‘I was a Kentucky boy.’ Vernon Hatton, one of UK’s storied ‘Fiddlin’ Five,’ dies at 89.
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Vernon Hatton, one of the stars of Kentucky’s 1958 NCAA championship team and the player who made, arguably, the most famous shot in University of Kentucky men’s basketball history, has died.
Born on Jan. 13, 1936, Hatton was 89 years old.
Over the course of his UK varsity career (1955-58), Hatton scored 1,153 career points. The product of Lexington’s Lafayette High School made the game-winning shot that gave Adolph Rupp’s Wildcats a 61-60 victory over Temple in the 1958 NCAA Tournament national semifinals.
In a 1957-58 regular season game against Temple at Memorial Coliseum, Hatton hit a half-court, set shot with one second left in overtime to tie the game and force a second OT. UK went on to win the contest in three overtimes.
Even now, “Hatton’s heave” stands as perhaps the greatest shot ever made by a Wildcats player.
“They’ll never beat my one-second shot,” Hatton said in a 2024 interview.
During his Kentucky Wildcats career, Hatton, a 6-foot-4, 195-pound guard, became known for clutch play.
“Adolph (Rupp) always said if he had to send his money to Vegas, he’d send it with Vernon,” Russell Rice (who died in 2015), author of several books on the history of University of Kentucky athletics, said in 2008.
In a unique twist, Hatton’s UK basketball success came only because he ignored his church when it ordered him to choose a different school.
A Lafayette star
Hatton first came to the attention of the commonwealth’s basketball fans in the early 1950s as a star at Lafayette High School for the Generals’ iconic head coach, Ralph Carlisle.
In the 1953 state tournament, Hatton led a dominating Lafayette team to the second of what would be three state championships won by Carlisle as the school’s head coach.
The 1953 Generals won their four state tourney games by margins of 34, 14, 18 and 31 points. Hatton and teammate Bill Florence were named to the All-State Tournament Team.
“I owe everything to Ralph Carlisle,” Hatton said in 2008. “Here I was, 6-4, and he moves me to guard. Well, when I got to UK, everybody was pretty much my size. But I was the one who had played guard in high school. The other guys had all played inside. That gave me a leg up.”
Though he was from Lexington, it was far from a certainty that Hatton would respond favorably to the recruiting efforts of Rupp and the hometown Kentucky Wildcats.
Hatton was a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.
At an age when many young Mormons receive the call from a General Authority (a church leader) to go on a foreign mission, Hatton said he got a different request from his church.
“They called me and said, ‘We would like to see you come to BYU,’’’ Hatton recalled in 2008.
When Brigham Young University head coach Stan Watts visited Hatton in Lexington, he said BYU – the Provo, Utah, university named for the second president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints – wanted the Lafayette star.
However, the school was not offering a full-ride basketball scholarship.
“I wanted a full ride,” Hatton said in 2008. “And back then, if you were going to play college basketball, Kentucky was the place to be. At the end of the day, I was a Kentucky boy.”
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The Fiddlin’ Five
In the years immediately after World War II, Rupp built Kentucky into the undisputed king of college hoops.
Over the six seasons from 1946 through 1951, Rupp and the Wildcats played in the finals of a national tournament five times. UK won the NIT in 1946 and was runner-up in that tourney in 1947. Kentucky then captured NCAA crowns in 1948, ‘49 and ‘51.
However, this golden age of winning was sullied when UK was forbidden by the NCAA from playing a varsity basketball schedule in 1952-53 due to rules violations in the Kentucky program. The rule-breaking came to light after several of Rupp’s most famous players were implicated in the college basketball point-shaving scandals of the late 1940s and early 1950s.
Amid the scandals, critics of alleged college athletics excesses called for Rupp’s ouster. The University of Kentucky administration did not bend to those calls. Rupp vowed that the same NCAA officials who had punished UK would someday have to present the coach with another NCAA Tournament championship trophy.
As Hatton’s senior season, 1957-58, approached, Rupp did not sound like he expected that year would produce his restoration.
In the preseason, Rupp used a musical analogy to assess his team’s prospects, noting Kentucky faced a “Carnegie Hall schedule.”
“We’ve got fiddlers, that’s all,” Rupp said of his players. “They’re pretty good fiddlers, be right entertaining at a barn dance. But I’ll tell you, you need a violinist to play in Carnegie Hall. We don’t have any violinists.”
From that point forward, the 1957-58 Wildcats became known as “The Fiddlin’ Five.”
The starters were Johnny Cox and John Crigler at the forwards. Defensive ace Ed Beck manned the center spot. Adrian “Odie” Smith joined Hatton in the backcourt.
All but Beck (Fort Valley, Georgia) were native Kentuckians.
It was a mature group. All but Cox (a junior) were seniors.
In June 1957, Hatton had married his high school sweetheart, Suzanne Unsworth.
‘The perfect shot’
Hatton’s signature moment as a Kentucky Wildcats player came on Dec. 7, 1957.
Visiting Temple and their All-America guard, Guy Rodgers, seemed poised to hang a rare homecourt loss on Rupp’s Wildcats. With three seconds left to play in overtime, Temple went ahead 71-69 on a short jumper by Rodgers.
UK called timeout with one second left. In the Kentucky huddle, Rupp’s longtime assistant, Harry Lancaster, suggested that Hatton be chosen to try the last shot.
Taking a pass near mid-court, Hatton unleashed a two-handed set shot. The final horn sounded milli-seconds after the ball left his hands. Afterward, a measurement showed Hatton was 47 feet from the basket when he let fly.
“I was standing under the basket and I watched the ball leave his hands,” Beck (who died in 2019) recalled in 2008. “From halfway, I knew the ball was going in. It had the right height, the right speed. It was perfect, the perfect shot.”
When it went in, Hatton’s half-court heave forced a second overtime. With Hatton scoring Kentucky’s final six points of the game, UK eventually won, 85-83 in triple OT.
Years later, Hatton said he was working as an auctioneer when a woman introduced herself to him. She said she had been pregnant while in attendance at Memorial Coliseum on the night of 12/7/57.
The woman, Hatton says, told him that she vowed that night that, whether she had a boy or a girl, the child would be named after the hero of this epic Kentucky win.
Turning to a young woman standing nearby, “She said, ‘Mr. Hatton, I’d like you to meet my daughter, Vernetta.’”
Home-state champs
As the 1958 NCAA Tournament approached, UK did not seem likely to have a need to clear space for a national championship banner.
Rupp’s Southeastern Conference champions entered NCAA play with six losses versus 19 wins. It was the most defeats for a UK team since the 1941 Cats had lost eight.
In 1958, no team with six losses had ever won an NCAA tourney.
“We weren’t as bad as our record looked,” Hatton said in 2008. “We lost three games that year by one point. We played a bunch of tough road games. We were a little stronger going into the tournament than it probably looked.”
UK did have one major advantage. The Mideast Regional was being played at Lexington’s Memorial Coliseum. The Final Four was scheduled for Louisville’s Freedom Hall. Kentucky could win the NCAA title without ever leaving the commonwealth.
In Lexington, Kentucky rocked Miami (Ohio) 94-70 and Notre Dame 89-56.
As a Final Four reward, the Wildcats got a rematch with Temple. The return engagement did not last as long as the teams’ earlier three-overtime marathon, but it was every bit as tense.
It was 60-59 Temple with 27 seconds left when Owls star Guy Rodgers was fouled. He missed the front end of the bonus. Kentucky rebounded and called timeout.
Rupp again chose to put the ball in Hatton’s hands.
Once again, Hatton came through. His drive and reverse layup with 17 seconds left gave Kentucky a 61-60 win.
“Ed Beck came up and (screened) my man,” Hatton recalled in 2008. “I sort of hooked the shot back on the other side of the goal. It was almost a little hook shot.”
Now all that was standing between “The Fiddlin’ Five” and the fourth NCAA title that Rupp so craved were Seattle University and its star, Elgin Baylor.
Down 11 early, Kentucky took the lead for good with 6:01 left in the game. What was then the largest crowd (18,803) ever to see an NCAA tourney game watched the Wildcats win going away, 84-72.
Hatton finished with 30 points, while UK’s Cox had 24 points and 16 rebounds. Baylor had 23 points and 19 rebounds for Seattle but shot only 9-of-32 from the field.
When the final horn sounded at Freedom Hall, Hatton was swarmed at the bottom of a pile of jubilant Kentucky cheerleaders.
“I distinctly remember hearing a voice I recognized saying, ‘Vernon, you come out of there,’” Hatton said in 2008. “I looked up and I could see my wife out on the court trying to shoo the cheerleaders off of me.”
Life after basketball
Hatton spent four years playing in the NBA. When the basketball finished, he became a successful auctioneer/realtor in Lexington.
He and Suzanne were married 67 years. The couple has three sons Jeff (wife Michele), Terry (Tammy) and Steve (Amy), eight grandchildren and 16 great-grand-children
Though the Hattons stayed in their hometown, it did not mean they put down roots.
The couple spent their marriage buying houses, moving in, remodeling them, then selling the refurbished home and starting the process over.
In 2024, when Kentucky introduced Mark Pope, also a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, as its new men’s hoops head coach, Hatton, then 88, attended the introductory news conference at Rupp Arena.
“I wouldn’t have missed that, hardly, for anything,” Hatton said at the time.
Across the decades, Hatton said he sometimes wondered how things would have been different had he followed the suggestion of his church and chosen BYU instead of UK.
“But after we won it all in ‘58, I got a letter from Stan Watts, the Brigham Young coach,” Hatton said in 2008. “It said ‘Congratulations, it probably turned out best you didn’t come to BYU.’ So, I think I did the right thing.”
This story was originally published March 21, 2025 at 10:46 PM.
