He’s attended every UK home game since at least 1973. Can his streak survive 2020?
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Game day: Kentucky vs. Ole Miss
Click below for more of the Herald-Leader’s and Kentucky.com’s coverage of Saturday’s Kentucky-Mississippi football game at Kroger Field in Lexington.
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This was it: 2020 was going to be the first time in more than 40 years that Leslie Hurst did not attend a University of Kentucky home football game.
That’s what he thought. Six weeks ago, he still wasn’t convinced football games would even be played. When the announcement came forth that games not only would happen, but with a limited number of fans in the stands, he was still not sure he’d be in Lexington.
Because of his standing on the K-Fund priority list, Hurst was certain that there wouldn’t be tickets left to all the home games by the time his scheduled call came up with UK’s ticket office. If he couldn’t go to all five games, he didn’t want to attend any. What good is a streak with a guaranteed expiration date, after all?
“I had already mentally prepared myself that this was gonna come to an end,” Hurst said, adding with a chuckle, “I think my wife was hoping it would.”
When UK called, however, not only was he able to get two tickets — one for him and another for his wife, Donna — to every game this season at Kroger Field, but secured in the same section (117) and just about in the same area that they’ve occupied since the early 1970s..
Kentucky’s home opener against Mississippi is scheduled for 4 p.m. Saturday. Hurst isn’t counting his chickens, yet.
“Hell, I might go up there one game this year and they do my temperature and I’m running a fever or something,” Hurst, 68, said. “I don’t know what I’d do.”
The almost miss
Leslie Hurst has never missed a UK football game played at Commonwealth Stadium, now called Kroger Field.
He was there for the stadium opener against Virginia Tech on Sept. 15, 1973, and every home game through the 1975 campaign, though not as a season-ticket holder. Hurst didn’t start buying the year-long package until 1976, after having a difficult time securing entry into UK’s home game against Auburn on Oct. 11, 1975.
“Sonny Collins was playing,” Hurst said. “The place was packed and I had a hard time getting a ticket, but I got in.”
His purchasing of season tickets has not lapsed since 1976, though UK is not able to verify that his (or any other person’s) streak goes back that far. Hurst hasn’t missed a home game since before Commonwealth Stadium opened, when he would drive up to Lexington from Bardstown to meet family members and friends who were attending UK and go to the games.
He hasn’t kept many ticket stubs, and never set out to start a streak. Leslie confesses that if every game had been available via home broadcast like they are now, instead of just one or two a year when he began attending, the streak would have ended long ago.
Now, though, it’s hard to see anything stopping it.
“Nieces, nephews, if they get married on a U of K game, he’s just always told ‘em, ‘If you want me there, don’t do it on a home game,’” Donna Hurst said. She paused for a second, then finished.
“He’s missed a few weddings.”
Only one time, in 2000, was his streak in jeopardy.
His father, Julian, better known by his nickname, “Buzzy,” instilled a love of the Cats in him. Leslie has purchased three season tickets most years (though due to the circumstances, not the current one), and for a long time Buzzy was a frequent occupant of that third chair. In 2000, during the week before UK’s home game against South Carolina, he died.
His funeral was on that same Saturday. It was a morning service, but the family sat around talking with one another for a long time after. Kickoff was scheduled for 7:30 p.m. and the game was broadcast nationally on ESPN2, UK’s third TV date that season.
“His older brother said, ‘Look, the funeral’s over and daddy would be sad that you broke your streak because of this,’” Donna said. “’Go ahead and go to the game.’ That was probably the game we had the least fun at.”
Leslie was convinced. He and Donna left Bardstown at 4:30. They were there to see Jared Lorenzen throw for more than 300 yards, but the Cats couldn’t hold a halftime lead and fell, 20-17.
“We didn’t tailgate. I think we maybe even left a little bit early so we didn’t have to sit in traffic,” Leslie said. “It was a good game but South Carolina won. It was hard to do. It’s something he would have wanted me to do, so we did it.”
Through the years
Donna has attended dozens of games with Leslie, dating back to when they were students at Bardstown High. They started going steady when they were 16 and got married eight years later.
Their children, who now have their own children, have attended many games, too. But Leslie is the only one who’s been present every time the Cats have kicked off in Lexington since the early 1970s, sometimes going it alone.
“He has gone to ball games with the flu and sat there by himself because I told him not to talk to anybody and pass the flu on,” Donna said with a laugh. “He would sit there freezing in the end zone.”
Donna is more technologically savvy than Leslie, who uses a flip phone and wouldn’t be able to enter the stadium this year without his wife’s smartphone in tow. His streak probably would have subsided a long time ago without her backing him up; from 1990 to 2005 they owned Parkway Mini Mart in Bardstown, and she more often than not stayed home on Saturdays to run their business while he was cheering for Kentucky.
She’s enjoyed going over the years, too, though the long days are getting longer.
“The thing that has started to bother me over the years is the eight hours of tailgating,” Donna said. “I’m worn out by the time the game is over and you get home at 2 o’clock in the morning.”
Tailgating was at the center of another potential endpoint for the streak: When the renovations to the venue now known as Kroger Field were completed in 2015, the Hursts were among the season-ticket holders who lost their parking spot in the Blue Lot because they weren’t donating enough to the K-Fund. They’re further away in the Orange Lot, now.
“That upset me pretty good,” Leslie said. “I said, ‘What do you think I’ve been doing all these years buying these tickets when I could have walked up there and got one for nothing?’ I always looked at that as donating.”
Still, he’s kept coming. Leslie fondly recalls times pre-renovation when he’d buy additional $5 tickets at the box office before games just so he could leave the stadium during the game and re-enter; that’s impossible now.
“At halftime we’d go out and drink a couple beers,” he said. “Then we’d get back in on that five-dollar ticket. We did that for years before they got good. Then they quit letting people go in and out.”
He outlasted “the pissing bush,” which was so large that it formed something of a cave around which tailgaters who wanted to empty their bladders could do so privately. It was removed a few years ago after it had served him and countless others for decades.
Leslie has had dozens of opportunities to upgrade his seats to ones on the sidelines. He grew used to the end zone point of view — it’s where he, Donna and others would sit at Stoll Field, too — and has never once thought about changing things up. A ticket-office employee insisted that there were sideline seats still available in the lower bowl if Hurst wished to upgrade this year, but he was thrilled to get seats so close to his normal ones.
His favorite player is Tim Couch, whose No. 2 is stitched into a UK hat he wears to every game, though Lynn Bowden gave him a run for his money after the way he performed last season. He saved a photo from the Courier-Journal of Bowden plowing over defenders during UK’s win over Louisville in 2019 that he hopes to have printed on a T-shirt soon.
The seven-overtime game. The Bluegrass Miracle. The Mark Higgs goal-line stand. Like a coach, Leslie remembers some of the bad outcomes better than the better ones.
“I’ve heard Rocky Top played way more than I ever wanted to hear it played,” he said. “It’s bad enough when you go down there and hear it. At least you’re in Tennessee.”
A positive play that stands out vividly in his memory: Braxton Kelly’s game-ending tackle in UK’s 43-37 win over then-No. 1 and eventual national champion LSU in 2007.
“It wasn’t like it was close and the referee could put the ball up there another foot to give him a first down,” Leslie said. “He stopped him 2, 3 yards short. There was no doubt about it and the place just erupted. That was a fun time.”
Year 48
The Hursts aren’t dismissive of COVID-19; Donna lost her father, Donald Shewmaker, to the virus in July.
Wearing masks for the duration of a game isn’t a problem; Leslie, who helps out at a friend’s liquor store in Bardstown, wears one for about seven hours a day, five days a week.
There will be no tailgating. There will be fewer fans around them to cheer and commiserate alongside. There will be no guaranteed victory on a schedule stocked with Southeastern Conference foes.
But as long as the games are played, Leslie Hurst will be in the end zone at Kroger Field, from where he’s watched the Wildcats in parts of the last five decades, and for 47 straight years. And counting.
“I’ve been lucky,” Leslie said. “I’m in good health for a 68-year-old man and that’s worked out good for me. I’ve been in the hospital a few times but luckily it wasn’t during football season. All that stuff has lined out so far, so good.”
If he has his way, the streak will outlive him.
“He’s told our son, ‘I know you’re probably gonna get locked up, but after I die I want to get cremated and you’re gonna throw my ashes across the stadium,’” Donna said. “He says, ‘Your mom will come get you out of jail.’”
Saturday
Ole Miss at Kentucky
When: 4 p.m.
Where: Kroger Field (limited spectators)
TV: SEC Network
Radio: WLAP-AM 630, WBUL-FM 98.1
Records: Ole Miss 0-1, Kentucky 0-1
Series: Ole Miss leads 28-14-1
Last meeting: Ole Miss won 37-34 on Nov. 4, 2017, in Lexington.
This story was originally published October 2, 2020 at 7:28 AM.
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