Nobody asked me, but…

Now we know exactly how weak the Southeastern Conference was this season. Louisville 69, Tennessee 50. So much for the league’s best team and last NCAA survivor. I said all season the Vols were too selfish to win it all. To get the ball, Chris Lofton practically had to steal it from […]

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I’m eagerly awaiting my invitation to the big victory party that will be thrown somewhere across our borders.
The guests of honor will be the members of the Kentucky House of Representatives, who boldly allowed the proposed casino amendment to die from lack of support or benign neglect, whatever you want to call it As I […]

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The network talking heads – yes, that includes you, Bob Knight – are using the C-word, as in Cinderella, to talk about Western Kentucky’s scramble into the NCAA tournament’s “Sweet Sixteen, but if they’ll check the history books they’ll find that the Hilltoppers aren’t exactly your basic Davidson or, for that matter, George Mason.
Long before […]

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With the shot clock turned off and the final seconds ticking away, the proposed constitutional amendment to legalize casino gambling still is on the bench in the House of Representatives, hoping to at least get some floor time before the game is over.
The pundits on the sidelines are saying it will take a miracle to […]

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It was 50 years ago this month that I was a 15-year-old ninth-grader, skipping classes at Morton Junior High in Lexington so I could sell soft drinks for the Turf Catering Co. at the 1958 Kentucky State High School Basketball Tournament in Memorial Coliseum.
For a kid who loved sports, it was a great way to […]

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Funny how things work out, but Kentucky’s path to the NCAA tournament’s Sweet Sixteen is less daunting than the ones faced by Louisville and Indiana. Besides that, the Cats get a trip to balmy Southern California.
Somebody on the tournament committee must like Billy Clyde Gillispie.
After Georgia – Georgia! – completed its improbable run through the […]

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I used to think that post-season conference basketball tournaments were established purely so that greedy college presidents and athletics directors could gouge even more money out of the fans and TV networks. I thought that conference tournaments cheapened the regular season and put unreasonable demands on those athletes who also took their academics seriously.
But I’ve […]

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The same University of Kentucky basketball fans who are deliriously happy with the Wildcats’ 18-11 record in Coach Billy Clyde Gillispie’s first regular season would be furious if Tubby Smith were still the coach and the record was exactly the same.
Go figure.
Surely we can all agree that Smith did such excellent work during his first […]

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My friend John Y. Brown III was just a kid back in the 1970s when his dad owned the Kentucky Colonels of the American Basketball Association and his mom was chairman of the first, and still the only, all-female board of directors in the history of professional sports.
So when John saw the advance publicity about […]

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It’s always fun to fill out my ballot for the U.S. Basketball Writers post-season honors. We vote for a 10-man All-American team, a national Coach of the Year, a 10-man All-District team, and a District Coach of the Year. Living in Louisville, I’m in the district that includes Kentucky, Tennessee, Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama, Georgia, and […]

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