If you read David Hawpe’s column in today’s Courier-Journal, you may have been surprised to learn that he received an inscribed football from the members of the 1961-’62 freshman football team at the University of Kentucky. Why the surprise? Well, suffice it to say that in his long and distinguished editorial career, David has exhibited a far deeper affinity for politics, the arts, and history than for sports.

Knowing David, I know that he doesn’t dislike sports. In fact, going back to the days of Adolph Rupp, he has long been an avid UK basketball fan. It’s just, like me, he’s uncomfortable with how big college sports have become relative to the university as a whole. The tail often wags the dog. A large segment of society seems to believe that universities exist mainly to sponsor sports teams – and that’s disturbing.

So why would Hawpe be getting an award from a bunch of old football players?

Because, as a callow young journalist, he demonstrated courage and wisdom beyond his years by exposing and criticizing the brutality that existed in UK football coach Charlie Bradshaw’s program, but that was largely ignored – even condoned – by the state’s largest newspapers.

After graduating from Louisville Male High in 1961, David joined a UK freshman class that included four scholarship football players from Male – Jim Bolus, Lindsey Able, Tommy Hedden, and Joe Blankenship.

They all had signed up to play for Blanton Collier, the erudite, hard-of-hearing coach who had succeeded Paul “Bear” Bryant in 1954. But before they could ever play a second for Collier, he was fired after the 1961 season and replaced by Bradshaw, a Bryant disciple who had the coldest blue-gray eyes that anybody had ever seen.

Publicly, Bradshaw preached the Baptist religion and talked about the need to recruit players who had “good mamas and papas,” a message that resonated favorably throughout Lexington and the commonwealth’s small rural communities.

Privately, however, he believed that UK’s poor recent records had been because Collier was too “soft” on the players, a situation that he intended to correct by instilling brutal offseason workouts – illegal under NCAA rules – that were designed, as the saying goes, to “separate the men from the boys.”

Bradshaw knew he could get away with mayhem, literally, because Lexington’s newspapers, the morning Herald and the afternoon Leader, had long been in bed with UK athletics. Why, heck, Stoll Field, where the Wildcats played their home games in those days, was named for Judge Richard Stoll, whose family had some ownership in the Herald-Leader Company.

At the time, Ed Ashford and Winfield Leathers were sports editors of the Herald and the Leader, respectively. Leathers had only recently replaced Larry Shropshire, who had been sports editor of The Leader for years, and, as a former cityside reporter, Winfield brought a new perspective into the sports department.

Leathers quickly came to admire Collier’s integrity and knowledge of the game. They were both professorial in nature and they hit it off well. So when Collier was fired, Leathers took a much different position than did Ashford and his assistant, Billy Thompson, Herald assistant sports editor and author of the popular “Pressbox Pickups” column, a must-read for fans throughout Central and Eastern Kentucky.

Maybe Leathers’ support of Collier cost him his job, and maybe it didn’t, but he soon left the Leader to take a job with the Cleveland Plain-Dealer. Collier also had re-located in Cleveland as an assistant coach of the NFL’s Browns (he replaced Paul Brown as head coach after one season.). With Leathers gone, Kentucky’s media lined up solidly behind Bradshaw.

Except, that is, for David Hawpe and the Kentucky Kernel, the university’s independent student newspaper.

Because of his friendship with Bolus, Blankenship, Able, and Hedden, Hawpe was getting information about what was really happening inside Bradshaw’s program — and the reality was a far cry from what was being fed to the public throughout the Herald, the Leader, the Courier-Journal, and other mainstream outlets.

Bradshaw’s idea of instilling discipline into his players was to routinely abuse them both physically and mentally. He and his staff were cruel to the point of being sadistic. And the players began leaving in such numbers and with such regularity that it became a story impossible to ignore.

But only the Kernel got the truth and printed it because the “quitters” either wouldn’t talk truthfully to the mainstream media, for fear of reprisal, or else weren’t even approached for interviews by the writers who had, in effect, become Bradshaw’s accomplices in the coverup. Today it would undoubtedly be called “Charliegate” or some such.

The Kernel’s reporting drew the attention of Sports Illustrated, which sent investigative reporter Mort Sharnik to Lexington to sniff around. Writer Robert Creamer’s subsequent story, “Rage to Win,” should have set off alarm bells across the commonwealth. Instead, it was dismissed as a case of nothing more than a bunch of outsiders coming in and trying to stir up trouble.

By the start of the 1962 season, Bradshaw was left with only 30 able-bodied players available for duty, so somebody – Thompson, probably – dubbed UK’s team “The Thin Thirty.” Gone was the guts of the 1961 freshman class, including such highly recruited players as Paintsville’s Mike “The Missile” Minix, Bowling Green’s Dale Lindsey, and Male’s Bolus. All had been first-team All-Staters.

Of the 46 players listed as freshmen in the 1961 media guide, only half were listed as sophomores in the 1962 guide. And of those 23, only six were still on the varsity as juniors in 1963.

The Courier-Journal belatedly joined Bradshaw’s critics when Bolus, a journalism major, transferred to the University of Louisville and was hired to help cover high-school sports and horse racing. He told Earl Ruby, then the paper’s sports editor, what had really happened behind the scenes in Lexington, and Ruby wrote about it in “Ruby’s Report,” easily the most influential sports column in the state.

When the remnants of the 1961 freshman class were seniors in the fall of 1964, Bradshaw’s third varsity team went to Jackson, Ms., and upset top-ranked Ole Miss, 27-21, the program’s biggest football victory since the Bryant days. Gloating, Bradshaw posed the question, “Was it worth it?”

Most UK fans, flushed with victory and apparent vindication, answered in the affirmative. But Hawpe answered Bradshaw’s question with yet another scathing editorial indictment of the coach’s methods. He argued that the ends did not justify the means. Around the state and beyond, Hawpe and The Kernel were condemned as long-haired hippy freaks who didn’t have the right values.

But that ’64 season quickly turned sour for UK and the team that shocked Ole Miss finished with only a 5-5 record and no bowl invitation. The only coach who earned vindication that season was Blanton Collier, who coached the Cleveland Browns to the 1964 NFL championship. In the player draft after that title, Collier picked Dale Lindsey from Western Kentucky, where he had transferred after leaving UK, and Lindsey became an All-Pro linebacker with the Browns.

That’s right. The same Dale Lindsey whom Bradshaw and his staff had labeled a “quitter.” He wasn’t the only one to show up Bradshaw. Bolus became a nationally respected journalist and Kentucky Derby historian. Minix became a successful ophthamologist. Others excelled in the military, business, medicine, and education. Some never got over the “quitter” stigma, but almost to a man, to their undying credit, they didn’t let it define or defeat them.

Wrote Hawpe:

“Throughout my years-long confrontation with Bradshaw, he insisted that those who left rather than accept his program’s savagery – and, more importantly, the personal abasement it involved – were quitters. He said if they quit the team, they would be lifelong quitters. These guys prove him wrong.”

The story of the “Thin Thirty” was finally told in a 2006 book by lawyer Shannon Ragland. It was a good read, marred only by Ragland’s erroneous assertion that UK’s 1962 loss to Xavier may have been “fixed.” Besides providing some historical perspective for modern fans, the book finally provided some closure to some of the players who have been unfairly forced to carry the “quitter” tag through life.

Hawpe was never an athlete, yet journalism taught him the same qualities of character and courage that players are supposed to get from sports. University administrators would be well-advised to remember this the next time they start talking about cutting funds for the student newspaper or the marching band or the drama club.

We have some history, David and I.

After Hawpe graduated from UK in the spring of 1965, he was hired to assist Bob Cooper at the Associated Press bureau in Lexington. It was a job that required Hawpe to make regular treks up to the sports department to get scores and other information. When his hiring was announced, Billy Thompson instructed us – I was covering the state colleges for the Herald then – to give him the cold shoulder.

That didn’t last long.

I liked David from the git-go and soon he was an honorary member of the sports department “gang.” After hours – and, yes, sometimes during hours – we played gin rummy and “eraser ball” in the sports department. Hawpe even won over Billy Thompson, who was too good-hearted to dislike anybody for very long.

Over the years, David and I have shared many good times and glorious moments. We’ve also had some serious philosophical disagreements that have tested us both. But I’ve always admired David and given him the benefit of the doubt because of what he did during the “Thin Thirty” era. Even when I disagreed with him, I knew him to be a man of character.

At a tender age, David was thrust into the crucible of journalism and public opinion. He trusted his friends and his instincts. He did the right thing, even though it cost him friends and probably a fraternity invitation or two, and he never backed down.

It’s nice to see that, after all these years, he has been recognized by the champions he championed. Had I been there, I would have led the applause.