The day after Western Kentucky dropped a two-point overtime decision at home to Louisiana-Lafayette on Jan. 5 – a game in which the visitors inexplicably had six men on the floor for the last 20 seconds – Ken McDonald was fired as the Hilltoppers’ head coach and replaced by Ray Harper, a native of nearby […]

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“If you look closely at the various forces at work in basketball at every level of the sport—the AAU programs that funnel players to college programs, the agents looking to land players as early as NBA rules allow, the shoe companies, coaches, franchise owners, front-office executives, players—it eventually dawns on you that they have one […]

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It was on the afternoon of Dec. 23, 1978, that I met Dave Gavitt for a cheeseburger at the Executive Inn near Freedom Hall. In a few hours, his 10th and last Providence College basketball team would play the University of Louisville. At the time, U of L belonged to the Metro Conference and Providence […]

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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. – 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 […]

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LOUISVILLE – At a Kentucky Colonels reunion before Artis Gilmore’s induction into the Kentucky Athletic Hall of Fame, the biggest man in the room sat quietly in a corner, listening and laughing as old friends and former teammates told stories, some of which may have even been truthful, about the late, great American Basketball Association.
It […]

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Good morning, class, and welcome to Character Building in College Sports 101. Our topic today is Mr. Tony Woods, a former student-athlete at Wake Forest University. When Mr. Woods was in high school, he was branded with a five-star rating in the recruiting meat market, at least partly because he stands 6-feet-11 and can run […]

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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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SPRINGFIELD, Mass. – I have covered national championship college basketball teams coached by Denny Crum, Joe B. Hall, Bob Knight, Rick Pitino and Tubby Smith. I covered an ABA championship team coached by Hubie Brown. And now I’ve covered an NCAA Division II national championship team coached by Scotty Davenport.
All were special, each memorable in […]

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My bracket went into the dumper the first day of the NCAA tournament so even I don’t care what I think about the Final Four. There is no such thing as a Cinderella anymore. Put all the ratings systems in the shredder. I’ve already forgotten the name of the numbers geek ESPN tried to pawn […]

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