Kentucky Minute

I've largely gotten away from The Joe B & Denny Show, but I caught yesterday's last 20 minutes and it was excellent. Some guy named Tony was doing the moderating (and is again today), and he asked Joe B why he left the UK job when he did. Joe B went into this long thing about all of the pressure he felt in that job ...

Joe B said he and his brother had grown up in Cynthiana (my vote for Kentucky's best town name) listening to games in the 1930s. He and his brother would keep their own scoring record with paper and pencil at the kitchen table and shoot paper wads at a wastebasket each time they heard that a UK player had taken a shot. Though he played only one season of varsity basketball for UK ("and didn't play much" even in that one year), Joe B said that running out onto the home floor in his Wildcats uniform for the first time still ranks as the most thrilling moment of his life.

Eventually--after jobs at Shepherdsville High School, Regis College and Central Missouri State--he was hired by Coach Rupp as an assistant coach in 1965, and for seven years Joe B said he traveled throughout the state recruiting and learning that his passion for UK basketball was shared in every county he visited. Coach Rupp had seemed unfazed by the pressure of coaching a team whose success or failure was so widely and deeply felt, Joe B said; "he had built the thing, so, if he failed, he didn't fail anyone but himself. ...

"But I inherited it." Joe B said the responsibility of being head coach at UK was just so heavy on his shoulders that almost immediately upon getting the job he promised his wife that he would retire when he was 55. The good feelings of the good seasons, even the bliss of the championship season, were sweet--but didn't last or blot out the disappointments, Joe B said. And even when basketball seasons finished, Joe B said he felt tremendous pressure to keep on the road recruiting or speaking on behalf of the program. Simply moving on to another school, where he wouldn't feel such a personal kinship with and responsibility to its fans, was no option; "my family would've disowned me; every member of my family lived around Cynthiana or Lexington, and they were all UK fans."

Joe B was 55 years old when Kentucky's season ended with the horrible NCAA-tournament loss to Georgetown in 1984. "That was no loss to end a career on." Joe B came back for one more year, coached the Wildcats to the round of 16 and left the team to become vice president of correspondent banking for Central Bank & Trust Company. "That was the best thing that could've happened to me at that point in my life," Joe B said. It was terrific to get to regularly experience "that TGIF feeling," he said.

So, anyway, I found this all just riveting, and I decided that I needed to go back to listening to The Joe B & Denny Show and sometimes offering up "Kentucky minute" coverage. That begins now.

Here goes: Today, Joe B and Tony have been taking calls on the World Equestrian Games, which are ongoing in Lexington. Joe B says they're great.