In the spring of 1970, Sports Illustrated sent me to Mississippi to gather the material I needed to do a cover story on Archie Manning, the senior-to-be quarterback at Ole Miss, for the college football issue that would be published that fall.
He belonged to an exceptional crop of quarterbacks that included Jim Plunkett of Stanford, […]

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Nobody asked me, but…
A few weeks ago, I argued that now would be a good time for University of Kentucky football coach Rich Brooks to retire – he’ll be 67 when the Cats open against Louisville this fall – and turn the reins over to Joker Phillips, the offensive coordinator who’s done such a splendid […]

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Hypocrisy, n., 1. False claim to virtue; insincerity, pretense, deceit, duplicity, playacting, phoniness. (The Oxford American Desk Dictionary and Thesaurus)
The desire to have a statewide referendum on casino gambling should be viewed, essentially, as a tourism and economic-development issue that will give our economically-troubled commonwealth an important new source of jobs, taxes […]

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From humble roots in the segregated South, they grew up to become the disparate voices of Black America in the 1960s, that dark and defining era when America was ripped asunder by two wars — one in the jungles of Vietnam, the other in the streets and backroads of Alabama, Mississippi, and other places where […]

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Early in their Monday night show at the Derby Dinner Playhouse, the Monarchs did their version of the Five Satins’ immortal 1956 hit, In The Still of The Night, and I frankly admit to harboring some decidedly ungrandfatherly thoughts.
Even in winter, a lion is still a lion, if you get my drift, and that music […]

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It was 21 years ago that yours truly, typing out a column for The Courier-Journal, took a cheap shot at Ned Jennings. He was a 6-foot-9 kid from the crossroads town of Headquarters, in Nicholas County, who played center for the University of Kentucky from 1959 through ’61.
I remembered him as hard-working but not nearly […]

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Now that our Mayor and the City Council have finally put their big feet down on smoking in public places, I am awaiting the opening of our city’s first private smoking clubs. These clubs would be modeled after the “Speakeasys” that were established in cities around the nation after 1919, the year the moralists in […]

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You can sense it coming together, can’t you? You can sense that the University of Louisville basketball team is on the cusp of breaking through the malaise, or whatever you want to call its knuckle-headed play of yore, and becoming a very good team – maybe even a Final Four contender.
The victory over Kentucky got […]

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During my years with The Courier-Journal, I provided Bob Schulman with a lot of material for his media column in The Louisville Times. Sometimes he took my side, sometimes he didn’t. But I never doubted that he cared deeply about fairness and ethics and integrity.
It was fashionable in the newsrooms to dismiss Schulman’s opinions and […]

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As expected, the battle on the floor between Kentucky and Louisville wasn’t nearly as interesting as the internal battle between Wildcat coach Billy Clyde Gillispie and his players. At no point this season have the new coach and his players seemed to be on the same page, all pulling together for the common good.
Something’s going […]

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