Walk down the narrow stairway to Eldon Thompson’s basement and your eyes almost can’t focus because of what they’re seeing, which is a little bit of everything, a sports smorgasbord sea of memorabilia.

A hodgepodge of sports photographs, posters and newspaper clippings are hanging on every inch of every wall in the room that has a pool table smack dab in the middle of it. Shelves and tables have neatly placed memorabilia, including some 1920s and 1930s Ashland Tomcat football and basketball team photos, autographed baseballs and other sports trinkets.

The 88-year-old Thompson has made the basement haven a hobby since 1999 and some of the clippings are as old as him. Like the front page of the Lexington Leader the day after the Tomcats and Kittens captured the 1928 state basketball championships.

He has a program from the national tournament in Chicago where the Tomcats won it all in 1928 and a bracket from the national tournament that same year. He has a tattered photo that shows an old Tomcat logo with the scores of the five games from the 1928 national tournament, a rare piece of Ashland sports memorabilia.

Longtime friends, including the late Bun Wilson, entrusted him with much of the Tomcat memorabilia, which he said he might loan out but would never sell. He has a game jersey that was worn by James Castle, a Tomcat football team captain in 1939 who was a sophomore when the original Putnam Stadium opened in 1937.

Thompson was a fan of the Brooklyn Dodgers and especially Gil Hodges and Duke Snider. He penned a letter of the day that he went to Crosley Field in Cincinnati in 1952 and timidly went up to Hodges for an autograph because he was his favorite player. Hodges not only signed his program, but he passed it around so everybody else in the Dodger dugout at the time could put a signature on it. Unfortunately, he says, that program may have been accidentally thrown away by his mother. It may be the only thing not on his wall.

The letter he wrote of that day in Cincinnati is well written and typed in all caps. It’s framed on a shelf, angled perfectly on a small bookcase, with several other framed photos beside it.

Three baseball cards of Hodges are on a wall, too, and somewhere, he said, are ticket stubs from a Super Bowl that he once attended. “I think the Vikings were one of the teams in it,” he said. There’s also a photo of him in the Winner’s Circle at Keeneland after a friend invited him to come down following a big victory.

He has a lot of UK and Louisville photos and posters and Styrofoam footballs with scores of Kentucky football wins etched on them. There are hats, golf balls with Louisville logos, photos of Babe Ruth and Mickey Mantle, Johnny Unitas and a framed photo of the cover from the 1952 Cotton Bowl when Kentucky stunned Oklahoma.

He has a Tomcat warmup jacket that has a message on the sleeve from Larry Conley. Thompson, who was an Air Force veteran, was an American Legion baseball coach when Ashland’s “Larry Legend” played in the early 1960s. The inscription reads: “To Eldon, One of the great baseball coaches in Ashland. Larry Conley.”

In another corner on a table sits a framed photo of the 1922 Ashland Tomcat basketball team. Beside that are several football team photos from the 1930 era in Ashland. He has schedule cards, programs and other Tomcat memorabilia in the room.

Mixed among it all are photographs of his grandchildren and great-grandchildren and their involvement in sports because family makes his world go around.

There’s no rhyme or reason as to how everything is pinned, taped or glued to the walls but nearly every available space is taken. While the collection wouldn’t bring a king’s ransom, they mean the world to him. Much of them are personally signed to him and all of them have a story behind them.

Another item hanging in the room is a framed letter to Andy Rooney of “60 Minutes” that he wrote in 1996. It seems Mr. Rooney suggested parents should never name their children after them and that it was, in fact, dumb to do so. Thompson took exception to that statement and he wrote a letter letting Rooney know about it because he was proud to carry his father’s name. Here’s how he closed that letter.

“One last item, if you ever come to Kentucky and look me eye to eye and say my parents were dumb for naming me Eldon, Jr., DUCK.” And he signed it: Sincerely, Eldon W. Thompson Jr.

 

When I was writing Tomcat Dynasty, the book about Ashland’s unmatched baseball run from 1965 to 1969, interviews with players who could tell me the rest of the story was imperative to making it a great book.

Most were more than willing, even thrilled, to be interviewed about some of the greatest times of their lives. Bill and Bob Lynch were my top contacts and they helped me track down many others. Some were still in Ashland, including Fred Leibee.

I’d known Fred for years and knew how good of an athlete he was for the Tomcats in basketball and baseball since he played when I started paying attention to sports. I was 11 years old in the spring of 1969 when Ashland’s basketball team went to the Sweet Sixteen in Freedom Hall. I knew the players – Ray Kleykamp, Roger Baldridge, John Mullins, Jerry Owens, Dave Staten and Fred Leibee.

Like the rest of Ashland, it was a tough going through that 82-80 loss in the semifinals to Ohio County that was a heartbreaking defeat, even though Louisville Central, one of the greatest teams in Sweet Sixteen history, would have been waiting in the finals. Still, it was a hard loss, with Ohio County rallying from 15 points behind and then Kleykamp missing a jumper at the buzzer that could have tied the game.

Ashland never makes it to the semifinals without Leibee, who scored 19 against Harlan and 20 against Shelby County to help get them to Ohio County and the final four. It would be Ashland’s best showing since 1962.

Then there was the 1969 baseball season and Ashland had won three state championships in a row. They defeated Don Gullett in the regional semifinals in Morehead  during that ’69 season in one of the greatest victories in Ashland history with Tim Huff outdueling the future Cincinnati Red in a 1-0 thriller.

Fred Leibee was in the middle of all that. I asked Fred multiple times to talk with me about the good ‘ol days but he was never interested. “Ah, Mark, that’s ancient history,” he told me more than once. He didn’t want to replay or live in the past. That part of his life was over and he’d put it behind him. I remember trying one last time to convince him and both Bill and Bob Lynch asked him about it too. “Nah, guys, that’s ancient history.”

It was a history that he helped write for the Tomcats.

Many people may live too much in the past and often they live in a past that frankly wasn’t all that great except in their minds. That wasn’t so for Fred Leibee. He was great.

I wrote the book without him quoted but not without him in it. He was too integral a part of that 1968 championship season and the 1969 runner-up team to be left out.

Leibee was such a tremendous baseball player both as a fielder, hard-throwing pitcher and clutch hitter. He made some fabulous plays at third base in the ’69 tournament and was named to the All-State tournament team.

During the regular season he was part of a doubleheader sweep of Lexington Catholic where 27 players went down swinging against the Tomcats’ Huff (12) and Leibee (15). The headline in the next day’s newspaper read: “Uncle Huff, Nephew Leibee Hurl AHS to Twin Bill Sweep.”

Leibee was overpowering with the 15 strikeouts and no walks in a 7-2 win. Huff got more offensive help in a 12-1 rout. Lexington Catholic went home not seeing much of what either of these guys threw at them. That’s 27 strikeouts out of 42 outs. Uncle Tim was the brother of Leibee’s mother and they were friends for life.

They also got in plenty of trouble, including in that ’69 season when coach Shorty Blanton suspended them after smelling alcohol when they showed up for a game. They had taken advantage of Senior Skip Day and went to the strip mines where they “had a little too much to drink,” confessed Huff in an interview with me. He wasn’t so much confessing as laughing. “Shorty kind of smelled it on us. He suspended us. Everybody pretty well knew.”

Another big victory for Leibee was a 2-1 decision against Holy Family and Dave Brislin in a pitcher’s duel. There were a lot of other big moments, too. It was a team that led the state in having fun but they were serious between the lines. Only a 1-0 loss to Owensboro kept them from a fourth consecutive state championship.

A few years ago we did convince Fred to accept an invitation to be in the CP-1 Hall of Fame, even though he had to give a speech. In typical fashion, his “speech” lasted about 15 seconds. Another record for Fred: shortest induction speech ever.

Fred Leibee is gone now. He died on Monday at the age of 68. His legacy as one of Ashland’s greatest athletes during the golden era of Tomcat sports in the 1960s remains forever, with or without interviews.

 

The deuces were prevalent for the Ashland Tomcats and Ashland Kittens basketball teams in 1928.

Let’s count the ways:

–Ashland brought home not one, but two, state championships with both the Tomcats and Kittens winning it.

–Tomcat star Ellis Johnson was whistled for two fouls – the entire season! No wonder he was given the sportsmanship award after the tournament.

–Two Kittens players were named to a Lexington writer’s “All Kentucky Beautiful Girls Basketball Team.”

I couldn’t make this stuff up. Are  you seeing double yet?

When Ashland’s boys and girls swept the 1928 state basketball championships, it was a hero’s welcome when they returned home from Lexington. And why not? It was the first time in Kentucky high school history that any school swept the boys and girls championship honors.

The Tomcats did it in heart-stopping fashion by defeating Carr Creek 13-11 in four overtimes before a loud and rowdy crowd at the UK gymnasium. The Kittens defeated Oddville (I’m not kidding) by a score of 27-11.

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A delegation of 10,000 awaited the train carrying the victors home and the mayor extended an official welcome and had some keys to the city to hand out (you reading this Steve Gilmore and Matt Perkins?) It was declared a half-holiday in Ashland with most of the businesses shutting down amid the celebration. A parade took the teams down Winchester Avenue and over to 17^th Street where the party continued for hours. Picture shows (no movies yet), confectioneries, and amusements of all kind were made available for free to the Ashland teams who were clearly the toasts of town.

Ashland had more than 1,000 fans of the 4,000 in the UK gymnasium on the boys championship night, the Lexington Leader newspaper said. Special cars were made up that carried 400 on a train from Ashland to Lexington and the other 600 came Thursday. Carr Creek, the mountain team from Knott County that didn’t even have a gym where they could practice, had become tournament darlings and several thousand supporters, including many from the schools that had already been eliminated, were rooting for the Creekers

When the Kittens won the championship, they were showered with dozens of flowers on the floor. The state title was nothing new for coach W.B. Jackson, who had directed state titles in 1921 and 1922 – the first years of the tournament – and also in 1924.

Ashland’s boys had reached the semifinals twice and the finals once in previous state tournaments.

The attendance for the 1928 boys tournament was the best since it started, the newspaper reported.

The All-State team was selected by the two referees with Ashland’s Ellis Johnson and Darrell Darby among the five named. That’s right, five. Carr Creek had one player on the team.

Johnson won the sportsmanship award after a season where he was whistled for only two fouls in 37 games.

Carr Creek’s team was given the sportsmanship award and it’s no wonder why. They had captured everybody’s hearts. Fans of both teams hoisted their coaches, Jimmy Anderson for Ashland and Oscar Morgan for Carr Creek, on their shoulders following the exhausting four-overtime championship game.

E.M. Sargent, a writer for the Lexington Leader, selected his own team for the girls. He wrote: “Kentucky has always been noted for its beautiful women and therefore it is appropriate that an ‘All Kentucky Most Beautiful Girls Basketball Team’ be selected.” Evelyn Ashworth and Thelma Young of Ashland were among his team of “two blondes and three brunettes.”

Oh my, how times have changed.

 

 

No matter what else Ashland’s boys’ basketball team does over the next two or three weeks, they have carved out a place in Tomcat lore.

They have made us reach back into the Tomcats annals of history practically every week and reminded us of greatness past. Upon completing the perfect regular season at 28-0 on Thursday, they won the most games in a season since 1996 when those Tomcats notched 27 victories during a spectacular and surprising run to the state championship game before losing to Paintsville in an all-mountain final. We’ve compared them to 1961, the greatest passing team maybe of all time in Kentucky high school history, and in some ways we have linked them to 1928.

How hard is going undefeated in the regular season? Well, it hasn’t happened in 92 years in our region. The 1927-28 Tomcats didn’t lose a game, going 37-0 in an era when there was a jump ball after every basket (it really paid off to have a tall guy!).

It wasn’t like basketball as we know it now, with 3-pointers being largely a part of the landscape for this year’s Tomcats, but that didn’t make it easy to go 37-0. It was a game where buckets were scare and defense was fierce.

They didn’t have quite the attention (pressure?) that we put on these young men today. We’ve all talked about the unbeaten Tomcats since they won the Ashland Invitational Tournament in December. The countdowns came with every game. How many more could they win? Can you imagine what has been put on their shoulders?

I asked a friend who played on Ashland’s 1975 JAWS football team about the pressure of being on an undefeated team. JAWS went 14-0 before losing to St. Xavier 20-0 in the 4A championship game. Rick Sang told me, “We never thought we were going to lose. Not even against St. X after everything we were hearing about them.”

The same could be said for the 1966 undefeated Ashland state championship baseball team. They went 25-0 in the first of three consecutive state titles. Bill and Bob Lynch, the stalwart pitchers for those Tomcats, echoed Sang’s feelings of “we never thought we were going to lose.”  And with those guys on the mound, they seldom ever did. They were 17-1 in 1965, losing in the state semifinals. That’s 42-1 over two years. Dominant pitching was the difference.

Losing wasn’t an option or part of the vocabulary. In my estimation, it’s even tougher in basketball (and baseball) than football to complete perfection. That statement bares truth when you see how many teams in Kentucky have completed undefeated seasons in football and the very few that have done it in basketball.

Johnson Central football did it this year, going 15-0 with an incredible team of well-coached athletes. Most of the teams on their schedule were no match.

Ashland’s 1958 football team is the last unbeaten in Tomcat history, going 10-0-1, with Herb Conley as one of the stars. He later was on the coaching staff of 1967’s 13-1 team and head coach of 1975 JAWS. Those teams were both built on brute force and simply overpowered most foes.

It’s different in basketball. Even though you may be the better team, the chances you could lose are greater. The intangibles – hot night for the opponent, cold night for you – can be the difference in winning or losing.

So the Tomcats going 28-0 – and 29-0 looks like a pretty sure thing come Monday vs. Rose Hill – is worth celebrating no matter what happens the rest of the way. Ashland could lose once and still have a shot to win the 16^th Region or they could take a sparkling 30-0 record to Morehead in two weeks.

It’s interesting what could transpire and how the script has been flipped. Last year, Ashland was given little chance against Elliott County in the region semifinals but pulled off the improbable victory. Now, the Tomcats are back in the more familiar role of favorite and the target is clear. They will get everybody’s best shot.

Back in 1928, the Tomcats were 21-0 in the regular season and then swept through the district and region with 10 victories. They played a postseason regular-season game against Huntington High between the winning the state championship and before going to the national tournament and won again to take a 32-0 record into the national tournament in Chicago.

Ashland qualified because of being a state champion and the team the Tomcats beat in the state finals in four overtimes – Carr Creek – was invited too. They had nine players, all of them cousins, who played the regional tournament in cutoff khaki pants and t-shirts with numbers sewn on by hand. They had to practice outside because they didn’t have a real gym and they had to walk or ride horseback eight miles to catch a bus ride to games, all of which were played on the road.

To make it to Lexington for the state tournament, they had to walk the eight miles and take a bus another dozen miles to reach the nearest rail spur that was about 20 miles from Carr Creek.

Don Miller’s book, The Carr Creek Legacy, is a jewel. It talks about how after Carr Creek defeated Middlesboro in the regional finals in Richmond, fans collected money so the Creekers could have regulation uniforms. Nobody expected them to be around long, but they kept picking off supposed better teams and wound up in the finals against the Tomcats.

The state tournament was a bigger deal then than even now with the media. It was second only to the Kentucky Derby as it related to sports fans in the commonwealth. The newspapers  moved stories from the tournament off the sports page and onto the front pages of the three-day tournament.

Neither Ashland nor Carr Creek were expected to be playing in the championship, but here they were. And they weren’t alone.  A crowd of 4,000 packed the University of Kentucky Alumni Gymnasium, according to newspaper accounts. Play-by-play reports were sent by telegraph to the Kentucky Theater because so many more wanted to know how the game was going. Can you imagine that?

It was a low-scoring game, like most of that time, with Carr Creek leading 4-3 at halftime. Ashland led 8-6 after three quarters and Shelby Stamper’s free throw with a second to play tied the game at 9 after regulation. Neither team scored in the first three overtimes.

Gene Strother tipped in a basket for the Tomcats from a long jumper in the fourth overtime and Ellis Johnson hit a layup for a 13-9 lead. Carr Creek made it 13-11 and the subsequent jump ball went Ashland’s way. There was no 10-second counts or over-and-back rules, so the Tomcats were able to stall out the rest of the game, using the entire floor, with Johnson “putting on a dribbling show,” as John McGill, a former ADI sports editor, said in Miller’s book. McGill saw the game as a young boy.
An excerpt from the book read:

“With Johnson putting on a dribbling show, Ashland was able to freeze the ball until the end,” McGill said, describing his childhood memories. As Ashland fans swarmed to hoist their players in the air, hundreds of fans swarmed to the floor to lift the Creekers to their shoulders, too. Earl Ruby, a sportswriter for the Louisville Courier-Journal, was trying to type his story, and he could not because of the frenzy of the Carr Creek fans. He had to obtain shelter under the table to finish his report.”

By the way, Ashland’s girls won the state championship on the same day but little was said about it. The Kittens were something fabulous too with coach W.B. Jackson guiding them to four titles in the eight years the girls state tournament was held.

One more little fact: Ashland finished its perfect season Thursday night on the floor at James A. Anderson Gymnasium, named of course, for the Mr. Anderson who was the coach of those 1928 Tomcats.

Ashland took its spotless record to the national tournament in Chicago and won five more to complete the greatest season in Tomcat history at 37-0. The team returned home to an incredible celebration of 10,000 greeting them at the train station on 11th Street where they boarded firetrucks and rode down Winchester Avenue to 17th Street and celebrated perhaps the greatest moment in Ashland sports history.