How Kentucky Became a Basketball State

WKMS | By Todd Hatton

Published March 9, 2012 at 10:27 AM CST

Spend any time in Kentucky, and you'll notice that residents of the Bluegrass love their basketball. Of the 72 NCAA men's championship games played since 1939, Kentucky teams have won nine of them. Only California has more championships. So, the Commonwealth is a basketball state. But why? How did that particular tradition begin? To find out, Todd Hatton spoke with Murray State University history professor Dr. Duane Bolin. Dr. Bolin is a former college basketball player himself (Belmont University in Nashville, Tennessee), and teaches a class at MSU on the history of Kentucky sports.

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Todd Hatton

Todd Hatton hails from Paducah, Kentucky, where he got into radio under the auspices of the late, great John Stewart of WKYX while a student at Paducah Community College. He also worked at WKMS in the reel-to-reel tape days of the early 1990s before running off first to San Francisco, then Orlando in search of something to do when he grew up. He received his MFA in Creative Writing at Murray State University. He vigorously resists adulthood and watches his wife, Angela Hatton, save the world one plastic bottle at a time.

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