonderful friends and family and Jesus. He's in a much better place."
It was December when Crum's health took a turn for the worst, and Hospice was called to the 75-acre Louisville home he shared with not just his wife. Former players frequently visited.
"He would say, 'I'm going to miss you so much,' and tear up. 'I just don't want to leave. I'm going to miss you so much,'" Sweeney Crum said. "I'm like, 'Honey, you're the one going to a much better place. I'm the one stuck behind missing you.'"
She talked about the players — like Robbie Valentine, Felton Spencer, Wiley Brown and countless others — who visited Crum long after basketball came to an end.
"They're all like sons to him," Sweeney Crum said. "Every player is special. He's always in touch with all of them, especially the ones around here."
For a man larger than life, there was no one too small, no thing too important to distract from the community and its people that embraced a coach from California.
"Just a regular person," Sweeny Crum said about her husband. "He'd walk up to people — we'd be at church — and he'd be like 'I'm Denny Crum.' And they're like, 'Uh, yeah.' But he never assumed everybody knew who he was. It didn't matter where he was. He always introduced himself, said hello, spoke to people.
"He was loyal. His legacy, for sure, is being loyal to people and his friends and his family. Beyond the basketball, I think he would like that to be what people also remember."
WDRB Sports Journalist Rick Bozich wrote a column Tuesday that painted a picture of that legacy:
"Louisville was going to be two sentences on Crum’s career achievements," Bozich wrote. "A brief connecting flight. Arrive from UCLA in 1971. Return to UCLA the moment John Wooden retired. Many people wrote it. Everybody believed it. But Crum stayed."
Sweeney Crum said it was the community (and hunting and fishing access) that kept him here.
Louisville Hall of Fame coach Denny Crum, in his deer stand outside his Louisville home, in 2017.
"You walk down the street, and people are nice but they're respectful," she said. "It's not crazy. He has access to go fishing and hunting anywhere he wants to, and, by then, he had grown to love the community so much that I think it made it hard for him to leave."
The fishing trips and hunting dwindled in Crum's final years, but love shared between he and his wife did not.
As she remembers the legacy and life of her husband, she knows there will be no pain for the reunions waiting in the next life, something that brings to her an overwhelming sense of peace.
"'You're not hurting anymore,'" she recalled thinking in the final moments with her husband. "Felton Spencer is up there waiting to give you a great big hug as soon as you walk across, and it's OK, because it's just too hard right now."
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