You can own a piece of Kentucky basketball history. The old Rupp Arena court is for sale
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The spot on the Rupp Arena court from which Tayshaun Prince decided to let one fly for the fifth time against North Carolina? You can own a piece of it.
The piece of hardwood that John Wall inhabited as he knocked down a game-winning shot in his very first appearance as a Kentucky Wildcat? It could be yours.
The area of hallowed UK basketball ground from which Anthony Davis sprang to swat John Henson’s shot during the 2012 national championship season, clinching a win for the Cats over the Tar Heels in one of the most anticipated games in the building’s history?
That’ll be for sale, too.
After a lengthy planning process, the first pieces of the old Rupp Arena court — the one that the Cats called home from 2001 up until last March — are available for purchase.
Artsman, a Cincinnati-based company that specializes in repurposing used basketball courts and creating handcrafted artifacts from the old playing surfaces, has been working for the past several months with Oak View Group — the company that manages Rupp Arena — as well as UK Athletics officials to piece together a unique offering for fans of the storied program.
Christopher Rose, managing partner and founder of Artsman, has worked with a whole bunch of big names across the sport in recent years. Artsman has managed similar projects for the NCAA Tournament championship courts that were played on by UConn and Kansas.
The vision for the company began with the Cleveland Cavaliers’ unlikely NBA title run in 2016, and recent championship courts belonging to the Denver Nuggets and Milwaukee Bucks are also among the previous Artsman projects.
Even with that track record, the undertaking of transforming UK’s court has been a special one.
“You guys have a great legacy. You guys have a great history in basketball,” Rose said. “You are, like, the kings of basketball.”
Rose explained that no one has done something with a Kentucky court quite like this before.
The original Rupp Arena floor — home to the Cats from the building’s opening in 1976 through the end of the 2000-01 season — was sold off in large chunks after being dismantled more than two decades ago.
The original wood from Memorial Coliseum infamously ended up in dumpsters behind the arena after it was ripped out amid renovations in 2007, with fans showing up to salvage what they could from the trash heap of basketball history.
That wasn’t necessarily uncommon up until recently.
“Historically, you know, people would take the floors and they would either recycle them or throw them in a dumpster,” Rose said. “Or they would kind of sell pieces out of the back of the arena, and there would be no organization to it.”
Every detail of this project has been planned.
Buy a piece of the Rupp Arena court
Oak View Group, which owned the court, shopped around for potential partners to lead this project after Rupp Arena got a brand new floor last year.
(A quick aside: You might recall that Rupp actually had a new floor for one game during the 2023-24 season, but it was deemed unsuitable for play and returned to the courtmaker after the Cats’ loss to UNC Wilmington. At last check, that wood was sitting in a warehouse in Michigan.)
So the court that had been in place since 2001 was reinstalled for the final few months of the 2023-24 season — and, thus, the end of the John Calipari era — before another new court took its place.
Oak View signed on with Artsman to piece together a plan for the court that had been home to the 2012 national champions — among so many other memorable teams and beloved UK players — and those two entities worked with the K Fund and JMI (the fundraising and media rights arms, respectively, of UK Athletics) to form a vision for the playing surface.
Some prominent K Fund donors have already purchased pieces of the floor. But there’s a lot of court that was held back for fans, and those pieces will be available for purchase in all sorts of shapes, sizes and configurations.
The first wave of products went up for sale on the Artsman website this week.
“But this is just the beginning,” Rose explained. “We’ll be doing this for several years, rolling out different pieces, collections, parts of the court, key shot moments.”
He ran off a list of nearly two dozen such moments — Prince’s fifth 3-pointer against North Carolina in 2001, Davis’ block to beat UNC, and Wall’s buzzer-beater in his debut against Miami (Ohio) were just three such examples — that will be immortalized in products available for purchase.
The items for sale — or that will be sold at a later date — include desk displays and “mini-courts,” which feature an actual piece of the Rupp court with the graphics of the playing surface painted to scale on the wood. There are also unique items like jewelry, dog tags and bottle openers.
Artsman has also worked with local companies to come up with even more outside-the-box items. Clark’s Pump-N-Shop — a prominent corporate partner for UK Athletics — has commissioned 20 Bradley putters that will feature the Rupp wood, for a future charity golf outing.
A portion of the proceeds that come from some of these ventures will go to the program’s NIL fund, an important revenue source that can raise money for future Kentucky basketball rosters.
Artsman has also acquired about one-sixteenth of the original Rupp Arena court, and there are plans to create products that utilize both playing surfaces, a celebration of nearly 50 years of Kentucky basketball history.
And there are even some parts of the floor that won’t be for sale to the public.
One, in particular, is the small segment with the logo honoring “Mr. Wildcat” Bill Keightley, the beloved longtime UK equipment manager who died in 2008.
Rose said Zo Goodson — a former UK student manager who is now the head coach at Rhodes College — has been working with former head coach Tubby Smith and others within the Kentucky basketball program to turn that piece of the floor into a remembrance of Keightley that will find a permanent home in an area occupied by the current UK team managers.
That’s the kind of story that gets Rose most excited when talking about this project. And as he and his team have been working with the Rupp court over the past few months, they’ve received an up-close look at the love that Kentucky basketball fans have for the Wildcats.
Based on their work with other teams across the sport, they think the items they have put together honoring the history of UK basketball will strike a chord with Big Blue Nation.
“I’ve seen fans that are so incredibly passionate that when they hold that piece in their hand — or when they look at it — it’s almost like they’re reliving every moment,” Rose said. “And that is really cool.”
This story was originally published March 21, 2025 at 10:59 AM.
