5:45 PM ET

Artis Gilmore was the coach of Jacksonville University when they defeated UCLA in the 1970 NCAA tournament championship game. He died at the age of 88.

Joe Williams Jr., his son, said that his father died in Mississippi after a long battle with cancer.

The Dolphins were a Cinderella team in the NCAA tournament. They beat Western Kentucky, Iowa, Kentucky, and St. Bonaventure on their way to the championship game and were led by the 7-foot-2 Gilmore. They scored more than 100 points 18 times that season.

The Bruins program was in the middle of coach John Wooden's dynasty. UCLA won its sixth national championship in seven years.

When Williams took over the Jacksonville program in 1964, he was an assistant at Furman, and the school played in the NAIA for one more season before moving to the NCAA.

Gilmore played two seasons in junior college before signing with Williams and Jacksonville.

Williams was willing to recruit Black players to Southern colleges when many coaches still refused to do so, and protected them in hostile environments on the road, his son said.

He was one of the first to do that. When Dad traveled with the team, he would pack the team up and go to a restaurant where they could eat together.

Dad was never one to talk about things like that on a soapbox, he just always did the right thing. He went through a lot. There were death threats in the mail. He wanted to treat his players equally. He wanted to teach his players how to be good humans.

Williams got into coaching by accident, his son said. He was an English teacher at a junior high school in Jacksonville when someone asked if he wanted to coach basketball, because the tall guy in the hallways had played basketball in college.

Joe Williams Jr. said that he realized that he wanted to do that.

After the title game appearance, Williams left Jacksonville to return to his previous job as a coach at Furman. He was a member of the Jacksonville University Hall of Fame.