This Friday night the Corbin Redhound football team will be travelling to Paducah to play Paducah Tilghman. The winner will go on to Lexington to play for the Class 4A state championship at Kroger Field next week.
This is not unusual for Corbin football to be progressing toward a state championship, but what is unusual is the distance they will have to travel to play the game. It is a long way to Paducah, about a four-and-a-half-hour drive. I did the play-by-play for the Redhounds for 30 years and we never had to travel that far for a game.
When I started broadcasting football and basketball games in 1961 on WCTT radio I did any game we could get sponsors for. But I was not expecting to travel to Greenville, SC to broadcast a game. At that time, I worked with a guy named Jack McCoy. Jack, who drifted into Corbin from Cincinnati, started working at WCTT.
Jack was impulsive and you had to be on guard to counter some of his wild ideas. Because he was older than me, I bowed at times to his off-the-wall requests. One such idea was to broadcast a game that Jerry Smith played in at Furman University. At that time Smith, who had been an all-state basketball player at Corbin, was now the star of the basketball team at Furman University.
It was a Thursday afternoon when Jack approached me and said, “Let’s broadcast the Furman game Saturday night.” I countered by saying, “Jack we don’t have time to get ready. We must order a telephone line for the broadcast, get sponsors, and get permission from Furman.”
It was as if I had wasted my breath because at noon Friday Jack said we are going to Greenville tomorrow.
I had purchased my first car, a 1949 Plymouth from my neighbor for $400. It was a beauty. It was two-tone orange and black. Of course, I had to drive. We took a couple of Corbin’s basketball players with us.
Back then there were no four lane highways and that added time to the trip. Somewhere in South Carolina I was following a coal truck doing about five miles per hour and decided to pass on a double yellow line. I could see clearly that no vehicles were coming, but I didn’t see the cop waiting on the side of the road. I got a ticket, and my insurance went up $18 a month.
But things were good when we got to the new arena in Greenville. University officials were very accommodating, even to the point of offering us a place to stay the night. It was during the holiday period and students went home for the holidays. What we didn’t know was there wasn’t any heat in the dorms.
That is how it started for me 64 years ago. For many years I would travel to broadcast games all over the state, but none as far away as Paducah. The team is leaving Thursday, so by game time Friday night they should be okay.
I have broadcast four of the Redhounds’ state championship games. It was always a thrill. But now my age tells me I can’t make the trip that far away. Like many of you, I’ll be watching and pulling for another trip to the state finals. Good luck Redhounds, and Happy Thanksgiving to all.
