LEXINGTON, Ky. – A typist who lives long enough to celebrate the 50th anniversary of his high school graduation has earned a bit of slack, the way I see it, so I want to tell you now about the 1960-’61 Blue Devils of Henry Clay High School, a team that was pretty danged good, if I do say so, and which became at least a footnote in what turned out to be a historic season in Kentucky high school basketball.

I guess I should start with the summer of 1960, when I was part of the Henry Clay contingent that got on a Greyhound bus in Lexington for the short trip to Eastern Kentucky State Teachers College in Richmond, where we would be delegates to Boys State, a week-long convention, sponsored by the American Legion, that was devoted to teaching government to boys from around the state.

Shortly after we registered and unpacked, three of us – myself and varsity basketball players Bill Brooks and George Insko – sauntered over to the gym to see if we could find a pickup game of hoops. Much to our delight, we ran into three guys, obvious country bumpkins in T-shirts and jeans, who were happy to oblige us.

Well, suffice is to say that instead of showing these rubes how the game was played in the big city, we got clobbered in three straight games. It turned out that our opponents – and fellow delegates – were starters on the Ashland High team. Their names were Harold Sergent, Steve Cram, and Gene Smith. It was not to be the last we heard of them.

Our coach, Elmer “Baldy” Gilb, also taught a full load of mathematics courses and somehow found time to moonlight as a scout for Adolph Rupp, the legendary coach who lived only a couple of miles from our three-story brick school on East Main Street.

In those days before scouting services, videotape, and wall-to-wall ball on TV, scouting was as primitive as recruiting. Mr. Gilb actually had to travel to see a UK opponent play in person. He diagrammed plays on tablets that he brought back and turned over to Rupp. We all were terribly impressed that our coach had such access to the most important man in the state.

Mr. Gilb was an excellent teacher, both in the classroom and on the basketball floor. He spoke loudly, possibly to compensate for his poor hearing. Although he always turned out good teams at Henry Clay, he never won the state championship, meaning he suffered in comparison with cross-town rival Ralph Carlisle of Lafayette High, who won the title in both 1953 and ’57.

The ’57 team won its championship by beating Eastern High before a crowd of around 18,000 in Louisville’s brand-new Freedom Hall. At the time, that was the largest crowd ever to see a basketball game of any sort below the Mason-Dixon line. But even as Carlisle celebrated, his world was changing. That also was the first year that all-black schools were allowed to compete against the all-white and integrated schools for the state title.

During my junior year at Henry Clay, Lafayette again had the state’s top-ranked team. Its star, Jeff Mullins, was a transplanted New Yorker whose father had been transferred to Lexington by IBM. At 6-feet-4, Mullins was a slashing driver who also could pull up and hit the jumper. It was a foregone conclusion that he would go to UK, following in the sneaker steps of former Lafayette stars Vernon Hatton, a starter on Rupp’s 1958 NCAA championship team, and Billy Ray Lickert, who was starting for Rupp at the same time Mullins was becoming Kentucky’s “Mr. Basketball” at Lafayette.

Shockingly, however, Lafayette lost to Dunbar in the first round of the 1960 district tournament. And a few weeks later, Mullins stunned Rupp and everybody else by announcing that he was going to Duke to play alongside Art Heyman instead of staying at UK, where he would have been a teammate of Cotton Nash. For Rupp, the loss of Mullins was humiliating. Although recruiting services didn’t exist in those days, everybody knew that Mullins was one of the best prospects in the nation.

With Mullins gone, those of us at Henry Clay felt pretty sure we would be better than Lafayette in 1960-’61. But now the specter of Dunbar loomed over us like a huge cloud. And that’s how it was throughout the season because we didn’t play Dunbar, or any other black school, until tournament time in March.

Brooks, my best friend and locker mate, was our starting center even though he was only 6-2 and 165 pounds. But he could jump, and he was a smart player on a team of head cases. The only other senior in the starting lineup was 5-8 guard Buddy Rust, who never cracked a book so far as anybody knew. He was backed up by Insko, my pal from the Boys State debacle.

The three junior starters – 6-3 Frank Harscher, 6-4 Pres Judy, and 6-6 Bob Johnson – all were legitimate college prospects, especially Harscher and Judy, who had been rivals since grade-school days. In those days before cell phones and twitters, a prospect measured his status by how many letters he received from college coaches. Suffice it to say that Judy and Harscher had stacks of them.

Interestingly, however, even though his scout Baldy Gilb was our coach, Rupp never showed any interest in any of the Henry Clay players. Maybe the Mullins fiasco had spoiled him on Lexington players. Whatever, I don’t recall seeing him at a single one of our home games in the Lexington Junior Gym, where we played because we had outgrown the facility at Henry Clay.

Unable to make the team, I stayed close by keeping the scorebook on road trips, which afforded me the exquisite pleasure of riding a yellow school bus along two-lane twisting roads to such outposts as Irvine, Mt. Sterling, and Harrodsburg. I also covered the team for both The Lexington Herald, where I worked up to 60 hours a week to support myself, and the school paper, the Hi-Times.

Confession time: I didn’t report on the rivalry between Harscher and Judy because friendships meant more to me than a newspaper story. Still do, for that matter. Nor did I report that when Brooks went to work at a Florida camp in the summer of 1960, his girl friend, one of our cheerleaders, took up with Harscher.

This soap-opera turn of events could have wrecked the chemistry on the basketball, team, not to mention the rock band we had formed. (Harscher and Brooks were the guitar players, Johnson the saxophonists, and me the business manager/roadie). But Brooks took the high road and refused to make an issue of it, saving both the team and the band.

(Editor’s note: We named our band the “Torques,” which is a term for a twisting action, because, you see, the dance craze known as the “Twist” was just becoming fashionable, so we thought…never mind. It seemed like a good idea at the time.)

Our team made up in finesse what it lacked in brawn. Both Brooks and Johnson were pale and frail, easy to push around inside. Neither was what you would call an enforcer. Heck, when a fight broke out at Anderson County, Johnson went into the stands and sat between his parents. But in Harscher, Judy and Rust, we had three shooters who could flat bust it from outside.

We got off to a fast start, winning our first eight games by an average of more than 20 points. But then a loss to Harrodsburg – who had two future D-I players in Eddie Bodkin (Eastern Kentucky) and Terry Mobley (UK) – was followed by an upset to Lafayette. Regrouping, we ran off nine more victories before losing our season finale to Clark County, giving us a 17-3 record to take into postseason play.

In the Central Kentucky Conference tournament, we won our first two games but lost again to Harrodsburg in the title contest. That put us at 19-4 heading into the district tournament, where we beat Bryan Station in the first round. Then, finally, came the long-awaited – or long-dreaded, if you prefer – showdown with Dunbar.

Lining up for the center jump, Brooks looked like a waif next to Henry Davis, the chiseled 6-5 Dunbar pivotman. Nevertheless, we held our own against the Bearcats, pushing them to the limit before they finally pulled out a 57-56 victory. That effort looked better and better as Dunbar stormed through the bracket, winning the district and region on the way to the State Tournament, where they rolled through their first two games to earn a semifinal berth against Breathitt County, a team from the mountainous coal region of eastern Kentucky.

At the beginning of the Saturday morning game in UK’s Memorial Coliseum, the crowd was heavily in favor of the underdog mountain team. However, as the game progressed and it became apparent that a couple of racist referees were determined to keep Dunbar from advancing, the crowd shifted to the black players in the green-and-white uniforms.

Even so, it looked as if the zebras would prevail until the final second, when Dunbar’s Austin Dumas launched a desperation 50-footer that swished, giving the Bearcats a 55-54 victory and making them the first all-black school to play in the championship game of the State Tournament.

When they came out for the championship game that night, they were obviously drained by their effort against Breathitt County. However, even had they been fresh, the Bearcats weren’t going to beat the Ashland High Tomcats, who even are regarded as probably the best high school team ever produced in Kentucky. Coached by Bob Wright, the Tomcats had lost only one game all season – to Lafayette, of all people. It was a game replayed many times by Ashland star Larry Conley and Lafayette substitute Tom Hammond after they became a TV announcing team that did SEC games for almost 30 years.

So Ashland won the game and the title, 69-50, with Hilton, Smith and Cram – the three guys we had played the previous summer at Boys State – combining for 42 points. The other Ashland starters were senior guard Harold Sergent and Conley, the splendid junior who was the team’s catalyst.

All five of the Ashland players earned D-I scholarships. Hilton went to West Point along with Henry Clay’s Brooks. Cram went to Baylor, Sergent to Morehead State, and Smith to Cincinnati. After a sterling senior year in 1961-’62, Conley went to UK, where he became the leader of the “Rupp’s Runts” team that lost to Texas Western in the 1966 NCAA title game.

Our Henry Clay guys also did all right in the scholarship department. After a senior year in which they led the Blue Devils to the State Tournament, Judy decided to play for Coach Whack Hyder at Georgia Tech and Harscher followed Mullins to Duke (he transferred to Georgia after two years). The academic-minded Johnson opted for a small-college career at Denison, where he became one of the program’s best players.

Only Rust didn’t play college ball. He had neither the size nor the grades. Sadly, more than any of the others, he lived in the past, reliving the old glory at every opportunity. He died long before the 50th anniversary of our graduation.

All four of the other starters showed up for our 50th reunion, which we turned into a joint affair by inviting the classes of 1962 and ’63. Music was provided by – you guessed it – the Torques, who have gone through many personnel changes over the years with one exception: Brooks, a highly acclaimed neurosurgeon, still is playing the guitar.

The typist was glad to see them all. We had come of age together, and that creates a special bond that can never really be broken. We had some really good players at Henry Clay High in 1960-’61 and if Adolph Rupp couldn’t see it, well, who cared about him anyway?