Category Archives: Sports

Let’s Have Some Fun, Card Fans!

Yesterday I was daydreaming, wondering about how far fans will go when they are in love with a team or a school?

So, I thought it would be cool to see if any of the Red & Black Faithful who are the vast majority of my readers have stories have any stories?

Which I hope all will share in the Comment Section below.

I’ve got some. Mine involve Cardinal hoops, but the sport does not matter, it’s what was done in the name of loyalty.

Three here underscore how strong my love is.

To start. It would be disingenuous not to admit my entire professional career path was altered by a U of L basketball game.

Truth is I never in my callow youth contemplated adulthood. Marriage. Family. Career. Never gave ’em much thought.

So, my senior year at U of L arrives in ’66-’67. Vietnam is the black cloud over all of us military age. I hadn’t a clue what I was going to do after graduation. I had a humanities prof whom I really liked. So, what the hell, I signed up to take the Graduate Records, and apply for a Masters or beyond in Humanities.

Like I said, not much aforethought.

But the week of the Saturday I’m going to take them, a pal walks into the Cardinal Inn with this.

Great news, he advises, he’d scored some tickets to the Cards hoops encounter that Saturday afternoon at Cincy. In their old gym. Continue reading Let’s Have Some Fun, Card Fans!

Supremes Skunk NC2A

We don’t need Matt Damon to demonstrate how much Supreme Court Dude Brett Kavannaugh likes beer.

The future Justice only mentioned it about 173 times during his confirmation hearing.

During which dog and pony show we also learned that he and his pals — Squee, Moose, and PJ — also like college hoops. Kinda anyway.

He made a note on his calendar in March 1982 about the U of L/ Georgetown battle in the Final Four.

“Who won that game anyway?”

Yeah, beer and basketball. It’s a match for many.

Maybe his honor doesn’t remember much about that particular tilt, but it’s obvious from his concurring opinion in “NCAA vs. Alston,” that he’s been paying attention to the grift college sports’ ruling body has been running for a long while.

More about his take in a second. Continue reading Supremes Skunk NC2A

“The Pacific was a Home Run”: My Favorite Sportswriting

I’ve been known to steal ideas before, and here it comes again. Deal with it.

At theathletic.com the other day, writers covering different sports listed their take on the best books about each.

OK, there’s a nifty idea, I says to myself.

At which juncture, I perused the bookcases in my condo, donning one of my Covid masks, so I wouldn’t choke on the dust stirred up, and pulled out a few of my faves.

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I’ll start with my favorite sports book, and my favorite story by my favorite sportswriter. My favorite writer period, the fellow whom I would aspire to emulate, while understanding I really am not worthy of toting his inkwell.

Murray, Ky. — You run up Route 641 to get here from Paris in Tennessee, because that is the closest place to Murray where there are any hotel rooms. You run past the browned fields, hawks, and vultures riding the thermals at different levels, and you run past the ponds, as still as Sunday morning. You go through Camden, where Patsy Cline’s airplane went down, and all the little farm roads off the highway seem to lead to churches, many of them the least common denominations. One of them, two miles up the road, calls itself The Church of the Living God of the Holiness of Holiness, which certainly ought to narrow things down. The way you know you’ve passed from Tennessee into Kentucky is that all the liquor stores and roadhouses seem to have disappeared. Continue reading “The Pacific was a Home Run”: My Favorite Sportswriting

Friday Squawks: Dabo, Roy, K, & the ’86 Title

Because I’m an inveterate Louisville Cardinal fan, because I still shake my head in awe that the Cards now compete in the Atlantic Coast Conference, and because I’m justifiably accused of being OCD, I tuned into the premier evening of the ACC Network.

(Besides I’m not a huge fan of the LLWS, and the episode of “Texas Metal” on MotorTrend Channel didn’t intrigue me.)

It was mostly just Show & Tell, since there was no actual live sports action.

Here are a few of the things I learned: Continue reading Friday Squawks: Dabo, Roy, K, & the ’86 Title

Louisville Cardinal Short Shots

So I’m standing in line at the grocery on the first day of the weekend, and the clerk asks if I have anything fun planned for the holiday?

“Errands. Maybe some music,” I reply.

At which point the fellow next to me in line says, “Post something at CardChron.”

Fortunately he didn’t seem to be one of the regulars, an antagonist whose vitriol would indicate I wouldn’t want to be meeting them out in public. He was a good guy.

“It’s that time of year, when there’s not a lot of news. Hopefully the baseball team (which had just gone ofer the ACC tourney) will get its act together.”

Anyway, my reader’s wishes are my command. So, here I come with a bunch of little stuff. Most, but not all of which, is Cardinal related. Continue reading Louisville Cardinal Short Shots

Louisville Cardinals in the Big Time Now

LouACCBrad Evans was a dude in full.

A Hemingway character — He eventually drank himself to death after working on barges just for the experience — he was as smart as he was mean, as willing to argue politics as he was to break a bottle of Sterling over your head in a bar fight.

The transfer from Wofford played line for Frank Camp’s Cardinals in the mid not-so-halcyon 60s, toiling in the grime that passed for turf at the one-sided all-purpose facility, passed off as a football stadium, at the State Fairgrounds.

Evans was an imposing presence on the then quaintly bucolic Belknap campus.

He could rouse the rabble with the best of them.

In that capacity, he led the several hundred or so protestors who marched to The Thinker, to rally against school prexy Philip Davidson’s proclamation that the then woefully underfunded municipal university was seriously considering dropping football.

Were Evans still around, I trust he’d be as dumbfounded and exhilarated as I am at what’s happened with U of L sports. Continue reading Louisville Cardinals in the Big Time Now

Who is The University of Louisville’s Best Coach?

cardsThere are, of course, some eagle-eyed among you, who, upon seeing the header to this blog, said to yourself, “There goes Seedy K, grabbing hold of somebody else’s idea and presenting it as his own.”

In this case, you’d be thinking of WDRB’s Rick Bozich, who asked the very same question in a column, on the exact day last week — honest — that a loyal reader asked it of me. And I replied to my fan, there’s a column there.

I swear. It was such the coincidence. No really, I’m not lying. (If you insist I’ll copy you the emails that went back and forth between Big Card Fan (not his real moniker) and myself, which shall be time stamped before Rick posted his story.)

So, even those it’s been asked before, and recently at that, I’m still going with it.

Because? Well, because it’s a fascinating discussion taking place among Cardinal fans, during these halcyon days of athletic success on the diamond, pitch, field, court, track and in the pool.

Plus, because, Big Card Fan’s analysis is seriously astute, and he took time out of his working day to send it along. Continue reading Who is The University of Louisville’s Best Coach?

Thirteen Thoughts for Thursday (Rockin’ Video Included)

animated_sports1. Boys Will Be Boys. So The Rick, as he is wont to do from time to time, pontificated about his feelings on the social media phenomenon.

Essentially, he called all of us who might, from time to time, tweet or post on Facebook or any other of our ilk, uh, “crazy.”

Which is, frankly, a really stupid thing to say, but of little consequence in the realm of human events.

Except to Coach Cal, he of the you-say-potato-I-say-tomato mentality, when it comes to his rival down I-64.

And so it goes.

Boys, go to your rooms, each of you, and don’t come out until called for dinner. Continue reading Thirteen Thoughts for Thursday (Rockin’ Video Included)

A Loyal Reader’s Valentine Gift: One I Shan’t Easily Forget

shoutingAny number of you regular readers have sent inquiries, questioning the sanity and intelligence of a regular — dare I say, loyal — reader, one J G Joyner.

“Does this dude actually read your stuff? Why would he think you’re a UK fan?’

“Is that J G idiot mental, or what?”

“What’s this guy’s problem. If he could read, he’d know you’re not a big Kentucky booster.”

Having seen neither the results of his IQ test, nor a clean bill of health from the Mental Inquest department, I feel uncomfortable commenting on either.

I do know that he is more than somewhat obsessed with the Cats. And, as you know if you’ve been paying attention, not in a positive way.

I admit to lunching with him, and another old associate, on occasion. Once, by coincidence when I showed up with a blue shirt on, he threatened to sit at another table.

And, in a comment, to a blog earlier this week, he simply commented, “You should move to Lexington . . .”

Hmmmm . . .

So, in the interests of hopefully coming to some resolution to what I’ve considered an egregious breach in internet ethics, I met him and that other associate, who also happens to be my attorney.

Or, so I thought. Continue reading A Loyal Reader’s Valentine Gift: One I Shan’t Easily Forget

Year of the Cardinal’s Bumpy Landing

cardsThis is the way a magical Flight of the Redbird ends, not with a bang but a whimper.

* * * * *

Before one of Louisville’s exhibition basketball games — one of those actually designated so, not one of the spate of them since the “real” season began — I was chatting up a fellow long time fan about the state of Kevin Ware.

While our mutual love for the Cardinals is deep and true, we rarely agree about any specific. But, that night, he offered of Ware, “I just have a feeling it’s not going to be a good end for him at U of L.”

I felt compelled to agree. Continue reading Year of the Cardinal’s Bumpy Landing