Last Night's Boys' Basketball Scores

For (I believe) the 81st year in a row, our beloved Heath Pirates will not play in the State Basketball Tournament. In fact, the losers in all these games were eliminated:

1st District (at Hickman Co.):

Carlisle Co. 47, Hickman Co. 42

2d District (at Paducah Tilghman):

Lone Oak 69, Heath 63

3d District (at Graves Co.):

Graves Co. 49, Mayfield 27

6th District (at Henderson Co.):

Webster Co. 52, Union Co. 44

7th District (at Caldwell Co.):

Madisonville-North Hopkins 81, Dawson Springs 24

And the Fifteenth Region will have a new champion this year, as East Ridge eliminated Shelby Valley, the 2010 State Champion, by the score of 62-46. Other teams of note eliminated tonight were 1976 Champ Edmonson County, 1991 State Finalist Lexington Tates Creek, the Kentucky School for the Deaf (they lost 81-8 to Danville to finish 11-20), and Red Bird (one of the great name teams -- their nickname is the Cardinals).

Also, a note for Eric: Pesky Russellville beat Franklin-Simpson 59-50 in the 13th District; the Panthers will play Logan County for the district title.

Oh, Kentucky

One and done: The boys' and girls' rounds of 268 (I think) start tonight. Most of Kentucky's 64 boys' and 64 girls' high-school basketball districts have four teams. The sixth, 10th, 59th and 60th districts have three teams each; there are 17 districts with five teams apiece, but at least one of them, the fourth, puts only four teams into its tournament. So, anyway, that math (probably flawed) comes out to 268 teams that begin today in the hunt for each of the one boys' and one girls' state basketball championship that the KHSAA awards. Hooray! In the honor of all those teams' having at least a glimmer of title hopes this morning, the Kentucky desk today performs a reading from Dave Kindred's essential Basketball, The Dream Game in Kentucky (5 stars, highly recommended), printed by Louisville's Fetter Printing Company in December 1975:

KINGDOM COME, February, 1968--Driving down KY 463, you pass through Delphia, which isn't much more than the "Delphia U-Wash Laundry" on the right. Over a hill and you're in Letcher County in the mountains of Southeastern Kentucky, 225 miles from Louisville. At a sign that says "Cumberland 5 miles, Hot Spot 15 miles," you turn left and go down a narrow road four miles--past Dollie's Place, which is a cafe with good hamburgers and a six-foot pool table--and you have found Kingdom Come High School. ...

Kindom Come doesn't have a good team. It has lost all 12 of its games and is last in The Courier-Journal's Litkenhous Ratings of the state's 350 high school teams. It has an 0.1 rating.

Coach Coots, who is called 'Coots' by everyone in school, says Kingdom Come has problems it likely will never overcome. Only 30 percent of the fathers in the valley have jobs, he said. Boys leave school to join the Army. They go to Cincinnati or Detroit to work.

"These kids have been losing for so long, they're used to it," Coots said. "They joke it up just as big if they lose as if they'd just won a game."

Maybe.

When Red Bird moved ahead 70-68 and was holding the ball until the final seconds ticked off on an electric alarm clock (the scoreboard had shorted out), a Kingdom Come senior guard Sharon Gentry shouted at a Red Bird fan: "Don't you sound off about winning, or I'll come down and scratch your eyes out."

And when Junior Halcomb left the floor, after missing two late free throws that would have tied the game, the tears in his eyes were not from joking it up.


In other sports news: Franklin-Simpson and Lone Oak's Kenny Perry ... LexCath's Natalie Novosel ... awesome, baby.

It's windfall day in western Kentucky: $7,000 profit shares for the Corvette makers in Bowling Green from GM, free surgeries for cataracts sufferers in Paducah from HPKo10*.

Van Halen--voted a "favorite music group" by Heath High School's seniors in both Pirata 1984 and Pirata 1985--played in Louisville this weekend. With all of the tumult and uncertainty that these last 27 years have brought, it's good to see that we can still count on David Lee Roth and the Van Halen brothers to make beautiful music together.

Tommy Womack's rocking anew, too.