By 1983 I had a strong collection of albums, mostly popular rock like Foreigner, Journey, Styx, and the like. Let's see what was happening in 1983. 1978 will be a hard act to follow. I did write about 1983 last spring. The Music of 1983. A lot of this music would become much more a part of my life later when I was in college.
I saw it. I definitely saw it. We must've had a snow day, or I must've been sick, or we might've still been on Christmas break. But, whatever, I saw it.
Happy one-year birthday to Dolly Parton's Hazard library!
Says YouTube user "capnvid47:" "When I was around eight living with my family in Hyden, Kentucky, we set
up a UHF antenna (a rare occurrence in that mountainous area) to get
the KET (Kentucky Educational Television) transmitter in nearby Hazard,
which with the rest of the statewide network signed on in 1968."
Here's what the bowls would look like if we were in 1983 -- I leave it up to you whether you like this system better or worse than the system we currently have:
Orange Bowl: (1) Florida St. (11-0) v. (6) Missouri (10-1)
(Since Missouri would be in the Big 8, their only loss would be to Indiana)
Sugar Bowl: (2) Alabama (10-1) v. (7) Texas Christian (10-1)
Rose Bowl: (3) Oregon (10-1) v. (4) Ohio St. (10-1)
Cotton Bowl: (5) Baylor (10-1) v. (9) Mississippi St (9-2)
Fiesta Bowl: (8) Michigan St. (9-2) v. (10) Arizona (9-2)
Florida State would, of course, roll over the Big 8 champ and take the title -- just like Miami used to do back in the day. Of course, I think FSU is going to roll over everyone and take the title this year. At least under the old system, everything would be over by the end of New Year's Day.
One more thing: if the Big XII really does add two members in order to have a championship game, I hope they add Southern Methodist and Rice.
Eric and Matthew have been talking about Sam Bowie's injury, and it got me to thinking about how those seasons in the early 1980's played out. Consider the following:
Bowie was part of the same class as Dirk Minniefield, Derrick Hord, and Charles Hurt. They were all freshmen in 1979-80, and they were sophomores in 1980-81. The 1980-81 season ended with a loss to UAB. For 1981-82, Bowie was gone due to injury. So that team was led by three juniors (Minniefield, Hurt, and Hord), with Jim Master and Melvin Turpin as sophomores. That team lost to MTSU. In 1982-83, UK had a great team: Minniefield, Hurt, and Hord were seniors; Master, Turpin, and Beal were juniors; and Kenny Walker was a freshman. That team, of course, came very, very close to the Final Four – they were beaten by Louisville in overtime. The next year, Bowie was back – but Minniefield, Hurt, and Hord were gone. By this point, Walker and Turpin were so good that UK didn't miss Hurt and Hord too much – they had been phased out over the course of the 1983 season anyway. But there was no good replacement for Minniefield. Here is UK's 1983-84 roster:
Seniors: Bowie, Turpin, Beal, and Master
Juniors: Bearup and McKinley
Sophomores: Walker and Roger Harden
Freshmen: Winston Bennett and James Blackmon
Now that is an even better team than the one UK had in 1983 – and this team did reach the Final Four. But the bottom line is that Hall never had the chance to play the team he had meant to have – the 1983 team that would have featured Minniefield, Bowie, Turpin, Master, Hurt, Hord, and Walker. Without Bowie, the 1983 team didn't have enough on the inside to go all the way. Without Minniefield, the 1984 team lacked the point guard play necessary to go all the way.
Could Hall have won it all in 1983, if he'd had Sam Bowie? I believe he could have. Remember, he was building toward that year – just as he had built for 1978. I think UK, with Bowie, beats U of L in 1983, and then I think the Cats would have had a very good chance to take down Phi Slamma Jamma in the Final Four. (UK did beat Houston the next year, although that game was at Rupp and Houston no longer had Clyde Drexler.) And then it would have been a final against North Carolina State – and UK had some great free throw shooters. In any event, I would have much preferred UK's chances with Bowie in 1983 to their chances of getting past Patrick Ewing and company without a good point guard in 1984.
The extent to which Bowie's injury wrecked those UK teams of the early 1980s – and Joe Hall's efforts to do what he could to coach around them – probably deserve a lot more attention than they have gotten. At the time, the local media did little to defend Hall, and mostly did everything they could to make him look bad. That definitely had an effect on how he was perceived, but inside and outside Kentucky. My guess is that a sympathetic writer could tell a pretty convincing story of how Hall did some of his best work in 1983 and 1984, and got almost no credit for it.
Today the Champion, Viswanathan Anand, had white. He opened with P-K4, the first time that move has been tried in this competition (each of the other four games started P-Q4). Boris Gelfand, the challenger, responded with the Sveshnikov Variation of the Sicilian Defense (1 . . . P-QB4; 2. N-KB3 N-QB3; 3. P-Q4 PxP; 4. NxP N-KB3; 5. N-QB3 P-K4; 6. N(4)-QN5 P-Q3; 7. B-N5 P-QR3; 8. N-R3 K-P4). At this point, Anand played N-Q5 -- which, according to Wikipedia, leads to "quieter play" than other potential variations. And so it proved to be, as Gelfand easily held off the Champion, and the match ended in a draw after only 27 moves. You can read about it here.
So that's five matches and five draws. There are only 12 matches scheduled, so it seems increasingly likely that whoever becomes the first player to win a match will win the title.
SCORE AFTER FIVE MATCHES
Anand (IND) 2 1/2 - 2 1/2 Gelfand (ISR)
Whatever the number, the vast majority of folks in the Kroger lot had arrived long before my wife, 3-year-old daughter and I did--at about 7:15, after hitting Pizza Inn's Friday-night buffet ($18 for the three of us with a 20-percent tip, and they made any pizza for the buffet that we requested--even the daughter's olives-only job; 5 stars, highly recommended). WKYX had Tweeted a picture shortly after 5 that showed a substantial line already gathering even that early.
Indeed, by the time we arrived, police had blocked off the lot from more entrants, and so we and dozens of others resorted to parking in the gravel lots near the baseball parks at Bob Noble Park just east of Kroger and then walking over the quarter mile or so to grocery. (It appeared quite a few folks had used the parking lot of Park Avenue Baptist Church, on the west side of Kroger, for the same purpose.)
The bus was scheduled to arrive at 7:30, but it was running a bit late getting out of Owensboro. Instead, it was a local radio DJ, "Bear," who took the stage at 7:30 and asked us to practice a "big western-Kentucky welcome." Apparently, we didn't cheer big enough because he had us practice it again. Then he asked us to cheer for Kroger, and we cheered. Then he asked us to cheer for the local police and emergency-management personnel who were on hand for crowd control, and we cheered. And then he asked us to cheer for the Tilghman High School band and cheerleaders who performed off and on throughout, and we cheered for them, too.
Then there was 30 minutes of mostly nothing.
During this period, my wife and I thought about leaving because we kept on worrying that the daughter was going to get bored and fussy. The worry was unfounded; the daughter seemed to have a blast from beginning to end. She led us in dancing to the band. She led us in petting peoples' dogs. And she led us in playing ring around the rosey. In fact, I saw no one leave early--literally zero. Some played with smartphones. Some boys played football in an open area of the parking lot. Most folks just talked with one another; everyone seemed to know everyone else.
Still, it was chilly, and we might've bailed--if not for a trip inside Kroger to use the restrooms. It gave us a chance to warm up a bit, and, by the time we were finished, they were announcing over the loud speaker inside the store that the bus was on Park Avenue and nearing the lot.
Coach Cal talked about the legacy he inherited in becoming the Kentucky coach, and there was a giant roar when he introduced Coach Hall.
And then Coach Cal talked about the sacrifices that various players made this season in order to make the championship possible.
But then the police started getting worried about all of us behind the stage and the fact that maybe we weren't leaving enough room for a fire lane. So those of us behind the stage had to move around the bus and out with the rest of the crowd in the front, and Coach Cal cut it off pretty soon after that, anyway. He was tired. They had already been to Midway, Frankfort, Elizabethtown and Owensboro before arriving in Paducah on Friday. And they had made a huge whip through eastern Kentucky on Thursday. In addition to the scheduled stops, there were impromptu visits to an Etown Shoneys and a Martin McDonald's.
Matt Jones with Kentucky Sports Radio got up and talked the crowd through forming groups of 25 or so to have their pictures made with Coach Cal and the trophy. At this point, we gave up the ghost and retired for the night.
John Wright, who may or may not have been part of the Heath High School Class of 1987 and a reporter for the original Heath Post, wrote in Saturday's Paducah Sun about an 87-year-old Paducah man who celebrated his birthday Friday by coming out to see Coach Cal and the trophy. He said it made him feel young again--"you know, I think I feel 80 today."
I struggled the whole weekend with what to say about this event--whether to write it big and sweeping or small and particular. I've thought about writing something about how big a deal it is when someone big and famous comes all the way to Paducah ("it's so out there," as my wife correctly commented over pizza Friday night). I thought about writing something about how most of the folks at Kroger Friday seemed more intent on thanking Coach Cal than in being entertained (it really wasn't that entertaining of an event, but it sure felt like everyone who went were glad they did). I thought about writing something about earnestness and irony.
I'll leave it with this: It was a festive atmosphere of a particularly Kentucky type. There should be more events where people get together and just say and yell nice things about each other, and I am thankful that I got to go to this one in Paducah.
In the background of this Tuesday snapshot of a perfectly beautiful 3-year-old child who is utterly consumed with joie de vivre while playing at Camp Zachary Taylor Memorial Park in southern Louisville (where F. Scott Fitzgerald trained during World War I), you might notice the boys playing basketball--some in University of Kentucky blue, some in University of Louisville red. It really is kind of like that in the state this week. The Associated Press reports, "Here, the game is likened to a civil war," but that doesn't quite get it. The Courier-Journal on Monday's Page 1 declared it literally is "CIVIL WAR!"
Illustrations of how crazy Kentucky gets about UK-U of L are not hard to find. Pieces of evidence, from absurd to subtle, are coming in from all over: Georgetown, Lexington, Columbia, Nicholasville, Grantland and 1983. My personal favorite little sidelight detail to the big game is the Louisville jeweler who is running radio ads for red- and blue-diamond watches and hosting a pre-game party Saturday. "We haven't had so much to be proud of since the mid '70s," goes the ad. (The mid '70s?)
All of that said, of course, the basketball game is not all that is going on around Kentucky this week. For example, Paducah's rocking the Dogwood Trail.
Mrs. Mary Lanier Magruder is apparently one of the really good gets for UK's 1936 A Brief Anthology of Kentucky Poetry. Most of the poets in here are represented by two or three titles; Editor J.T.C. Noe makes way for five from Mrs. Lanier Magruder.
"Of 'Lane's End,' Kevil, Kentucky, comes of a long line of cultured ancestors, distinguished as soldiers, musicians, diplomats, courtiers, poets, and litterateurs," writes compiler Noe. "In her Virginia ancestry are the Laniers, Washingtons, Averys, Claibornes, Sterlings, Byrds, and MacLins." (Mr. Heath High School of 1983 was a Lanier, Marty; I wonder if he and Mrs. Mary are kin.) She's a big deal--published in The Saturday Evening Post, Collier's, Holland's and many more. Her 1924 novel, Wages, was heralded by The Buffalo Sunday Express as "sufficiently voltaged."
With the Carolina Panthers set to make the 98th overall selection and first pick of the fourth round of this year's draft, NFL.com says the best available prospect is Christian Ballard, a 6-foot-4, 284-pound defensive lineman from neither the University of Kentucky nor a Kentucky high school.
With the Philadelphia Eagles set to make the eighth overall pick in the first round of the 1983 draft, Sports Illustrated's Paul "Dr. Z" Zimmerman was probably saying that the best available prospect was Notre Dame tight end Tony Hunter, Illinois quarterback Tony Eason or Florida fullback James Jones. (None of those guys was a Kentuckian either.)
In February 1983, I was 14 and a very meaningful half years old. I know now that I didn't know, hadn't seen or hadn't done much of anything. In fact, I know now I still don't know, haven't seen or haven't done much of most things. But I did know, had seen and had done a few things when I was 14 and a half, and so I was pretty much convinced I knew and had seen all things--and even had done most.
My mom knew otherwise. In my house, Dad was the bombastic disciplinarian--the implorer and the pleader, the yeller and the cryer. The frothing position coach. Mom typically took a gentler tack.
When I got off the bus from Heath one February afternoon to find that week's issue of SI waiting for me, for example, "sizzling Cheryl Tiegs" had been additionally attired in a smart and modest, paper-doll dress that my mother had fashioned from a scrap envelope and affixed to the cover. This was classic Mom--not shutting out influences but shaping them.
But there was also in Mom the (thankfully) more rarely seen, no-quarter meter outer of condemnation and sanction. And it was this Mom, who later that evening, having flipped through the issue to look for college-basketball coverage, violently ripped page after page from the magazine as the swimsuits gradually shrank and the looks on the faces grew increasingly seductive.
I was incensed and insulted. Mom cared only that I was 14 and a half and hers.
The memory gets a little shaky here. I'm pretty sure that I actually was the one who pulled the plug on the SI subscription in a strange, made-sense-at-the-time act of defiance. Whether it was a strike or lockout didn't really matter; all that did was that there would be no more Dr. Z for me.
