It wasn’t too long after my parents reconciled that the three of us went on a weekend trip to Lexington for some fun and probably to celebrate our reunion as a family. We planned it after one of my mom’s friends from school had come up with three tickets to a UK basketball game. I looked forward to that trip for weeks in advance because I knew it was going to be great to see UK play (it was during the 1982-83 season when the Wildcats eventually lost to UofL in the one, and only, Dream Game) and I knew we had good seats.
After having lunch together my dad and I got ready to go to the game, while my mom got ready to go shopping. As we prepared to leave my dad realized something – he didn’t have the tickets. He asked my mom if she had them, so she checked but she didn’t have them either. So for the next 15 minutes or so we scoured our hotel room looking for the tickets. After we had exhausted all of our options, including the trash, I was getting very nervous at that point, time was ticking down until tip-off and we still couldn’t find our tickets. Was I going to be able to go to the game, or not?
“What are we going to do?” I asked my dad.
“We’ll try and get some from a scalper,” he replied.
Now up until that point that word was foreign to me, so my dad had to explain to me that that was someone who sold tickets to the game outside of the arena. Sometimes you have to pay a little bit more, he explained.
So we drove to Rupp Arena, parked and began looking for people selling tickets.
“It’s illegal in Kentucky,” my dad explained, so most of the time the people selling the tickets couldn’t do it out in the open or be obvious about it. Knowing that I would’ve given up any, or all of the money I had in my piggy-bank for a ticket, it didn’t take long before my dad found a pair of seats for sale. He gave the man the money and we went inside.
Rupp Arena was just as I remembered it – huge! Besides being one of the biggest basketball arenas in the country, and usually sold out for games, I thought it was kind of like a big, over-sized barn that featured some seats that had restricted views due to beams being right in front of them. Of course I got to see most of it that day because when we started looking for our seats we realized that we had quite a ways to walk.
We climbed step after step and we kept getting higher and higher, but I wasn’t about to look back because I was a little scared of heights. But I knew we were getting high when I saw the alphabet ending (V...W...X...Y...Z) and the double-alphabet beginning (AA...BB...CC). We finally found our seats, just a couple of rows from the top.
“These are what they call the nosebleed seats, because they’re up so high,” my dad explained.
Because we thought we would have good seats we didn’t bring binoculars, but we sure needed them then. I couldn’t really tell the difference between the players, other than the color of their jerseys, they all looked like Smurfs to me. I remember being afraid to stand up during the national anthem and at some points during the game, because I thought I was going to just fall forward and straight down to the court, but I stood anyway.
UK won a game that was otherwise forgettable, but what happened after the game was one of the most memorable moments of my life.
As we had in our previous trip to Rupp Arena my dad and I lingered afterward. We walked down from our seats and made our way down to court level. It’s every kid’s dream in Kentucky to one day step on the Rupp Arena court and I was no different. But when we got down to the court they wouldn’t let us walk on it. I was a little disappointed, but I got to see the court up close so I was pretty happy about that. After being turned away from the court we started walking through the halls of Rupp, I’m not sure my dad knew where he was going, but soon we found ourselves outside the UK locker room.
There were probably 20 or 25 people out there, some friends and family as well as some other kids with their parents just hanging out. Suddenly a big fan opened up the locker room door and said, “Okay, let the kids in.”
I looked up at my dad and he gave me a nod and said, “Go ahead.”
“Sorry, just the boys,” the big man added. I looked next to me as I walked toward the door and a little girl turned around and walked back to her father.
I had never really done anything like this before on my own, walking into a room where I didn’t know anybody, much less in the Kentucky locker room to see players I had only seen on TV and who I loved and adored. I had taken my program with me and some of the other kids were going around and asking players for their autographs, so I decided to do the same thing.
Mostly I just walked up with my pen and program in hand and handed them in the direction of the player I wanted to sign. Some times I stammered, “Can I have your autograph…,” but most of the time I just held out my pen and the program and they knew what to do, they were pretty experienced at giving out their autographs. How cool it must be to have people ask for your autograph, I thought. I made my way around the room to different players.
Suddenly there they were right in front of me and in the flesh, some of them literally, and larger than life. Big Melvin Turpin, who earned the nickname “Dinner Bell” Mel because of his prodigious eating habits; Jim Master, a sharp-shooter from Indiana, who was probably my favorite player at the time; Kenny Walker, a skinny freshman who was playing a lot; and even injured star Sam Bowie (who later would have the dubious distinction of being drafted ahead of Michael Jordan in the 1984 NBA Draft) who was in his second redshirt season after breaking his leg. Some players were sitting and some were standing and some were even getting out of the shower. I walked around to most of the ones I knew and held out my pen and program and asked them for their autograph.
Some were in different stages of undress, some were just drying off from getting out of the shower and some were getting dressed, while others were still in their uniforms being interviewed by reporters (that would be me in about 20 years). Being small I was able to wedge myself between reporters, in some cases, and thrust my pen and program in a player's direction.
I got most of the ones I wanted, including Master, Turpin, Walker and my dad's favorite player, Tom Heintz, a bench warmer. I got several autographs, that afternoon but the one that still stands out to me was the one I received from Derrick Hord. Hord was a 6-4 swing forward who was a McDonald’s All-American out of high school, but who had had a productive, but unspectacular career at Kentucky. Word was that he was a great practice player, but in games he was just an average player. But he will always be an All-American in my book. That’s because as I approached him he was talking to a couple of people around him, but when he saw me he stopped and took my pen and program.
“What’s your name?” he asked.
I was completely in shock. In those days, and still in some cases today, basketball players, especially at UK, were treated like Gods, now suddenly one of the Gods was asking me a question.
“J-j-j-osh,” I stammered.
He scribbled something in the program, smiled and handed the program back to me.
I can still remember what it said: “Good luck Josh, best wishes Derrick Hord."
Looking back it really impresses me that he took the time to ask me my name and include it in a personalized message. I don't care how he finished in his career at UK. I don't care if he didn't live up to the hype, Derrick Hord will always be an All-American in my book.
For many years I considered that to be the best day of my life.
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