‘The night nobody thought about UK basketball.’ From the Herald-Leader archives.

Editor’s note: The University of Kentucky will face perennial college football power Alabama for the 42nd time Saturday. Among all those meetings, the Wildcats have won only twice. The first was a 6-0 win in 1922 only a centenarian could have witnessed. The second, a 40-34 overtime victory on Oct. 4, 1997, produced one of the most memorable nights in UK’s football history. Chuck Culpepper, then a sports columnist for the Lexington Herald-Leader and now for The Washington Post, captured the scene that night as Kentucky fans stormed the field. From the Herald-Leader archives, here is the story he told.

The night nobody thought about basketball

LEXINGTON — Fifty-nine thousand people witnessed it in person, but by next year that number could approach 100,000. Let a decade go by and it could mushroom to quadruple the accurate.

Everyone will want to claim presence on the night you just had to be in Commonwealth Stadium, last night, the night the edifice became something other than a harbor of heartbreak. The night nobody thought about basketball.

Everyone will recall precisely how Kentucky outlasted Alabama 40-34 in overtime in a football game that evolved into three-plus consuming, riveting hours.

Your neighbor will say he saw Craig Yeast from Harrodsburg reach out to grab Tim Couch’s third-down pass in overtime, then run the final 10 yards to the end zone for Kentucky’s first victory over Alabama in merely 75 years. The neighbor might even have seen Yeast make a quick right turn to bolt toward his mother, only to succumb to a blob of Wildcat revelers including reserve tight end Darrin Clark.

Couch’s uncles Mark and Herman Johnson will say they were the first ones to reach the Hyden-raised quarterback after the winning throw. “Tonight they probably did a 4.4 (40-yard dash) after the win,” Couch said. “They were both athletes so they put a little move on the cops.”

A friend will say you should have joined him in the mass that attacked the south goal post just after the win, haltingly toppling a structure that had stood stubbornly and almost smugly for 25 seasons through thin and thinner while no landmark victory occurred. Your friend might be that guy in the khakis and gray shirt who had the thrill of riding highest as the post fell. “If I wasn’t so old,” said Athletics Director C.M. Newton, who had asked the police to give way, “I would have jumped up on the damn thing myself.”

You will hear somebody say he helped escort the yellow post from the south end zone down the Kentucky sideline in front of the spectators toward the north end zone where, one of your distant cousins might say, he or she helped pull that one down as well. The principals wore white.

Everybody will have been there.

You’ll hear people recall the indispensable contribution of Tremayne Martin, a senior strong safety, whose final adroit blow on the Alabama offense freed a fumble during the Tide’s opening possession in overtime.

Your co-workers might say they were there bouncing in rapture with the masses during Anwar Stewart’s dramatic 68-yard return of the field-goal attempt senior David Ginn blocked in the fourth quarter. That gave Kentucky a 34-31 lead and Commonwealth Stadium a noise it perhaps hadn’t known in its three-decade existence, a noise it would know again moments later.

You might hear how Yeast begged Coach Hal Mumme, in but his fifth Kentucky game, to call the winning play, the curl pattern. Might hear how the Alabama corner played up close until bailing just before the snap. Might hear how Yeast knew then he would be open.

Receiver Kevin Coleman might tell of the gorgeous touchdown pass he caught from Couch in the third quarter, or he might tell how he celebrated by jumping up and down rather than throwing his helmet, “because the last time I threw my helmet after a win (in high school), I broke some girl’s nose.”

More than anything, everybody will recall the night when all the accustomed downers of Kentucky football, the traditional botched plays and ill-fated turning points, did not conspire toward another loss saddled with the ugly word “almost.”

A snap over the punter’s head was overcome. Three interceptions were overcome. The hasty fumbling of a 27-17 third-quarter lead was overcome. A nagging third-down fourth-quarter dropped pass was overcome. That awful Kentucky-football feeling when the opponent gets the ball down by three points with seven minutes to go? That was overcome. On Alabama’s march to the game-tying field goal, it converted a fourth-down play. That was overcome. It converted another fourth-down play and another fourth-down play, supplying Kentucky fans the usual excruciation, yet all of that was overcome. On a fourth fourth-down play it kicked a field goal to send the game to overtime at 34-34.

For the human rich in facial lines and emotionally damaging Kentucky football memories, overtime was a risk.

But Martin made his hit, with freshman Jeremy Bowie recovering the fumble to keep Alabama from scoring. And Couch threw his third-down pass, third-and-12, erstwhile occasion of only home haplessness in Commonwealth.

Yeast caught it. Two Alabamans in vicinity seemed to crumble out of the picture. Yeast was clear to the end zone. He did not trip. He did not clumsily injure himself. He did not forget to bring along the football. There was no lingering chance for an opposing receiver to break clear and ruin everything. A half-century of boneheadedness and sour fate was giving way to a night Kentucky fans could hang onto.

Even if they weren’t there.

This story was originally published November 10, 2023 at 7:43 AM.