Kermit Davis died Monday in Tupelo at age 91, ending one of Mississippi basketball’s longest-running family stories. The loss reaches beyond one name: his son, Kermit Davis Jr., said he could call his father his best friend.
“Dad had 91 great years,” Davis Jr. said Monday. He added, “I think the highest compliment a man can have is when his children all say he was their best friend,” then said, “I can say that for sure, and my younger brother, Bill, says it and my sister, Jennifer, says it, too.”
Mississippi State and Tupelo
Davis was a Mississippi Sports Hall of Famer who played basketball at Mississippi State before later coaching the Bulldogs. He won SEC Coach of the Year in 1971, his first year as Mississippi State’s head coach, and his career gave the program one of its most recognizable Mississippi links.
He also built his reputation well before that. Born and raised in Walnut in Tippah County in northeast Mississippi, Davis led Walnut to the state championship in 1954 in the smallest classification of schools, then took the team to the overall state championship the same year by defeating Forest Hill of Jackson in the Tournament of Champions. That run still reads like a blueprint for how one coach could carry a small-town program into the center of state basketball.
Babe McCarthy in 1954
1954 also created the turn that changed his college path. After officiating one of Walnut’s games, Babe McCarthy asked Davis where he was going to play college basketball, and Davis said he was probably going to play at Ole Miss. Instead, McCarthy recruited him to Mississippi State, a reversal that sent Davis into the program he would later coach.
Davis Jr. said his father’s life also carried a movie-script quality. “Dad and I watched ‘Hoosiers’ together,” he said. “He loved that movie. He loved all the similarities.” He added, “In many ways, Dad was Jimmy Chitwood,” a comparison that fits the way his father’s career blended small-town roots, coaching success and family memory.
Kermit Davis Jr. and 2019
2019 tied the family story back to the Southeastern Conference again, when Davis Jr. was named SEC Coach of the Year in his first year at Ole Miss. The father and son now sit in the same league record, separated by nearly half a century, with one at 1971 and the other at 2019.
The absence now leaves Mississippi basketball with a clean, hard fact: one of its defining figures is gone, and the family voice that described him best came from the son who said, “Dad was special.” For readers who followed the state’s basketball history, that legacy now belongs to memory, not the bench.
