OK, it’s hot and certainly not basketball season. But each time we open up our daily newspapers, they have schedules and highlights of tournaments that never seem to end.

Who is responsible for the immense interest in hoops in Kentucky?

I always will remember a pioneer in the high school coaching fraternity telling me, “Coach Adolph Rupp gets a well-deserved  large amount of credit, but high school basketball was big all across Kentucky before Coach Rupp came to UK in the early 1930s after coaching high school ball in Illinois.”  

Coaches such as Neal Arnston of Manual, Ted Hornback of Corinth, Pat Payne of Hazard, Paul Jenkins of Ashland and Male High, Bob Schuhmann of St. Xavier, Nick Denes of Corbin, Homer Holland of Sharpe, Herman Hale of Brooksville, Pearl Combs of Hindman, Oscar Morgan and Morton Combs of Carr Creek, Joe Gilly of Harlan, Russ Williamson of Inez, Bob Laughlin of Breckinridge Training of Morehead State, Earle Jones of Maysville, Letcher Norton of Clark County, Ralph Carlisle of Lafayette and Goebel Ritter of Hazard.

They are the coaching lions of the early days. Many others deserve to be mentioned with them, and other great ones followed.

Tiny, tiny schools
All of the coaches mentioned won at least one State Tournament, and many other great ones have served magnificently at other schools, many of them tiny with fewer than 100 students. One such man was important in my life, Joe Ohr of Irvine High, and I thought of him last week when an Iowa football coach was shot and killed by a former player. How could anyone do that to a man who had helped hundreds of kids?

Ohr played baseball at UK and then returned to Irvine to teach and coach. Mainly he is known for basketball because he coached Irvine’s only State Tournament team in 1948. But during World War II when coaches were scarce, he volunteered to coach football. And in 1948 Guy Strong and a few others urged Mr. Ohr to let us start baseball.

Strong, who already was pitching against – and beating – future big leaguers Steve Hamilton and Woodie Fryman in the Blue Grass League, told Mr. Ohr that he would coach. But Mr. Ohr was only too happy to coach his favorite sport. All Mr. Ohr did was serve as principal, teacher,  boys’ counselor, athletic director and basketball coach. Ralph Dorsey did the same things at Caverna, plus being the superintendent!

No uniforms!
Strong pitched us to the State Tournament, but we had a little problem before we could depart for Louisville: We didn’t have any uniforms, but we borrowed those of the Blue Grass League team. Truth is, not all of us had gloves. But Strong pitched every inning of the regional semifinal and final against Henry Clay and Shelbyville on the same day to get us to the State Tournament at the Louisville Colonels’ Parkway Field.

Now I tell you this personal stuff to let you know about the conditions that the early coaches faced.

For instance: Russ Williamson returned from Morehead State, bought a toll bridge across the Big Sandy River to West Virginia, wound up owning a bank, coal mines and natural gas wells. The first time I visited him in his bank, he wanted to take me into one of his mines.

I respectfully declined.

Williamson built tiny Inez into a basketball power and won the State Tournament in 1941.

Left by wagon!
He took his teams all over the state, even to the Jackson Purchase in the far reaches of Western Kentucky. I asked him how he traveled. Here’s what he said:

“The road from Inez to the railroad in Johnson County wasn’t  paved so we had to go in a mule-drawn wagon. Then we went by railroad to Ashland, the C&O to Louisville and the L&N to Western Kentucky.”

Williamson’s funeral was held in the little Inez gym, where two state champions had played. Tom Mills, Billy Wise (both of them served as commissioners of the KHSAA) and I went to the funeral. My seat was right on one free-throw line. All of the paint was worn off one spot. I thought of the many times that sharpshooter Billy Ray Cassady and other Inez Indians had drilled free throws from there.

Denes of Corbin, Male
Hazard’s Pat Payne did something no one else has done – or ever will. He coached Hazard High’s boys AND girls to state titles!
Nick Denes won the state basketball championship at Corbin, then came to Louisville Male High where he won state championships in track and football (mythical in football). He later served as head football coach at Western Kentucky University and took the Hilltoppers to the Tangerine Bowl.

Ted Hornback, who coached little Corinth to the 1930 state basketball championship, returned to Western to become Ed Diddle’s longtime aide. Ted played high school ball at Sonora in Hardin County. “There weren’t  any uniforms so my mother took an old pair of my overalls and made a shirt and pants for me. The other players liked them so much that they got their mothers to do the same thing!”

Outdoor basketball
You should understand that in the early days most schools had to play outdoors on dirt courts. Letcher Norton started coaching at little Trapp High in rural Clark County, halfway between Winchester and Irvine.

When it rained, the outdoor court became muddy. Norton said, “We were able to practice on Highway 89 in front of our school because two of our boys acted as road guards. There wasn’t much traffic – or many cars – in the 1930s.”

Paul Jenkins, who had been a great athlete at UK, is the only man to coach two different high schools to state basketball championships. He won two at Ashland and one at Male, where he got to coach Ralph Beard and Gene Rhodes. Jenkins, Lafayette’s Ralph Carlisle and Manual’s Neal Arnston are the only men to coach three state championship teams.

Morton Combs made the winning basket for Hazard in the 1932 State final. When he was superintendent of Knott County schools, he took me to see the old Carr Creek school and where its outdoor court was, high above a creek. I asked him who had to go get the ball when it went into the creek.

“It didn’t,” he said. “That’s why the Carr Creek boys were such good shooters!”

Carlisle vs. Norton
I grew up watching teams play that were coached by Ralph Carlisle at Lafayette and Letcher Norton at Clark County. Without denigrating other great ones, I have always thought that they were the best. When their teams played each other in UK’s Memorial Coliseum, crowds were more than 13,000 – more than UK was allowed to admit.

Bo Davenport’s Edmonson County team  won an important championship in 1976. That stopped talk of class basketball for Kentucky because big Louisville schools won six of seven championships. And Bobby Keith helped basketball when his Clay County team, led by Richie Farmer, won the 1987 crown to prove that mountain boys could still play.

I’m looking at a list of the state championship coaches and I know that I haven’t  mentioned some of the great ones. I promise to make it up to them in a later column. I can tell the Cuba and Brewers stories then and get Howie Crittenden and Barney Thweatt  off my back.