From 1947, when Jackie Robinson of the Brooklyn Dodgers broke major-league baseball’s color barrier, to 1964, when President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the historic Civil Rights Act, sports and rock music – rock n’ roll, as we called it then – did more than anything to change America’s culture and its attitude toward race.
That’s why […]

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I don’t know about you, but, frankly, I’m thrilled that the national basketball team of the Dominican Republican is training in Lexington for the FIBA Americas Tournament Aug. 30-Sept. 11 in Mar del Plata, Argentina. I am not sure what this tournament is all about, but I think it has something to do with the […]

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Lexington, Ky., is about the last place in Basketball America where you would expect to find a team that’s easy to wrap your arms around and love like an underdog. That’s because University of Kentucky basketball long has been the poster child for overemphasis. Going back to 1930, when Adolph Rupp began building the game’s […]

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It’s too bad for longtime Kentucky hoops fans that the greatest victory in Morehead’s history had to come at the expense of Louisville. Then again, from the Eagles’ standpoint, it made their remarkable achievement just a little sweeter. Had the 13th-seeded Eagles upset any other No. 4 seed, it wouldn’t have been quite as fulfilling.
Like […]

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Black History Month is another attempt at setting the record straight. For many years history books, written primarily by whites for whites, ignored many of the important contributions African-Americans have made in the fields of science, business, government, and education. So Black History Month is a nationwide effort to getting those stories out and recognizing […]

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The National Football League was born in the 1920s, that giddy era when the prohibition of alcohol turned out to be the best thing to ever happen to organized crime. It was a time when movies and the radio shrunk the nation, when flappers danced the Black Bottom in speakeasies, and when baseball, college football, […]

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Ordinarily I am not much of a tourist when I go on the road. Oh, if some famous or historic place happens to get in my way, I will pause to take a look. Usually, though, I’m too preoccupied with what I have to do.
It was different when I made my first trip to cover […]

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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 — […]

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My longtime friend David Kindred, best wordsmith of my newspaper generation, has a new book out about one of his former employers, The Washington Post, and how it has coped with the swift and startling changes in the communications business. Those who know Dave’s work will not be suprised to learn that it’s beautifully written […]

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Shame, shame on The Courier-Journal for not including Earl Cox in its otherwise outstanding special <a href=’http://www.courier-journal.com/section/sports0202&template=fullpage’ >Sunday section</a> about the end of the University of Louisville’s reign in Freedom Hall.
For those who have asked, it doesn’t bother me that my former employer, which I served as sports editor from 1977 through 1986, did not […]

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