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Mark Story: Keightley represented heart of UK basketball

By Mark Story

Herald-Leader sports columnist

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Related Story Bill Keightley, 'Mr. Wildcat,' dies at age 81

Mr. Wildcat by the numbers

  • 2: One of only two non-players or coaches to have his name hoisted into Rupp Arena rafters. The other was longtime broadcaster Cawood Ledford.
  • 3: UK NCAA titles at which Keightley sat courtside.
  • 6: Head coaches Keightley served under (Adolph Rupp, Joe B. Hall, Eddie Sutton, Rick Pitino, Tubby Smith, Billy Gillispie).
  • 8: UK trips to Final Four at which Keightley sat courtside.
  • 12: Southeastern Conference Tournament titles during his tenure.
  • 19: All-Americans who have gone through UK in Keightley’s tenure.
  • 24: Won or shared UK Southeastern Conference regular-season championships
  • 48: Seasons as equipment manager on UK bench.
  • 57: Percentage of games in the 105-year history of UK basketball in which Keightley worked.
  • 1,113: Wins he witnessed from UK bench.

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It was March 22, 2007. Word had just broken that Tubby Smith was leaving Kentucky for Minnesota.

I was scrambling to leave the state high school basketball tournament to get back to the office when I ran into a familiar face behind Rupp Arena.

Bill Keightley’s eyes were filled with tears.

His title may have been UK men’s basketball equipment manager. His nickname may have been “Mr. Wildcat.”

What Bill Keightley really represented was the heart of University of Kentucky basketball.

It was Dec. 29, 2002. Rick Pitino had just coached his first game in Rupp as Louisville head coach. UK had administered an 82-62 beatdown to its former coach.

In the bedlam of the Kentucky locker room, reporters gathered around Keightley to get his take on what had been a day like no other in UK hoops history.

“I love Rick like a son,” Keightley said that day, “and sometimes your son needs his butt kicked.”

Keightley died Monday at 81 of internal bleeding after falling as he got off a bus to attend opening day for the Cincinnati Reds. If you think about it, he deserves to be remembered as one of the more extraordinary figures in the history of sports in our state.

A guy who never played a second for the Kentucky Wildcats, never coached a game, never wooed a recruit, nevertheless became the living symbol of the winningest program in college basketball history.

“How many equipment managers in any sport are known by their school’s student body?” Larry Conley, the former UK forward and current college basketball analyst, asked Monday night.

Not many. Probably not any.

A longtime employee of the U.S. Postal Service, Keightley joined the UK basketball family in 1962 through the efforts of one of his buddies at the post office. George Hukle was also a letter carrier as well as Adolph Rupp’s equipment manager. Hukle brought Keightley on to help him wash Kentucky jerseys and hand towels to UK players and do all the other things that went with that job.

Rupp always called the new man “Little George.”

Until Monday’s freak accident, Keightley never left. He was on the Kentucky bench the night of the famous loss to Texas Western in the 1966 NCAA finals. He was there when UK ruined Indiana’s unbeaten season in the ’75 Mideast Region finals.

Jack Givens’ 41-point game in the ’78 national championship game. Rex Chapman’s freshman tour de force vs. Louisville in 1986. The Laettner Shot. The Mardi Gras Miracle. National titles in 1996 and ’98. Joe Crawford’s valiant 35-point game in this year’s NCAA loss to Marquette.

Keightley was the link to all of them.

“Coaches, players, athletics directors, they go and they come,” former Kentucky star Kenny Walker said Monday night. “Bill Keightley was the constant.”

Besides longevity, Keightley owed his special status inside UK basketball to sheer personality.

In newspaper journalism, we develop a heightened detector for phonies. The gregarious, outgoing Bill Keightley you saw in TV interviews was the exact same guy I always saw when the TV lights were not shining. Mr. Wildcat was the same with the fat-cat boosters or the average Joe and Jane Cat fans from someplace like Waddy.

“That’s a tough question,” Keightley said last spring, asked how he explained his popularity. “I’ve tried to be congenial and considerate to everyone I’ve met.”

Mostly, he loved being around the Kentucky players.

“Saying he was kind of like a grandfather sounds kind of cliched,” said former UK guard Cameron Mills. “But that’s how he was. When you get in trouble with your parents, you can go to your grandparents and they will kind of love on you. That’s how Mr. Keightley was with us. When the coaches got on you, he was the guy you could go to who’d make you feel better.”

The next time the Kentucky Wildcats take the basketball court, Bill Keightley will not be sitting at the end of the bench. That’s hard even to envision.

“I always felt like someday he’d sit down on the end of the bench in Rupp Arena, go to sleep and just not wake up,” Conley said. “He was an icon.”

Bill Keightley is gone. The heartbeat of Kentucky basketball can never be quite the same.


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