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.

Those were the days when Lexington’s black community was virtually ignored by Lexington’s newspapers. Neither the morning Herald nor the afternoon Leader had a fulltime black editor, reporter, or photographer. In the Leader, news of the African-American community was confined to a column entitled “Colored Notes & Obituaries.” Its author was Helen Berryman, an elderly black lady who would type up her copy at home and drop it by the office.

Those also were the days when much of America, especially the South, was aflame with racial tension. The era in which I met Roach was the era in which blacks and civil-rights workers were being murdered, when churches were being bombed, and when UK basketball coach Adolph Rupp could not sign black players because he could not guarantee their safety on visits to Alabama and Mississippi.

When rioting erupted in the Watts section of Los Angeles in 1965, it was page one news in most parts of the country. In Lexington, however, Fred B. Wachs, the publisher of both papers, ordered his editors to bury the story deep inside the paper on the grounds that if Lexington’s blacks didn’t know about it, they wouldn’t be tempted to replicate what was happening in LA.

It apparently never dawned on Wachs that blacks did not depend on the papers to get their news. He probably would have been shocked to learn that blacks actually owned radios and – yes! – even TV sets. It was the sort of plantation mentality that always has existed in Lexington, where the Old South still lives in certain musty minds.

When I decided to give Lexington’s black high schools – Dunbar in the city, Douglass in the county – equal treatment with the white schools, I wasn’t really trying to make a political statement. It just seemed the logical and right thing to do, that’s all.
Ever since 1957, when the traditional black schools had first become eligible to play in the State High School Basketball Tournament, Dunbar had supplanted Lafayette as Fayette County’s No. 1 basketball program.

After beating the Bearcats the first time he met them in district tournament play, Ralph Carlisle, then iconic coach who had won state titles in 1953 and ’57, went 0-11 against Roach’s teams. Try as he might – and he tried every tactic imaginable, including holding the ball in those days before the shot clock – Carlisle could not beat Dunbar. So he retired in 1962, ostensibly to spend more time on his insurance business.

The white coach who did the most to help Dunbar – and to promote race relations in high school basketball – was John Bill Trivette of Pikeville. Seeing how black players would change the game long before anybody else, Trivette knew that his boys were going to have to learn to play against them if they were to have any chance at future state championships.

So he invited Roach’s teams to Pikeville and he reciprocated by playing them in Lexington, either at the Dunbar gym or in the University of Kentucky’s Memorial Coliseum as part of double- or triple-headers. Roach once said that he got treated better in Eastern Kentucky than he did in Lexington.

Unfortunately for Dunbar, not everyone was as color-blind as Trivette.

In 1961, when Dunbar became the first all-black school to make the quarterfinals of the State Tournament, a couple of good-ol’-boy referees, Foster “Sid” Meade and Milford “Toodles” Wells, decided there was no way a black school was going to win the state title while they had anything to say about it.

So when the Bearcats went up against Breathitt County, they stiffed Roach’s team so blatantly that the Memorial Coliseum crowd, which was mostly pulling for Breathitt County at the tipoff, did an about-face and was rooting for the Bearcats at the end.

At the buzzer, Dunbar’s Austin Dumas threw up a prayer from midcourt. When it swished through the nets to give the Bearcats the victory, it touched off an incredible celebration. The Bearcat fans chanted, “Dun-bar did it again…Dunbar did it again.” For one brief shining moment, justice had prevailed.

After that ordeal, the Bearcats were physically and emotionally depleted when they took the floor that night to play Coach Bob Wright’s Ashland Tomcats for the state title. They couldn’t have won under any circumstances because the Tomcats – Larry Conley, Bob Hilton, Gene Smith, Steve Cram and Harold Sargent – still are the best team in the state’s history.

Nevertheless, Dunbar might have been able to make it a little closer than the 19-point final margin if Roach and his players were so depleted by the Breathitt County game. Even in defeat, however, they won praise from everybody except the most hardcore rednecks. They demolished the ugly stereotype that blacks would fold against good white teams because they weren’t disciplined enough.

When I started giving the black schools equal treatment, only one of my editors said anything ugly. It happened one night when I returned to the office after covering a game at Dunbar in which the Bearcats played host to either Louisville Male or Central, I can’t remember which.

“What game did you cover?” asked the editor.

“Dunbar,” I said.

“What are you,” he sneered, “some kinda nigger lover?”

“No sir,” I said. “It was just the best game in town, that’s all.”

In a very real sense, Roach was like his hero, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. Whenever his teams were confronted with ugly fans or racist referees, he never complained. His just pushed his teams to play harder. He believed the scoreboard was where you got even. The Bearcats had plenty of opportunities to get involved in brawls, but never did.

He always wore a coat and tie to games. He never cursed. His teams were invariably disciplined and hard to play against. He made them keep their hair short and dress conservatively. He was so old-school that I don’t believe he could have handled dreadlocks, tattoos, jewelry, and saggy pants.

First and foremost. Sanford T. Roach was an educator. He taught his good players to view basketball mainly as a means to an end – a college education. He taught all his players values that would enable them to find jobs and take care of their families and hold their heads high in a racist society.

For anybody who loved exciting basketball, the Bearcats were a joy to behold, especially when they were playing one of the Louisville schools. I remember when Male came to Dunbar with incredible players such as Dallas Thornton, George Tinsley, and Teddy Rose. But Dunbar countered with the likes of George Wilson, Bobby Washington, Joe Hamilton, and Richard Green.

The white crowds at Lafayette, Henry Clay, Bryan Station, Lexington Catholic, and University High – the other high schools in Lexington at that time – didn’t come close to have as much fun as the Dunbar crowds. They rocked the gym with their chants, their songs, their dance routines, and their sheer exuberance. Every Bearcat game was like an old-fashioned tent revival.

Burdened by the death of his wife, Roach abruptly and prematurely retired from coaching after the 1965 season. But he never retired from education or the civil-rights movement. Over the next 45 years, he held various administrative positions in the school system, not to mention serving on all sorts of boards and commissions.

In the early 1970s, Dr. Otis Singletary, to his eternal credit, made Roach the first African-American to serve on UK’s Athletics Board. And it was in that position, in 1998, that he wiped away tears when Tubby Smith was named UK’s first African-American basketball coach.

A decade or so ago, I got a call from my friend Jim Host, who then was running one of the most powerful collegiate public-relations, marketing, and publishing firms in the nation.

“I want to do a book about S.T. Roach,” he said, “and I want you to do it. I can’t afford to pay you much because I know we’re not going to make any money on it. But I don’t care about that. I want to do it because it deserves to be done.”

And so we did it, enabling me to spend many happy and poignant hours reminiscing about his remarkable life. The only trouble was, Roach was a tough interview because he didn’t like to toot his own horn. I had to work hard to drag nuggets of information out of him.

After the book was published, however, Roach became so excited about all the positive comments he received that every time I would see him, he would have a new story for me, one that he had “forgotten” to tell me while we were working on the book.

“Coach,” I would groan, “why didn’t you tell me that before? Now we’ll have to save it for the second printing.”
Of course, there never was a second printing. As Host knew in advance, our book was not a commercial success. But because of what it meant to us, to Coach Roach, and to the Dunbar community, I can say without reservation that it’s one of the best things either of us have ever done.

I’ve been blessed to know a lot of iconic coaches in my 50-plus years in this racket. But I respect none more than I respect Coach Roach. He was one of the very best people I’ve ever known. And by his example more than his words, he taught me more than anybody about humility and respecting the rights of others and treating everyone, regardless of their race or religion, with dignity.

It is ironic, in a sense, that he passed two days before the first Kentucky-Louisville football game where both sides have African-American coaches. He would have loved seeing Joker Phillips and Charlie Strong lead their teams on the field. He wouldn’t say a word about it, of course, but he would have that glint that he got when he was proud.

Funny what you remember. Even though I was 37 years his junior, he always called me “Mr. Reed.” I hate to force him to call me “Billy.” I’m just glad I got the chance to tell him, a few years ago, that I loved him. He was embarrassed, as usual, and changed the subject.

But I like to think he was pleased. I like to think that he loved me, too.