With a new book out, Alan Cutler reveals 2 regrets related to chasing Billy Gillispie
For the title of Alan Cutler’s new book, the former WLEX-TV sports anchor’s wife, Judy, made the winning suggestion:
“Cut To The Chase” serves as an allusion to the most famous moment from the three-plus-decades Alan Cutler spent as a staple of Lexington TV sports.
It is now more than 11 years since the famous video was shot on March 27, 2009, of Cutler chasing Billy Gillispie into the University of Kentucky men’s basketball office. The TV reporter was seeking comment from the coach only moments after Billy G.’s firing as UK head man had been announced.
To this day, Cutler carries two regrets that relate to Gillispie.
Cutler laments that he let WLEX management coerce him into sending emailed apologies to viewers who contacted Channel 18 to complain about the reporter’s persistence in pursuing Gillispie.
“Within two hours (of the Gillispie pursuit), to say we had a thousand emails that were negative toward me is a low number,” Cutler said. “My boss came around to my desk and said, ‘We are getting bombarded.’”
To defuse the fury, Channel 18 decided Cutler needed to reply to the angry emails by saying he was sorry.
“Anytime I talk about this, I am furious at myself that I agreed to apologize,” Cutler said Thursday. “If I had been 25, I would have told the station to go bleep off. But it was 2009, (I had) a wife. (I had) two kids. (I had) to put (the kids) through college.”
So Cutler made the pragmatic choice.
He came up with an apology, had it approved by station management, and then sent it in reply to those who emailed WLEX to complain about his chasing of Gillispie.
“What, to me, was fascinating was so many, hundreds and hundreds, responded back (to the apology),” Cutler says. “The overwhelming majority of people who responded back (then) apologized to me. Which I thought was incredible.”
Bear with us, and we will get to Cutler’s second Billy G.-related regret below.
When he retired from Channel 18 in 2018 — his final on-air appearance came from Justify’s victory in the Kentucky Derby — Cutler says he brought home about 40 pages of notes he had kept from memorable moments in his long television career.
“I didn’t do it with the premise of ever writing a book,” Cutler says. “It was just to remind myself of stuff from my career, good stuff and bad.”
However, Dr. John Huang, a retired orthodontist who has transitioned into writing, had previously launched a campaign to convince Cutler to let him co-write a book on the TV anchor’s career.
“He blew me off,” Huang said Friday. “But I can be pretty persistent. I kept bugging him. Lo and behold, it had to be a year or so later, (Cutler) said, ‘Hey, John, let’s get a cup of coffee.’”
Once Cutler decided to try writing a book with Huang, he turned to a friend, veteran college basketball writer Dick “Hoops” Weiss, for advice.
Weiss is a frequent collaborator on book projects with Dick Vitale, the ebullient ESPN college hoops analyst.
“I called (Weiss) up,” Cutler says. “I said, ‘How do I not fail?’ That was my exact question to him. And Dick said, ‘Big boy, if the book doesn’t sound like you, you are going to fail.’”
Cutler’s idiosyncratic broadcasting persona was a challenge to capture via the written word. “We spent many mornings just sitting at (Cutler’s) breakfast table, me learning his speaking style and cadences,” Huang says.
“Cut To The Chase,” 460 pages, 129 chapters, is now available via Amazon ($19.99 paperback, $9.99 Kindle). A local basketball coach, John Calipari, wrote the book’s foreword.
Cutler says the book contains anecdotes on Ralph Beard, Shane Boyd and Jared Lorenzen, Dale Brown (the ex-LSU coach, not the former Kentucky hooper), Travis Ford, Kevin Grevey, Cory “Poop” Johnson, Cawood Ledford, Dan Marino, Hal Mumme, Gary Player, Nolan Richardson, Adolph and Herky Rupp and Pat Summitt, among many others.
In writing the book, Cutler says he relished “being able to go deeper (in telling stories) than you can on TV.”
“Cut To The Chase” also features far more on the aftermath of Cutler’s chase of Gillispie. Included is the public relations approach Cutler adopted after the incident that he believes helped turn public opinion in his favor.
As for Cutler’s second Billy G. lament, it is that the coach, once he left Kentucky, would never take the TV reporter up on the idea of using their shared moment of video fame as a way to raise money for charity.
“I tried to call him for years and years and years and years,” Cutler says. “It just made sense to me: This whole thing was ridiculous. Why not turn it around and have a charity run for money?”
Gillispie never responded to his phone calls, Cutler says.
