From the Perspective of UK Basketball Fans, Was Billy Reed Worse than Jerry Tipton?

Here are comments posted by GoHeath on Rupp's Rafters in response to the above question:

To understand this issue, you really have to appreciate what the Courier-Journal used to be. In the 1970s and early 1980s, the Courier-Journal was one of the best papers in the whole country. It was about two or three times as long as it is now, it had a collection of great writers, and it covered almost every major event -- from a Presidential inaugural to the Super Bowl -- with its own reporters. It was distributed all over Kentucky; I lived in Paducah and it was widely read down there. In the days before talk radio and the Internet, the Courier-Journal had a power and influence within the Commonwealth that is unimaginable now.

So when Billy Reed was the main sports columnist at the C-J, he was a much, much bigger deal than Tipton is today. He was read by hundreds of thousands of people all over Kentucky. And he would occasionally write articles for Sports Illustrated. You also have to understand that back then (I'm thinking about the time from around 1978 to 1984), Reed was really, really talented. If you went back and read his old columns, you would find that they were better written and more interesting than almost anything you see in any newspaper today.

At that time, UK, U of L, and IU all had great coaches -- all three teams were in the hunt for the national title almost every year. And there were strong feelings among all three fan bases about who was the best. Reed was a big supporter of Crum and Knight, and always disliked Hall. He also led the charge in attacking UK for its refusal to play U of L. As relations between Reed and Hall degenerated, Reed just attacked UK and its fans more and more -- and continues to do so to this day. Other Kentucky journalists followed his lead, and here we are.

So the bottom line is this: Reed's attacks on UK were much more serious, and much more harmful, than anything Tipton does -- because Reed was more respected, more connected to the national media, more widely read, and a much better writer. Tipton is basically a pale imitator of the sort of stuff that Reed used to do.

Having said that, in some ways Tipton's career makes much less sense than Reed's. I could understand why the C-J would put up with Reed back in the early 1980s -- he was a truly great sportswriter who happened to dislike UK. In fact, most of the time Reed didn't write about UK basketball -- he would cover the Reds, or horse racing, or football most of the year. Tipton is a terrible writer and he only writes about UK basketball -- so I don't see the benefits to the LHL for keeping someone in that role who drives away UK fans and doesn't bring anything else to the table.