Originally published in the December 2003 issue of the Louisville Magazine.

by Ken Snyder
Louisville Magazine
December 2003

He has publicly referred to his successors, Courier-Journal sports columnists Pat Forde and Rick Bozich, as “Tweedledum and Tweedledee,” and he has called Louisville a “lousy sports town.” In a community that likes to play nicey-nicey in public, Billy Reed, the doyen of Kentucky sportswriters, is willing to criticize — even members of his own profession and the city where he lives and works. You just don’t hear much from him anymore.

This former sports columnist for The Courier-Journal and Lexington Herald-Leader, who also wrote for years for Sports Illustrated and then did a stint at Business First, now pens a weekly sports column on a variety of topics for, of all publications, Snitch, a police-beat tabloid. Finding his mug shot in Snitch almost seems like a case of mistaken identity, but Reed, 60, does not seem bitter about his pres-ent place in the lineup of local sports opinion-makers.

“I always thought that when you get to be my age, with all the experience I have and all the things I’ve done, that I would be a valuable commodity,” he says. “Maybe I’ve burned too many bridges.”

Reed’s 1986 departure from the C-J was less than amicable and he’s fallen victim to budget cuts and changing editorial priorities at some of his other stops, but he remains outspoken. “Unlike Henry Clay, nobody will ever call me ‘The Great Compromiser,’” he jokes. For those who miss Reed’s cutting commentary, here are a few of his uncensored opinions.

He calls today’s newspaper sports pages obsolete. “The old-time stuff — the advance on the day of the game, then the game story — people already know all that through the TV and Internet,” he says. “What they want to know is what the hell happened, why and what’s your opinion about it." Reed believes that sports-talk radio (he briefly hosted such a show on WTMT-AM) is successful because it answers these questions.

He faults Forde and Bozich for not offering enough diversity of local opinion. “If you’re going to have two sports columnists for the paper, you ought to get different points of view from time to time,” he says. “To me, in both writing style and positions they’ve taken, they’ve been almost identical. It’s insane.”

He dismisses the predictable view that University of Louisville basketball coach Rick Pitino’s high salary is symptomatic of all that is wrong with the big business of college sports. “Through ticket sales and interest in the university, Pitino is worth every cent paid him,” he says.

University of Kentucky athletics director Mitch Barnhart gets no such applause. Reed perceives Barnhart’s unsuccessful attempt earlier this year to hire Bill Parcells, now the Dallas Cowboys coach, to head UK football as ego-driven. “I think he’s mainly interested in Mitch Barnhart as opposed to being interested in the University of Kentucky," Reed says. “He wanted to do what (U of L’s Tom) Jurich did when he hired Pitino. He wanted to hit the big home run.”

Don’t assume an anti-UK bias, however. Reed, who spent his high-school years in Lexington and graduated from Transyl-vania University in 1966, is an admirer of basketball coach Tubby Smith and says, “For somebody at his level, he is one of the kindest, most decent individuals I’ve ever been around.”

As for Louisville being a “lousy sports town," Reed sees a silver lining, of sorts, in the preoccupation with the local college teams at the expense of everything else. “I think we’ve been smarter than a lot of towns because we have not mortgaged our futures to build these massive sports arenas that take years and years to pay off,” he says.

On Churchill Downs, Reed doesn’t automatically decry the monster makeover in progress for a facility he calls “one of our great American sporting shrines.” He takes a wait-and-see attitude, but adds, “Being a traditionalist, when I hear things that were put in place in 1902 are being removed, I am concerned about it. . . . I hope what they’re doing will maintain the traditional feel.”

He may be the last of a breed — a sportswriter with roots in the state where he makes a life’s work. Billy Reed, a Mt. Sterling native, may be in the glare of a smaller spotlight, but he’s still giving us his call on the local sports scene. “I think I’ve got some good years left in me,” he says.