My favorite college basketball players this season were a couple of big guys who put on clinics every time they took the floor. One came from nowhere and the other breathed life back into a career that seemed to be all but dead. Both were throwbacks to the days when playing smart and playing tough […]

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This is the last of a four-part series by Billy Reed on the issue of legalizing casino gambling in Kentucky. Mr. Reed is a member of the Kentucky Journalism Hall of Fame and the Kentucky Athletic Hall of Fame. He has written about sports and politics in the state for almost 50 years.
No issue in […]

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This is the third of a four-part series by Billy Reed on the issue of legalizing casino gambling in Kentucky. Mr. Reed is a member of the Kentucky Journalism Hall of Fame and the Kentucky Athletic Hall of Fame. He has written about sports and politics in the state for almost 50 years.
I’ve always said […]

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This is the second of a four-part series by Billy Reed on the issue of legalizing casino gambling in Kentucky. Mr. Reed is a member of the Kentucky Journalism Hall of Fame and the Kentucky Athletic Hall of Fame. He has written about sports and politics in the state for almost 50 years.
On the day […]

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This is the first of a four-part series by Billy Reed on the issue of legalizing casino gambling in Kentucky. Mr. Reed is a member of the Kentucky Journalism Hall of Fame and the Kentucky Athletic Hall of Fame. He has written about sports and politics in the state for almost 50 years.
I’ve lived and […]

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I like making lists of the all-time this or that, just for the pure fun of it, so I was naturally happy to see that ESPN is picking the 25 greatest college basketball players of all time, sponsored by somebody or the other. (IBM)
It’s impossible to compare players of different eras because game has changed […]

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Whatever the issue, university presidents seem perfectly willing to make exemptions for their sports programs. They tolerate, even encourage, a double standard that, if examined, leaves them open to criticism and disdain from faculty members and others who still cling to the quaint notion that universities exist mainly to educate, not to sponsor winning teams.
At […]

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It was during the Vietnam War that Simon & Garfunkel posed the question, “Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio, a nation turns its lonely eyes to you.” The message was as clear as it was powerful: The cynicism wrought by the war, and the civil rights movement, had stripped America of its heroes, the symbols […]

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Our state’s intrepid sports media covers University of Kentucky basketball like the dew covers Dixie, to quote the motto of a Southern newspaper, so it’s surprising that we don’t have the answer to the biggest question of the season: What in the name of Adolph Rupp got into the Wildcats in the week between Jan. […]

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Here in our little corner of the world, we have a bad habit of making issues more complicated than they really are. We have an aversion to simple solutions. I don’t know why. It must be due to some strange fungus that grows in our government buildings – a fungus that paralyzes the brains of […]

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