Basketball in Kentucky, NKY: A tale of two completely different places BY DAN WEBER, LINK nky SPORTS EDITOR-AT-LARGE
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“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times . . . ” and with apologies to Charles Dickens for stealing that opening line from “A Tale of Two Cities,” that was also the story of this past college basketball season in Kentucky. It was the best of times for Northern Kentucky. And it was the worst of times for the rest of the state. Where to start? How about with the bad stuff? Might as well get it out of the way . . . right away. How about Louisville? Chris Mack, the long-time Northern Kentucky resident and former Xavier coach, was jettisoned in January after months of offseason ugliness in Louisville, a six-game suspension to open the season and then an unimpressive start. Not that bad a deal for Mack, who walks away with nearly $5 million dollars. But we know you probably don’t care all that much about the Cards. OK, how about your Kentucky Wildcats and their head coach, John Calipari, whose more than $8
million salary – and lifetime contract – are both way more than the entire athletic program’s budget of a St. Peter’s Peacock team that handed Kentucky easily the most embarrassing loss in its long, illustrious NCAA Tournament history a couple of weeks back in Game 1. That left UK fans with this deeply un-fun choice for following the NCAA tourney: Root for the 15th seed Jersey City team to keep winning so UK wouldn’t be all alone among the embarrass-ees. Oh, and they could at least feel good that St. Peter’s ruined Murray State’s marvelous year, as well, in the next game. And yeah, that hasn’t worked out so well as three of Kentucky fans’ most hated rivals made it to the Final Four. And one of them – Kansas – did so by surpassing formerly No. 1 Kentucky’s all-time games-won total last week in the tournament while the winless Wildcats sat home. By the way, that’s a Kansas team Kentucky beat by 18 points in Lawrence this season. And UNC got there by tying Kentucky’s all-time NCAA tourney games won mark. Oh, and the Cats beat
North Carolina by 29 as well this year. As for the rest of the state, by Week 2 of the NCAAs (men’s and women’s), only Fort Thomas native Jeff Walz’s Louisville Lady Cardinals were left representing the Commonwealth. And while there were a bunch of TMU’s Mid-South NAIA teams alive, the regular-season champion Saints outlasted all of them. And as we transition from the bad to the good in Kentucky basketball this season, we can’t avoid bringing it back home to Northern Kentucky, where the Norse had some of each with more of the good the way Darrin Horn’s guys rallied to make something special, almost, after a struggling start – and we hate to have to say the “almost” part here – making it into the NCAA field for the fourth time in school history. For a team made up of players from mostly somewhere else, a 20-12 NKU team did a heck of a job for a good bit of its 14-winsin-17-final-games turnaround around Highlands alum and former Kentucky Mr.
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