Of the five starters on the magical University of Kentucky basketball team known as “Rupp’s Runts,” Tommy Kron was the most difficult to label. The others all had clear-cut roles and identities: Pat Riley and Louie Dampier were the scorers, Larry Conley the passing and ball-handling wizard, and Thad Jaracz the cuddly bear of a sophomore center.

But Kron? What exactly did he do? The answer was whatever Coach Adolph Rupp wanted him to do. Need a rebound? The 6-foot-5 Kron would crash the boards from his guard spot and get it. A defensive gem? Kron was the stopper. A jumper over a zone, a tough pick, an extra pass to find the open man? Kron, Kron, Kron. He was the team’s jack-of-all-trades.

The 1965-’66 team was known as the “Runts” because Kron, who died Wednesday afternoon at age 64, and Jaracz, both 6-5, were the tallest starters. Both were an inch or so taller than Riley, who nevertheless was such a prodigious leaper that he jumped center. Conley was a skinny 6-3 and Dampier, the best outside shooter Rupp ever coached, was listed at 6-0.

They took the nation by surprise that wondrous basketball winter. Coming off a 15-10 record in Kron and Conley’s junior season, Rupp’s worst ever to that point, nobody expected the Wildcats to win the Southeastern Conference, much less the national title.

But they played team basketball as well as it has ever been played. To watch them was to see a ballet on the gleaming polished floor of Memorial Coliseum. Sometimes the ball never seemed to touch the floor as they roared toward the hoop. They came out the gate fast and ran their record to 23-0 before losing to Tennessee in Knoxville.

Rupp came to love them, not only for the way they played, but for restoring him to national prominence. After winning his fourth national title in 1958, Rupp had gone eight seasons without so much as taking a team to the Final Four. It was whispered around Lexington that “the Baron” was over the hill. It was whispered around the nation that UK was done as a national power unless it started recruiting black players.

But all that was forgotten as the “Runts” made their run to glory. The Associated Press took a memorable photo of the five of them walking across campus together, eaching wearing his blue letterman’s jacket. Sports Illustrated sent a young writer named Frank Deford to Lexington to do a cover story on Rupp.

“I really liked Tommy,” Deford would say years later. “All five of the players were wholesome and engaging, but Kron and Conley were the most outgoing and the best talkers.”

Kron came to the UK in 1962 from Tell City, Ind., joining fellow freshmen Conley, from Ashland, and Mickey Gibson, from Hazard, to form a trio that Rupp called “The Katzenjammer Kids,” the name of an old comic strip. Like the characters in the strip, they always were up to something on the floor, and usually it was something good.

In those days, freshmen were ineligible for varsity play, so the “Katzenjammer Kids” had to bide their time until the 1963-’64 season, when they were sophomores on a team built around senior All-American Cotton Nash. Of the three, only Conley earned a starting berth. At some point, Rupp kicked Gibson off the team for breaking training rules. Another member of that freshman class, Wayne Chapman of Owensboro, had transferred to Western Kentucky.

Even with Nash, that team was upset by Ohio University, which was built around two African-America stars, in the Mideast Regional tournament. The next season, Kron moved into the starting lineup with Conley, Dampier, Riley and senior John Adams at center.

In UK’s disciplined practices, Kron often was the target of Rupp’s sarcasm. Once Rupp stopped practice after a Kron mistake and bellowed, “Did you know I’m writing a book entitled ‘What Not to do in Basketball’? The first 200 pages are about you.”

Kron’s junior season didn’t have many high spots, but one came at Tennessee. Rupp hated zone defenses so much that he never used one. But he was got so fed up with the 1964-’65 team’s inability to play his trademark man-to-man that he shocked everyone, including the players, by ordering his team to play a 1-3-1 zone against the Volunteers.

Kron was bigger than any of the Tennessee guards, so Rupp put him at the point and dared the Vols to throw over or around him. They didn’t have much luck and the Wildcats escaped with an unanticipated victory that delighted Rupp.

Naturally, after the game, the first question was about his new zone.

“That was no zone,” Rupp said. “That was a stratified, transitional, hyperbolic parabaloid.”

The key to UK’s success in 1965-’66 was unselfishness. Both Kron and Conley took it upon themselves to sacrifice their offense. They left the scoring up to Riley and Dampier, who both made All-American, while they did whatever else it took to win.

In those days, a seeded team only had to win four games to win the national title. As champions of the SEC, Kentucky was sent to Iowa City, Iowa, for a Mideast regional semifinal game against Dayton and its 7-foot center, Henry Finkel. The Wildcats dispatched the Flyers with ease, then waited for the outcome of the other semifinal between Michigan and its All-American, Cazzie Russell, and a great Western Kentucky team that had three homegrown African-Americans in its starting lineup (Clem Haskins, Greg and Dwight Smith), in addition to Chapman, the erstwhile Wildcat.

Sadly for Western, the Hilltoppers were denied the chance to play UK — Rupp refused to schedule regular-season games against the state schools — when referee Steve Honzo made one of the worst calls in basketball history on a jump ball between Russell and Greg Smith late in the game. It gave Russell two free throws and he made both, enabling the Wolverines to steal a win they didn’t deserve.

In the championship game, UK eliminated the Wolverines to earn a trip to the Final Four in College Park, Md., and a semifinal matchup with second-ranked Duke. Almost everyone agreed that UK-Duke would be the real national championship game. The lone dissenters were the players from upstart Texas Western, who easily defeated Utah in their semifinal.

The Wildcats’ 81-79 victory over the Blue Devils was costly. Conley, already suffering from a severe case of the flu, was exhausted. And in those days, remember, there was no day off between the semifinals and the finals. So UK spent Saturday resting while Texas Western contemplated its rendezvous with destiny.

It would be the first time that a team with five black starters would play for the national championship. And what better foil than all-white Kentucky, the biggest name in college basketball? At the time, the racial aspects of the game were largely ignored by the media. With the Deep South in turmoil because of the civil-rights movement, editors did not want stories about race creeping into the sports pages.

Early on, the difference between the two teams was made clear. Texas Western was stronger inside, as center David “Big Daddy D” Lattin proved when he slammed home a dunk over Riley. A dunk! Such things were never seen in the SEC. Then Bobby Joe Hill used his quickness to make two consecutive steals — one from Kron, one from Dampier — that demonstrated the Miners’ superior quickness.

Final score: Texas Western 72, UK 65, History Books 1.

Years later, due to the work of revisionist historians, the game became bigger in sociological terms than it was at the time. Writer David Israel dubbed it “The Brown vs. Board of Education of college basketball.” The story, which needed no embellishment, grew into a good vs. evil thing, with UK and Rupp occupying the role of bad guys. It was easy to depict the scowling, authoritive Rupp as a racist who espoused white supremancy.

The only problem was, it wasn’t true. Rupp began trying to recruit African-Americans before any of his peers in the ACC or the SEC. In fact, had he been successful with 6-8 Wes Unseld of Louisville Seneca High, Unseld — not Jaracz — would have been the team’s center and nobody would have called them “Runts.”

Hollywood producer Jerry Bruckheimer immortalized the story in a 2006 movie entitled Glory Road. While some UK fans felt the movie did little more than depict the same old inaccurate stereotypes, Kron and his teammates didn’t see it that way.

“The whole focus was on those (Texas Western) guys and how they overcome prejudice and racism to win the national championship,” Kron said, “and that’s a helluva story.”

After graduation, Kron played pro ball for four years — three with St. Louis and Seattle of the NBA, one with the Kentucky Colonels of the ABA. His 9.7 career average as a pro virtually mirrored his 9.1 career average as a a Wildcat. His career high was 30 against Syracuse in 1964.

Tommy married his college sweetheart, Dianne Berger, and settled in Louisville after retiring from pro ball. The Krons had two children, Jason and Jessica. In the mid-1970s, Kron tried the restaurant business, opening a place off Hurstbourne Lane that bore his name. When that failed, he became an institutional money manager.

He was one of those people who never seemed to have a bad day. To the end, he was a “Katzenjammer Kid,” always quick with a smile, a handshake, a kind word. He always called me “B.R.” Everytime I’d hear somebody yell it, I knew it was Kron.

To many of us sixtysomethings who lived in Kentucky in the 1960s, the team known as “Rupp’s Runts” will always be a symbol of our youth. They provided diversion, excitement, and pride at a time when fear and unrest, born of the civil-rights movement and the growing Vietnam War, gripped the nation.

They were just so good, so competent, so much fun to watch. And always, when we see them in the mind’s eye, there will be No. 30, Tommy Kron, the jack of all trades, playing the point on the zone, or whatever it was, and doing whatever it took to make his teammates better.