The University of Louisville’s legendary men’s basketball coach Denny Crum died last May, and the sports legend’s grave site — next to Muhammad Ali’s at Cave Hill Cemetery — remains unmarked nearly a year and a half later, but it will have to be unmarked for a little while longer after the Hall of Famer’s original monument was thrown into the Red Sea.
The monument, originally to be placed this spring, was handcrafted in India in a special red-colored granite. While being transported sometime earlier this year, Crum’s wife, Susan Sweeney Crum, said the ship the monument was on was targeted by Houthi rebels amidst the regional unrest caused by the Israeli-Hamas War.
“The monument was on a barge that was sunk,” she said. “They were trying to hinder trade and shipments heading west, I think. Apparently, it was coming through the Red Sea — possibly through the Suez Canal — and that’s where they were targeting all these commercial vessels.”
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Sweeney Crum said Denny would have found the positives in the experience, and often let things roll off his back.
“He would’ve gotten a little smile out of it. Nice little postscript,” she said. “In the grand scheme of things with what’s going on in the Middle East, I can’t get upset about it.”
The family chose the special red-colored granite to commemorate Crum, who often coached in a bright red jacket. While Sweeney Crum was hesitant to share the main quote being engraved, Crum’s final resting place will have benches with some of his popular expressions.
“One of the things he used to say to his players was ‘quit dinkin’ around on me,’ or anybody who was fiddling, so one of the benches will have that carved in it and the other one says ‘don’t major in minors,’ because that was something he always said,” she said. “His dad used to say it and he always said it too, don’t sweat the small stuff. We will have his hand holding the program carved into the stone as well.”
Sweeney Crum said the replacement arrived in Kentucky last month. The monument and Denny’s marker are nearly finished and the family hopes to have them installed by the end of the summer.
“I didn’t want people thinking we just didn’t care and weren’t bothering to get a monument up for him,” she said.
