SYRACUSE, N.Y. —
In many ways, they should be brothers, these universities that carry the hopes and dreams of bordering states into the NCAA Elite Eight, so similar are they in so many ways.
West Virginia and Kentucky are as green as their hills, as proud as their mountains. Their people are honest and hard-working, as rich as the soil upon which they live and friendlier than they have any right to be.
They are as Appalachian as the Hatfields and the McCoys, possessing real-life values that carry them from day to day in a world outside their borders that is being torn apart by the insanity of what others believe to be “the real world.”
Drive from Huntington across the state line and the only way you know you have ventured from West Virginia into Kentucky is the sign that so proclaims the sovereignty of the Blue Grass state. They wear the same kind of coveralls in Kentucky as they do in West Virginia.
There is, of course, another side of Kentucky, one that doesn’t exist in West Virginia, for it has two cities that have grown into metropolises, Louisville and Lexington, each feeding off the oats of the horse industry that created a class system in Kentucky that could not ever take hold in the Mountain State.
Indeed, thoroughbreds give Kentucky an almost royal reputation, what with its horse country riveted with ribbons of white fences dividing glorious green grass pastures where animals named Man O’ War and Secretariat were born and raised.
If West Virginia has its track in Charles Town, Kentucky points to the spires at Churchill Downs with religious fervor and to Keeneland as perhaps the most pleasant place in America to spend an afternoon, coats and ties in the clubhouse, please, gentlemen.
Kentucky has its coal industry, as does West Virginia, but it operates public relations-wise in the shadow of the horse industry, which is run by the state’s blue-blooded aristocracy.
Kentucky, like West Virginia, is a state without a major professional sports rooting interest, which makes its love affair with its college sports that much stronger. In West Virginia, of course, there is the state university and Marshall, while Kentucky’s two major universities are the state school in Lexington and WVU’s Big East rival in Louisville.
We all know the devotion and dedication of West Virginia fans, but it is no less so at Kentucky, maybe even more intense.
“They’re crazy,” Demarcus Cousins, the freshman center at Kentucky, said on Friday. “They follow you to class. They’re go in your class with you.”
He isn’t exaggerating.
Kentucky basketball is beyond a sport. It is beyond a religion. It is a way of life and you don’t mess with it.
Tom Callahan is a noted journalist and author, a former sports editor of Time Magazine but in his younger days while a columnist at the Cincinnati Enquirer he wrote a piece in 1978 that portrayed Joe B. Hall’s Kentucky team as being joyless thugs, almost like hired guns.
He received more than 1,000 phone calls and 514 letters, some of which included checks to be applied to the “Tom Callahan defense fund,” along with countless death threats.
And remember, this was in the pre-Internet era.
The history of Kentucky basketball is filled with some of the game’s greatest moments and players, but it also has its low points, once falling from the greatest heights any program other than UCLA has ever enjoyed to a depth few ever reach.
Kentucky’s first success as a basketball program came in 1921 when George Bucheit came in as coach and developed what came to be known as “The Wonder Team,” winning what was the Southeastern Conference in those days.
Adolph Rupp came on the scene and built Kentucky into the nation’s greatest basketball power after World War II, winning national titles in 1948, 1949, 1951 and 1958. You might notice, however, the gap of seven years, and it came about because Kentucky was only five schools to ever receive the NCAA “death penalty.”
After having won those consecutive titles in ’48 and ’49 and again in 1952 with such great players as Alex Groza and Ralph Beard, it was uncovered that the Wildcat team was part of the point-shaving scandal that almost destroyed the sport.
On Oct. 20, 1951, Groza, Beard and Dale Barnstable were arrest for taking $1,500 from gamblers to shave points in a 1949 NIT game against Loyola-Chicago. In those days you could play in both the NIT and the NCAA and Kentucky would go on to win the NCAA, but favored by 10, they lost, 67-56.
The result was the whole athletic program at Kentucky was banned from championship tournaments for a year and Walter Byers, the powerful executive director of the NCAA, convinced schools not to play Kentucky the next year, meaning their brand new Memorial Coliseum was inaugurated with a season of nothing more than intrasquad scrimmages.
What’s more, Groza and Beard, considered two of the top players of the era, were banned from the NBA.
It would not be the last time Kentucky would be faced with scandal. In 1989, coach Eddie Sutton resigned in the wake of an NCAA investigation.
Rupp revived the program and took it into the 1960s as a national power, but by now the civil rights movement was in full swing. As other schools integrated their programs, Rupp resisted, leading to the showdown in the 1966 NCAA championship game that became a movie the last couple of years.
Kentucky’s team, led by Pat Riley and Louie Dampier, was known as “Rupp’s Runts.” It was all white and it wound up in the final facing Texas Western, which would become Texas-El Paso, in one of basketball’s most famous games.
In the first collegiate meeting of an all-white starting lineup against an all-black starting lineup, Don Haskins’ El Paso team won, changing the face of college basketball forever.
Three years later Rupp integrated his program, bringing in 7-foot, 2-inch center Tom Payne. It was just 22 years after Jackie Robinson had debuted with the Brooklyn Dodgers.
While Kentucky now had black players and some of them went on to greatness, Goose Givens leading them to a national championship in a game in which he scored 41 points, there was still a great deal of resentment in the state.
As Ralph Wiley, the late black journalist would note in 1986, he recalled an article in Sports Illustrated by the aforementioned Callahan in which he noted that Kentucky fans “were happy to have won the national title under Joe B. Hall – the only drawback was the hand that had dropped 41 points that night, Jack Givens, happened to be black.”
That kind of thinking, however, dissipated, and the Kentucky team today worries not about the color of a player’s skin, only the color of his uniform.
If it is Kentucky blue, he belongs.
Patrick Patterson from Huntington is one of Kentucky’s key players who considered coming to WVU but was sold that Kentucky was best for him.
“Growing up it was either Marshall or West Virginia,” he admitted. “I went to a lot of Marshall games and talked to (former WVU) coach (John) Beilein a lot of times. As far as being a fan, I really wasn’t, but I had a lot of interest in West Virginia. I went to the campus and visited Coach Beilein, met a couple of players and saw the facilities.
“I liked it. It was home and all my friends were going there, but that was when Beilein was going to the Michigan job. Coach (Bob) Huggins came in and picked up where he left off in talking to me but by that time I had been interested in Kentucky.”
“When I got the job it was down to U.K. and Florida, I believe. I called, but it was too far down the road,” said Huggins.
And so one of West Virginia’s greatest basketball assets went across the river to Kentucky.
Others, however, stayed, and as bright as the Kentucky basketball history is, they don’t have Jerry West.
And as many disappointments as West Virginia has had on the basketball court, they have nothing to match the Christian Laettner shot against Kentucky to win the March 28, 1992, NCAA Final, a moment revered by Duke fans in Durham, N.C., but erased forever from the memory of Kentucky’s faithful.
To this day, Laettner admits that he drives around Kentucky rather than through it for fear of having to stop for gas or a meal.
That day was a miserable one in Kentucky for another reason as it was the final broadcast of the legendary Cawood Ledford, who was to Kentucky sports broadcasting as Jack Fleming was to West Virginia, just as colorful, just as much involved and a fan, and if not quite as flamboyant, every bit as much beloved.
E-mail Bob Hertzel at bhertzel@hotmail.com.
