I was lucky, I got to do what I wanted to do. Now it’s time for something else
Matt Christopher was my introduction to sports writing.
Who’s that, you ask. Matt Christopher wrote children’s books about sports. “Catcher With a Glass Arm.” “Touchdown for Tommy.” “The Lucky Baseball Bat.” “The Basket Counts.” Christopher wrote more than 100 of those sports novels. I read every one I could get my hands on. Cover to cover.
My obsession at Central Elementary School in Winchester reached the point where librarian Anne McConnell, a good friend of my grandmother, Louise Clay, the librarian at Paris High School, made a new rule.
I wasn’t allowed to check out another Matt Christopher book until I had read a non-sports book first.
Talk about tough.
So as you can see, I always wanted to be a sportswriter.
Now, after over four decades, I’m giving it up. Maybe not giving up writing about sports. (We’ll see.) But after 44 years, including 25 as a sports columnist, I’m retiring from the Lexington Herald-Leader. My last day is June 30.
I was lucky. I got to do what I always wanted to do. I started by covering junior high, freshman and high school games for the Winchester Sun and Paris Daily Enterprise. I was sports editor at the Kentucky Kernel, UK’s student newspaper. I worked as a clerk for the afternoon paper, the Lexington Leader, in 1980. I worked for the morning paper, the Lexington Herald, the summer of 1981 and was hired full-time by the Herald that December.
I covered high school sports. I worked on the sports copy desk for a period when the Leader and Herald merged. I was assigned to the UK football beat in 1987 and was promoted to sports columnist when Chuck Culpepper departed in 2000.
That summer at SEC Football Media Days, I ran into a friend who worked at another newspaper. He congratulated me on being named columnist, then quipped, “Not sure I’d want to follow Chuck, though.”
If someone had to do it, I’m glad it was me. By my count, I’ve been to 21 Final Fours, 44 runnings of the Kentucky Derby and 16 bowl games. I covered one Louisville team (1986) and three Kentucky teams (1996, 1998 and 2012) who won NCAA men’s basketball tournaments. I was on the track at Belmont Park when American Pharoah snapped horse racing’s 37-year Triple Crown drought. I chronicled the ups and (mostly) downs of Kentucky football. And lived to tell about it.
I made mistakes. I was wrong when I wrote that Rich Brooks was a bad UK football hire. I was wrong when I wrote that Kenny Payne was a good U of L basketball hire. I was hard on ex-UK athletic director C.M. Newton at the end of his tenure and hard on successor Mitch Barnhart at the start of his. Many a column I could have written better.
But I have no regrets. None. My goal was to tell the readers what I believed at the time. I wanted to be accurate, entertaining and fair. As Hall of Fame broadcaster Marty Brennaman once told me, “Without credibility, you have nothing.”
I worked with great sports editors, reporters, columnists, copy editors, photographers, people who cared about what they did and about journalism. Still do. I enjoyed every single second of it. Even the parts I didn’t enjoy, I enjoyed, if you know what I mean.
But a funny thing happened over these past four decades. I married my best friend, whom I met in a copy editing class at UK. She, our two sons, Carter and Alex, and my parents have taught me more about love, family and support than I could have ever hoped to know. And now we have three grandchildren. Even greater lessons and joys await.
I’ll still watch and follow sports. Especially UK sports. Old habits die hard. I might even write about sports again. If I do, it’ll be more as a hobby than a job.
That’s because, I discovered that Anne McConnell was right all along. There is more to life than sports. And it’s time for me to check out more of that.
This story was originally published June 25, 2025 at 10:00 AM.
