KHSAA Boys' Basketball Is Under Way

In the first game of the KHSAA Boys' State Basketball Tournament, the Lincoln County Patriots defeated the Jeffersontown Chargers 45-41.  Next up, the Muhlenberg County Mustangs will play the North Oldham Mustangs.

Lincoln County High School opened in August 1974.  According to Wikipedia, it resulted from a merger of the the following schools:  Stanford, Crab Orchard, Hustonville, McKinney, and King Mountain.

Seems Like a Big Deal

 This week, for the first time since December 18, 1961, neither Duke, UNC, nor Kentucky is ranked in the AP's men's basketball poll.  And you have to wonder how much longer all three teams will have the same coaches as they do now.

Rev. King in Louisville, 1961

"Delivered to the flagship theological institution of the flagship denomination of Southern Culture, Dr. King would never again give  another address like this."

Here's the audio, from Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville.

Belated Seasons Greetings, 1960-61!

The HP staff should get Football Holiday as a paid day off.

'The New Kentucky' (as of 1961)

The last chapter, "The New Kentucky," from Kentucky Yesterday and Today, written by Ruby Dell Baugher and Sarah Hendricks Claypool in 1961 and published by Kincaid Publishing House three years later:

There are silver-like strips that go east and west, north and south. They are highways that run right on through hills and over rivers. On those highways there are thousands of automobiles, trucks, moving vans, and buses. They are even now carrying more freight than trains. There has been a Louisville and Nashville train carrying passengers between Louisville and Henderson for more than a hundred years. It stopped November 15, 1958 because too few people had been riding it. Automobiles and planes are putting Kentucky passenger trains out of business. Nothing shows off our New Kentucky more than our 1961 civilization on wheels moved by gasoline. ...

Many would say that is is the schools that speak for a New Kentucky. There is the University of Kentucky Northwest Center at Henderson. It is so new that the 1960-1961 term was its very first, thus giving all in Western Kentucky who desire an education of university quality, an opportunity. Its first Director, they do not call him President, is Dr. Louis Alderman. In this our New Kentucky there are high schools and colleges available for all who will take advantage of their glorious privileges. And there is a public school for every boy and girl; the Minimum Foundation Law takes care of that. It provides each school district in the state a minimum program of education, regardless of the wealth of the district. State support for education provides sufficient funds to operate a minimum program defined by law. Those schools, all the way from the tiniest one-room school up to the most splendid college, are needed if Kentucky lives up to the highest expectations of Kentuckians in the past, the present, and the future.

Nothing helps more to make this a New Kentucky than electricity everywhere. Dix Dam, Louisville Dam, Wolf Creek Dam, and Kentucky Dam--these are the main sites for generation of electricity by water power. It is a New Kentucky with electricity in the milking barn as well as in the Governor's mansion. It is wherever practical necessity demands as well as luxury.

Western Kentucky has its smoke stacks and tipples proclaiming coal mines as viewed from the air. There is an Atomic Energy Plant at Paducah as recent as the Korean fighting. And there is Kentucky Lake drawing all people who have time to play.

There is nothing that announces New Kentucky more than Kentucky Lake. Last year it led all Tennessee Valley Authority impoundments with millions of visits from pleasure seekers. It is a recreational project that draws dollars from everywhere. Its thousands of houseboats, cruisers, runabouts, and rowboats are valued at more than eighteen millions of dollars. The value of its summer cottages run into thousands of dollars. Its tourist courts, cottages, and cabins rent for millions of dollars every year. At the 1960 Kentucky Lake Fishing Derby, Governor Combs said that tourists spent $160,000,000 in Kentucky in the summer of 1960. He said that the tourist industry was second only to agriculture in cash income in the State's industries.

There is a New Kentucky that does not shout. It speaks very firmly, sometimes in only whispers. But the whispers penetrate. This New Kentucky speaks through the devoutness of the churches, the desire for better teaching, sounder learning, cleaner politics, and in the problem of Integration.

This is New Kentucky, all forty thousand three hundred and ninety-five square miles of it for its population (1960) of more than three million people.

Oh, Kentucky

Anthony Davis in Etown.

President Clinton at Rupp Arena.

No Nugent for Fort Knox.

Meanwhile, Paducah Tilghman's Nobel Prize winner is coming off a busy week: speeches at Vanderbilt on Wednesday and in New York on Thursday.

Best Town on Earth?

Bow-tying in Bowling Green.

Intergenerational prom in Hazard.

Thirty years of Dial-a-Prayer in Morehead. 

Leave it to Washington.

Turning to the routes desk, ...

What an intricate and evocative piece of writing from Tom Eblen about John Jacob Niles, a woman from Russell with whom he collaborated, Thomas Merton, the guy who designed the state's memorial to Vietnam War veterans, etc.

"'Russ was the man, he was the guy,' Perry said."

The running clock comes to hoops, too.

Rest in peace, Coach Wright, coach of Larry Conley and the 1961 KHSAA boys' basketball champs and of Jerry Conley and the 1969 OVC co-champs.

HP SPECIAL REPORT: Murray State's undefeated season is under attack

This is a Heath Post Special Report ... Our undefeated and ninth-ranked Murray State University Racers trail, 61-60, at Tennessee State with 5:39 to play in Calloway County ...

The Home of College Basketball

From a December 11, 1961 article in Sports Illustrated about the Ohio Valley Conference, which at the time featured Morehead State, Western Kentucky, Eastern Kentucky, and Murray State:

"Give any boy in this conference a football and he will wonder how you dribble it with the points on the end. Basketball is the only sport that matters, and schools play it as though nothing else on earth matters."

Fifty Years Ago in Ole Miss

Interesting piece from Sports Illustrated's issue for November 13, 1961:

"I would give anything," wrote Jimmie Robertson, editor of the University of Mississippi's campus newspaper last week, "if there was some chance of Ole Miss and Michigan State playing each other in a bowl game. However, the archaic thinking which prevails in our capital city makes this impossible." Robertson's anger and frustration came from the weekly football ratings, which listed Michigan State as No. 1 in the nation and Ole Miss as No. 2. Robertson thinks that his team is the best, but no one will ever know -- Ole Miss refuses to meet any teams with Negro players. Thus, it cannot play Michigan State, Iowa or any school that does not engage in the same sort of hominy-grits thinking.

"That this sort of attitude still prevails in some southern centers of culture is hardly news. What is worth noting, however, is that student bodies of southern universities do not necessarily go along with the arteriosclerotic thinking of their faculty bosses. At the University of Texas recently, a campus-wide poll showed that the students were against such lily-white clauses 5 to 3. We somehow feel Jimmie Robertson is not alone at Ole Miss and that a poll there would show similar results. Meanwhile, let the panjandrums of Mississippi take their consolation from this one fact: only in a liberal, tolerant democracy could a school like Ole Miss be rated as high as No. 2 in anything."

Eleven years later, Ole Miss had its first African-American football player.

The Louisville Lip

The beginning of an article written by Huston Horn that was published in Sports Illustrated on September 25, 1961:

The clapboard house at 3302 Grand Avenue, Louisville is a commonplace dwelling one story high and four rooms deep. The ornamental frame of the front screen door was curlicued by hand with a scroll saw, and the concrete steps to the gray front porch are painted in stripes, red, white and blue.

"Don't bother your head about that house," says Cassius Marcellus Clay, Jr., 19 going on 20, the lyrical young man, lyrically named, who grew up there. "One of these days they're liable to make it a national shrine. Only by that time I'll be long gone, man, living it up on the top of a hill in a house that cost me $100,000. You'll find me out by the swimming pool, and I'll be talking to a bunch of little boys sitting in a circle around my feet. 'Boys,' I'll say to them, 'I was just a poor boxer once, as I reckon you already know. Only I was a very fine boxer, one of the finest that ever lived. And right there's how come I could move out of that little house down there on Grand Avenue and build this big one up here on the hill.'"

Here's one more quote from the same article:

"Like last Sunday," said Cassius, the unashamed, unequivocating materialist, not long ago. "Some cats I know said, 'Cassius, Cassius, come on now and let's go to church; otherwise you won't get to Heaven.' 'Hold on a minute,' I said to them, 'and let me tell you something else. When I've got me a $100,000 house, another quarter million stuck in the bank and the world title latched onto my name, then I'll be in Heaven. Walking around making $25 a week, with four children crying at home 'cause they're hungry, that's my idea of Hell. I ain't studying about either one of them catching up with me in the graveyard."

Tennis and the Long Arc of History

In 1961, Arthur Ashe of Richmond, Virginia won the U.S. Lawn Tennis Association's Interscholastic Championship at the University of Virginia. Here is an excerpt from Sports Illustrated's story on this event:

Ashe is the first Negro to win this tournament, and he is the last who will win it at the University of Virginia, where it has been held since 1946. People in Charlottesville have been unhappy at the university's role as tournament host since Negroes began to appear regularly. Despite an agreement with the USLTA extending through 1963, Virginia asked to be excused this year, but reluctantly agreed to hold the tournament on condition that it definitely be moved in 1962. The likelihood is that the new host will be Williams College, in Williamstown, Mass., where the sight of a Negro in white flannels does not upset white citizens as it apparently does in Charlottesville.

Two observations:

1. That last sentence is very nicely done.

2. These days, folks in Virginia have a very different feeling toward Arthur Ashe.

I Think This Show Will Make It

From the May 8, 1961 issue of Sports Illustrated:

"The American Broadcasting Company put on the first of its World of Sports television shows last Saturday. The creditable production of the Penn and Drake relays (Jim McKay was a good commentator -- he was considerably less lurid than at the Masters golf tournament) will be followed by 19 telecasts to be shown over 140 stations until September 9. Saturday's show was live and on tape from Philadelphia and Des Moines. But ABC plans to put international spice into Saturday afternoon's routine sports television.

"McKay will call the play between Tottenham Hotspur and Leicester City in Saturday's British Soccer Cup final, which will be taped. Included in the tentative ABC schedule are: a U. S. vs. U.S.S.R. track meet in Moscow; the Japanese all-star baseball game from Nagoya, Japan; the British Open Golf Championship; a classic day of golf, showing the St. Andrews course; the Canada Cup matches from Puerto Rico; world championship professional tennis from Mexico City; segments of the Le Mans International Grand Prix sports car race; and assorted events originating in the United States, showing track and field, stock car racing, the Indianapolis time trials -- even the Cheyenne rodeo. ABC plans to use additional commentators who are experts in their field, i.e., Arnold Palmer on golf, Jack Kramer on tennis and Sterling Moss on auto racing.

"American television has been making a good thing of sports financially for a long time, but has confined itself primarily to domestic events. Awareness of the potential in important foreign sports events is realistic and overdue. We wish ABC the best of luck and hope McKay will continue to allow the picture and play -- not the announcer -- to provide the excitement."

For the record, Spurs beat Leicester 2-0 to win the English F.A. Cup (not the "British Soccer Cup," as Scottish teams are not eligible), and become the first team to win the League and Cup Double since 1897. The 1961 Spurs team is one of the legendary teams in English history.

On the other hand, Jim McKay seems to have taken SI's advice to heart.

I have only two more comments:

1. Harlem Globetrotters
2. Arm-wrestling