Over the years I tried several times to tell S.T. Roach how much I admired him, how much I owed him, how much I cared about him. But I finally desisted because it embarrassed him. Oh, I think a part of him was flattered. But Mr. Roach – that’s what I always called him — was so self-effacing that he simply could not easily accept credit and praise from a white man who treated him with deference instead of contempt.

When I heard yesterday that he had passed, I wasn’t surprised. He was 94, after all, and he had slowed considerably in recent years. What did surprise me, though, was how sad and empty I felt. He was more, far more, than a superb high school basketball coach. He was man of dignity and quality who taught me much about character and integrity simply by the way he carried himself.

We met in the early 1960s, when I was on the high school beat for the afternoon Leader in Lexington and he was the veteran coach at Dunbar High, still an all-black city school years after Brown v. Board of Education desegregated American public schools in 1954.

Although I was only two or three years older than Roach’s players, he treated me with the utmost respect. One reason, I’m sure, was that I was one of the first – if not the first – writers who gave his teams the same coverage the white schools got and who actually came to games in the Dunbar gym.
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CINCINNATI — The long-awaited major-league debut of Aroldis Chapman turned into a cosmic event Tuesday night at Great American Ball Park. The crowd of more than 19,000 began buzzing as soon as the scoreboard announced that the Cuban left-hander was warming up his 105 mph fastball in the bullpen. When the gate swung open and Chapman began moving his lanky frame toward the mound, the park exploded in a flashbulb-popping, roaring frenzy of anticipation. Any minute, you expected fireworks to explode from the twin smokestacks in center field.

Watching all this, I turned to the guy next to me and said, “What’s the big deal? We’re using to seeing him in Louisville.”
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By saying that his dream job is athletics director at the University of Kentucky, as opposed to Governor or Lieutenant Governor, Richie Farmer gave us something to think about. Such as, if the UK A.D.’s job was put on the ballot, who would win an election between Farmer and incumbent Mitch Barnhart?

Barnhart couldn’t run on a pledge of no new new taxes, considering how he has just boosted the donor levels for basketball season tickets. That’s expected to generate around $3.5 million for the athletics department, which, coincidentally, is about how much it’ll take to pay off former hoops coach Billy Clyde Gillispie.

Richie lacks Barnhart’s experience in running a big-time college athletics department, one with a budget of more than $40 million, but he has apparently done a decent job of managing the Agricultural Department. If it’s a popularity contest, of course, Richie would win in a landslide — and that’s no knock against Barnhart because Richie would beat anybody, including Gov. Steve Beshear or Brad Pitt, one-on-one in a popularity contest.

Because of his legendary playing career at Clay County High and UK, Farmer is an icon in rural Kentucky. That’s why David Williams, the heavy-handed Republican despot who controls the State Senate, wants him as a runningmate. In some circles, Boss David is even less popular than Barnhart.
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(This column was originally published by Catholicsportsnet.com)

As the dog days of summer slide into the beginning of another school year, I have a question for parents of youngsters who are gifted enough to play varsity sports – especially those whose sons and daughters are talented enough to draw the attention of college recruiters.

Where do you stand on the subject of balance?

I ask that because this summer I gave four lectures to some of the students enrolled in the Governor’s Scholars program at Bellarmine University (similar programs were held at Centre and Murray State), and didn’t encounter a single recruited football or basketball player.

The reason, I’m sure, is that most of them were off honing their athletic skills in some AAU or shoe-company camp. It seems that today’s best players spend the entire summer away from home, doing little but working to get themselves noticed by the recruiting pimps who put out the rating systems.

But what about their intellectual development?

The Governor’s Scholars are the best and brightest of our high school seniors-to-be. They come from all 120 Kentucky counties. They come from private and public schools. The main requirement is that they are serious students willing to devote a part of their summer to improving their minds and broadening their academic horizons.
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Pressbox pickups from the sports whirl…

* As the guy who told you before anyone that UK and Notre Dame would play this season in Freedom Hall, I’m now here to tell you that the first UK-U of L basketball game in the KFC Yum! Center will be played on Dec. 31. That should make for quite a New Year’s eve on Main Street. The Galt House, Hyatt, and Marriott should be booked solid with revelers who want to mix hoops with Fourth Street Live!

* WANTED — Executive vice-president who can stage a music festival that will lose less than $5 million. Interested paeties should contact Churchill Downs. A six-figure salary and good Derby tickets will go to whomever is hired.

* Let’s see how it long it takes to Churchill to announce price hikes in next year’s Oaks and Derby tickets. The suits have to cover that $5 million loss somehow. By the way, it was interesting that Steve Sexton, the Churchill executive in charge of HullabaLOU, was not quoted in today’s C-J story. I wonder if he’s been told to clean out his desk.

* I don’t care what Bret Favre does. I really don’t. I’ll just be glad when this perennial soap opera is over so ESPN, the network that gave us the LeBron debacle, can obsess about something else.
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GEORGETOWN, Ky. — The crowds at the Cincinnati Bengals’ training camp are said to be larger than normal despite heat that would melt the stripes off a tiger. One reason is that the perennial losers actually made the playoffs last season and are hoping for improvement in 2010. Another is that Terrell Owens, the venerable wide receiver who has broken records and alienated coaches wherever he has gone, now is hoping to have one last hurrah with the Bengals.

As soon as T.O. signed with the Bengals, the speculation began about how he would get along with fellow wideout Chad Ochocinco, who has an ego roughly the size of Albania. Would there be room in the locker room for two of the most massive egos in NFL history? How long would it take one or the another to claim that quarterback Carson Palmer wasn’t calling his number often enough?

So far, so good. The two seem to have buddied up pretty well. They’ve done at least one joint interview and been photographed laughing together on the field. Their teammates seem cool about all the publicity the two have gotten, including a daily Chad/T.O. Watch in the Cincinnati Enquirer. Nobody has complained that Owens’ No. 81 jersey already is for sale in the gift shop at Georgetown College’s stadium even though he has yet to play a down for Mike Brown’s team.
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Charlie Strong and Joker Phillips have a friendship that still will be tight after their coaching careers are done. Yes, they will each be trying to win when Strong’s Louisville Cardinals and Phillips’ Kentucky Wildcats meet on Sept. 4 in the head-coaching debut for both. But they will never, ever be enemies. That’s a media story line, nothing more.

Each came up through the ranks, paying their dues as assistant coaches. For awhile, they worked together on Steve Spurrier’s staff at South Carolina. Each had to wait longer than necessary for a head job because, even though they belong to the second generation of African-American head coaches, college football still lags behind its basketball counterpart in the equal-opportunity department — especially in the South.

Oh, they’ve heard all the horror stories about discrimination in the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s. They are proof — along with new Western Kentucky head coach Willie Taggert — that times have changed for the better. But they also know that race still is such a delicate and divisive topic in America that they won’t be cut as much slack as if they were white.
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My longtime friend David Kindred, best wordsmith of my newspaper generation, has a new book out about one of his former employers, The Washington Post, and how it has coped with the swift and startling changes in the communications business. Those who know Dave’s work will not be suprised to learn that it’s beautifully written and meticulously reported — a definite “must read” for anybody who loves newspapers and cares about their future.

There are heroes and villains aplenty, and sometimes it’s hard to tell which is which. From the zenith of its power in the early 1990s, the Post’s decline was, and is, breath-taking to behold. Understand, it’s still one of the two or three best papers in the nation. But as Kindred shows us, not even the Post, with its vast resources, has been able to figure out how to effectively cope with the stampede of readers and advertisers to the internet.
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I’m going to be interested to see how the HullabaLOU mega-concert is supported at Churchill Downs. The cheapest ticket costs $75, which pretty much eliminates the high-school and college kids who were attracted by the night racing programs (or could it possibly have been the ease with which underage drinkers could get beer?)

In addition, parking will be limited because the big RV show at the Fairgrounds had reserved the parking at Papa John’s Cardinal Stadium long before HullabaLOU became a reality. Try as it might to take over the parking lots at the football stadium, the Churchill people in charge of HullabaLOU were denied at every turn.

You couldn’t blame AIG, the company hired to book entertainment at Freedom Hall and the KFC Yum! Center, for being angry with Churchill, which plunged into the concert business without consulting anybody. This sets up a competitive situation that’s not good for the community. Some of the acts that will play at HullabaLOU might have drawn more fans at either the State Fair or the new arena, both of which are far better concert venues than the race track.
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I am not ready to think about ordering playoff tickets, but I’m cautiously optimistic about what I’ve seen from the Cincinnati Reds so far this season. I love their young starting pitchers. I think they have the best infield in the National League. And in Dusty Baker, they have a veteran manager who has to be in the discussion about National League manager-of-the-year so far.

Over the last several years, the Reds have been a fragile team that comes unglued at the first sign of adversity. But this season they’ve shown a new mental toughness that’s encouraging. When they blew a big ninth-inning lead at Atlanta, they didn’t quit. When they dropped five of six to Kansas City, they regrouped. And when they got swept by the Phillies in a cruel four-game set just before the All-Star break…well, how will they react to that?

The last three losses were harsh. First they blow a six-run lead in the ninth and lose in extra innings. Then they get an eight-inning no-hitter from rookie Travis Wood, fresh up from Louisville, and get beat again in extra innings, 1-0. On the heels of that came another 1-0 extra-inning loss that ran their scoreless streak to 23 innings.
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