Ashland will try and become the 13th team in Tomcat history to have an undefeated regular season Friday night when it visits Lexington Catholic.
Ashland secured the Class 4A district championship with a 48-28 victory over Johnson Central on Friday night. With a win this week, they would become only the fifth Tomcat team since 1942 to be unbeaten in the regular season. Joining the 1942 team are 1958, 1975 and 2020. That’s it. Both the 1967 and 1990 state championship teams suffered their only loss during the regular season.
The KHSAA playoff system did not start until 1959. The Tomcats claimed mythical championships through the years prior to the playoff system. The 1931 team that went 10-0 clobbered Decatur, Ga., 80-6 at Armco Field in a game that was set up late to determine the top team in Dixie. Five decades later, in 1981, a news service poll that was checking up on national rankings from the 1930s declared the Tomcats as the best team in the country in 1931, per research from Tomcat radio voice Tyler Rowland.
Ashland’s last undefeated team came in the COVID-shortened 2020 season. The Tomcats finished 11-0. They were 6-0 in the regular season with several games cancelled because of COVID and then ran the table in the postseason to perfection.
Coach Tony Love celebrates the state championship in 2020 alongside Gage Layman. That team was the last one to have an undefeated regular season. The won six games in the regular season and then five in the playoffs to finish 11-0 in a COVID-shortened season. Besides them, only three other Tomcat teams have had an undefeated regular season since 1942.
These Tomcats have secured the opportunity to play more home games when the postseason begins a week from Friday. Ashland goes into the last regular-season game with the top RPI ranking in Class 4A. They need to win Friday to keep that standing and then would still have to potentially (likely?) battle through the northern Kentucky gauntlet of Covington Catholic and Fort Thomas Highlands before the RPI seeding takes real effect.
Covington Catholic wasn’t in the top 10 of the RPI but make no mistake, the Colonels are good but they have an interesting first round game with Johnson Central, the most dangerous 3-7 team in Kentucky.
I saw Covington Catholic in person throttle Class 6A Ryle in the opening game of the season. And Highlands is Highlands, the district champion and one of the favorites to win Class 4A.
A few weeks ago, I had the pleasure of meeting with Ashland’s coaches and players to present them with my new book and that day I asked them: How do you want to be remembered? They have the chance to etch their name in rare air with a win on Friday night. An unbeaten regular season makes you memorable.
Below are the years that Ashland had a perfect regular season, Eight of those seasons came between 1926-1935 including six in a row from 1926-1931. They had a 60-0-4 streak ended on a last-second play against Erie, Pennsylvania, at Armco Field in 1932.
Here are the dozen Tomcat teams that had an undefeated regular season.
ASHLAND, Ky. (KT) – Bill Grimes doesn’t remember everything about his Ashland Tomcat football career in 1961 and 1962.
But there is one collision he will never forget.
Grimes was a junior in 1961, and things weren’t going well on the second Friday in October when Ironton came to town. Ashland was 1-5 and hadn’t scored since the second week of the season, a 12-6 loss to Point Pleasant, W.Va. The Tomcats had opened the year with a 7-0 victory over Catlettsburg.
On the opening kickoff at Putnam Stadium, the stocky, 181-pound Grimes sprinted toward Ironton’s Coy Bacon.
They didn’t collide. They crashed.
Grimes went flying backward through the air and landed hard on the turf. He collected himself and walked off the field.
Bill Grimes during his senior year at Ashland in 1962
Sixty-five years later, he can still feel it.
Bacon did all right for himself, too. He was selected to three Pro Bowls during a 14-year NFL career and recorded 130.5 sacks before sacks became an official statistic.
That was the stone wall Grimes ran into – and wished he hadn’t.
“I wasn’t afraid of anything, even Coy Bacon,” Grimes said. “He hit me and I’m flying in the air going backwards. It was on the film. The coaches said, ‘Grimes goes in the air and then gets back up ready to play.’ They were trying to make me feel better. Coy was a class guy, I really liked him. I kept thinking this guy is 23, 24 years old. He knocked the crap out of me. I sure do remember that.”
Grimes, now 81 and living in Mt. Pleasant, S.C., won’t soon forget it.
Ashland lost that night, 13-0, for its fourth consecutive shutout. The Tomcats lost to Fort Thomas Highlands the following week, 34-12, falling to 1-6 before winning their final three games to finish 4-6.
It was a sign of things to come.
“We started meshing and it carried over,” Grimes said.
It certainly did.
The 1962 Tomcats went 8-1-1, with the only blemish a 28-0 loss to Highlands. That loss kept them out of the state playoffs, which had begun in 1959.
Ashland’s first postseason appearance came in 1966, when Highlands again ended the Tomcats’ season with a 27-12 victory. A year later, Ashland returned to the playoffs and won the Class AA state championship.
The 1962 season deserves more attention than it gets.
Grimes was a versatile player who ran the ball, kicked and played linebacker. He averaged 7 yards a carry but had only 30 attempts for 212 yards. Chip Miller led the ground game with 566 yards and 10 touchdowns.
And talented sophomore Tom Ferguson started at quarterback during an era when sophomores seldom dressed. Only five did that season.
Ferguson started all three seasons before signing with the University of Kentucky. He played quarterback on the freshman team before moving to linebacker, where he started three years for the Wildcats.
From Alabama to Ashland
Grimes moved to Ashland from Alabama before his sophomore year. His father was a career Army man, and the family was supposed to move to Berlin. But the Berlin crisis changed those plans, and his father decided to retire.
His mother, an Ashland native, insisted they return to her hometown.
Grimes loved football, and his mother gave him some simple advice.
If you want to play football, go to Ashland and become a Tomcat.
He moved in with his aunt and started school. His parents arrived two months later and bought a home on Woodlawn Avenue.
He attended the old high school on Lexington Avenue, but the construction of Paul G. Blazer High School was already changing the landscape. Grimes called the new campus a showplace and believes it helped bring the team together.
His cousin, Bob Patterson, played in the band and introduced Grimes to the Cincinnati Reds. Patterson also taught him a lesson Grimes still lives by:
Once you’re a Tomcat, you’re always a Tomcat.
Basketball was another story.
“I had no idea why these guys were running around in shorts,” Grimes said. “Bear (Bryant) wouldn’t let me go anywhere in shorts. It was a real awakening.”
During Grimes’ junior year, the 1961 Tomcats basketball team produced one of the greatest seasons in Sweet Sixteen history, going 36-1 behind Harold Sargent, Gene Smith and Larry Conley.
The next year, Ashland nearly repeated as state champion, losing to St. Xavier, 62-58, in the finals.
But Grimes’ game was football.
He had thick thighs and ran with authority, even though he didn’t get a lot of carries. He attempted six passes – all incompletions – and was an accurate placekicker, making 21 extra points. “I did whatever I could to get on the field,” he said.
The Tomcats opened the 1962 season with four straight victories, including a 7-6 win over Huntington High.
That one mattered.
It matched coaching brothers Rex Miller of Ashland and Claude Miller of Huntington. Grimes put the Tomcats ahead 7-0 before the Pony Express scored. Huntington’s chance to tie was denied when Eddie Radjunas broke through the line and blocked the kick.
John Stafford, Tim Brown, Fred Cooper, Vic McGuire and Radjunas were honorable mention All-State selections. Nick Jordan, a junior who joined the team late that season, would become a first-team All-State defensive tackle in 1963.
Grimes still remembers the teammates who became lifelong friends: David Alban, J.B. Conley, Bob Yancey, George Branham, Bob Reynolds, Charlie Jordan, Radjunas and Larry Fairchild.
“I loved that team,” he said. “Those guys took me in as a sophomore and we grew to like each other. All of them grew up in Ashland. They knew their people. But they took care of me. We had confidence in our coaching staff. They called me The Bull believe it or not. The funny thing, Bob Yancey once told me, ‘Coach should have put you in more.’”
Ashland’s 1962 football team that had an 8-1-1 record and included several well-known Tomcats.
Ashland tied Hazard 20-20, and Grimes played a role in preserving the tie. He missed the extra point after the second touchdown but made the kick after the third score to keep the Tomcats undefeated.
He remembered playing at Hazard the previous season, too. The field was uneven, he said, and coal miners watched from the sidelines covered in coal dust.
“All you could see were their white teeth and eyes,” he said.
After beating Ironton 25-6 in his ssenior season, Ashland took its 5-0-1 record to Highlands with little hope of winning, Grimes said.
“A lot of the guys were just trying to get the game over with,” he said. “We knew we were going to get beat; just don’t get beat too bad. On the way home the coaches said you guys are too happy. The idea was, we got through it, we didn’t get killed (28-0). We still had three at the end (of the season).”
The Tomcats regrouped.
They won their final three games by a combined 102-25 to finish 8-1-1, their best record since the 10-0-1 team of 1958.
Grimes’ best game came in a 34-6 rout of Russell. He rushed for 67 yards.
“They turned me loose,” he said, chuckling. “I carried a guy about 30 yards on my back before somebody hit me and knocked me down. That’s where the name Bull came from.”
Once a Tomcat
Grimes moved to South Carolina in 2014, where he eventually ran into a player from Stonewall Jackson, which Ashland had defeated 27-20 in 1962.
The man talked about how Stonewall Jackson had won the game.
Grimes didn’t correct him.
Instead, the conversation led Grimes and his wife to a church where they remain members.
Grimes’ life after Ashland was as remarkable as his football career.
He joined the Army out of high school and served in Vietnam from 1966 to 1969, eventually rising to captain. He retired from the military after 32 years.
At one point, he served a midnight shift guarding the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at Arlington National Cemetery, an honored reserved for the elite soldier.
He later earned a law degree and spent 32 years as a prosecutor in Indiana.
He said 50 men he sent to prison are now Facebook friends with him.
Grimes and his wife Valorie will celebrate 39 years of marriage in December. He has three adult sons from a previous marriage, all of whom played high school football. His middle son, Matthew, played at Centre College.
And there is one more thing worth knowing about Bill Grimes.
He coached youth league football for 20 years.
A Tomcat football player. A Vietnam veteran. A prosecutor who put bad guys away. A youth football coach.
Not a bad legacy.
And perhaps not a bad legacy for a Tomcat team that deserves a little more love than it has received over the years.
Grimes certainly hasn’t forgotten it.
“Once a Tomcat, always a Tomcat,” he said. “I loved it!”
INDIATLANTIC, Fla. – John Tuttle, who started a 40-year career in education in Ashland schools and was an assistant football coach for the Tomcats from 1975 to 1979, had a stadium in Florida named in his memory earlier this month.
Tuttle, who died at the age of 76 in July, had the Heritage High School football stadium renamed Tuttle Stadium at a ceremony earlier this month. His education career spanned more than four decades in Kentucky and Florida.
As a young man in his early 20s, Tuttle’s 40-year education journey started in the Ashland Independent School System. He coached football for seven years in the Ashland system, starting at Putnam Jr. High and advancing to the high school level in 1975 when the Tomcats beloved JAWS team went 14-1. He also was on the staff in 1976 during a 9-3 season and stayed on when Mike Holtzapfel took over the head coaching reins at Ashland from 1977-79.
He was also a highly respected high school basketball referee in Kentucky, many times partnering with Bill Burch.
John Tuttle is behind Coach Herb Conley who is giving the play to fullback Jim Johnson in 1975.
Tuttle was one of three assistant coaches during Herb Conley’s last two seasons at Ashland in 1975 and 1976. The other assistants were Bill Tom Ross and Holtzapfel.
Tuttle helped design and build Heritage High School in Florida, where he was principal when the first graduating class went through. He served in that role from 2009 to 2012.
Tuttle’s legacy is tied to Heritage Stadium, which serves as a symbol of his impact on education and athletics. His career was marked by dedication to student success, leadership in school administration and a passion for sports, making the stadium a fitting tribute to his contributions to the community.
If you are visiting Heritage Stadium, you can see it as a lasting monument to John Wayne Tuttle’s work in building and leading schools, as well as his role in shaping the athletic and academic environment for generations of students.
Before leading Heritage High School, he coached football, baseball and golf at Palm Bay High School, leading his 1985 baseball team to the state championship. He later served as Assistant Principal at Cocoa Beach High, Principal at Mila Elementary, Southwest Middle School and Bayside High.
The family of John Tuttle celebrated the renaming of Heritage Stadium to Tuttle Stadium earlier this month in Florida.
Brevard Public Schools officially dedicated the Heritage High School football stadium as Tuttle Stadium to honor his foundational leadership and impact.
Tuttle kept officiating basketball and appeared in several Florida state championship games as referee. Also, an avid golfer, he could shoot his age and shared a hole-in-one plaque with his son, Lance, and grandson, Cole, at Spessard Holland Golf Course.
He was from Winchester, Ky., and was married to his high school sweetheart, Karlene, for 55 years. Tuttle is survived by his wife and son and 10 grandchildren.
Tuttle was lured to Florida by friend John Thomas, a former star baseball player at Ashland, in 1980. Thomas was coaching in Florida and Tuttle followed him there to coach football and baseball at Palm Bay High.
He was also an assistant principal at Cocoa Beach High School and was a principal at Mila Elementary, Southwest Middle School and Bayside High. He was instrumental in designing Heritage High School before retiring after four decades in education.
Tuttle kept officiating basketball and appeared in several Florida state championship games as referee. Also, an avid golfer, he could shoot his age and share a hole-in-one plaque with his son, Lance, and grandson, Cole, at Spessard Holland Golf Course.
He was from Winchester, Ky., and was married to his high school sweetheart, Karlene, for 55 years. Tuttle is survived by his wife and son and 10 grandchildren.
Ashand’s 1975 coaching staff: Bill Tom Ross, Mike Holtzapfel, Herb Conley, John Tuttle.
Rick Sang and I took a deeper dive on the photograph of Terry Fish’s reported 47-yard field goal in 1974 for the Ashland Tomcats.
If you look at the photo, the 40-yard marker painted on the wall is clearly shown behind the Bryan Station bench. So, it was probably kicked from about the 44. Greg Estep’s hold looks to be on or about that spot. BUT the reported distance doesn’t account for the extra 10 yards from the goal line to the back of the end zone. That would make it a 54-yard field goal, which would have been a state record and still would rank sixth all-time in Kentucky high school football history.
A newspaper story about the game reveals the line of scrimmage was the 32 and then there was a 5-yard penalty on the Tomcats pushing it back to the 37. The standard from the snap to holder is seven yards, putting the hold on the 44, and the photograph shows that to be true.
My best guess is that the ball was on the 37 and they added 10 yards for the goal line-to-end zone distance to make it a 47-yard kick. But that’s now how it should have been scored. Ten yards is added from the point of the kick, not the line of scrimmage, making it a 54-yard kick.
The photo also shows the perfect technique on display. His kick made it 3-0 and Wendell Fugitt returned a fumble for a touchdown for a 9-0 lead. The extra point was blocked, which again shows you how much had to go right for Fish to boom a field goal of that distance. It took a perfect snap, perfect hold, perfect blocking and perfect kick.
And if he kicked it from the 44, which sure looks like happened, it was a 54-yard kick. He would have had the record until 2004 when Taylor Long kicked a 55-yard field goal for Christian County. That would mean Fish had the state record for 30 years before it would have been broken. But it was never recognized as such.
Schools must turn in a verified account of records for the KHSAA to consider them. Ashland apparently did not do that – or even think to do it – in 1974. I’m not even sure when the KHSAA began accepting records to be quite honest.
Tyler Pack of Johnson Central holds the state record of a 60-yard field goal. It was interesting because it came on a free kick in a game the Golden Eagles’ won easily. On a punt or kickoff, you can make a fair catch, and the coach can send out the kicker for a free kick from that spot. No rush from the opponents; just tee it up and kick. It usually happens with not much time remaining in a quarter, half or game. A missed kick can be returned, and the opponent takes possession if the kick is missed. (Note to coaches: It’s an interesting play to consider if you have a good kicker and if you have somebody who can fair catch a ball on the opponents’ side of the field).
Pack also had a 58-yard field goal and his 89-yard punt is also a state record. He had some kind of leg.
Aaron Pettrey of Raceland had field goals of 58 yards in 2003 and 52 in 2002. He went on to kick for Ohio State and had a cameo with the Cincinnati Bengals.
But Terry Fish’s long kick between the uprights on scoreboard side of the field in a 9-6 win over Bryan Station at Putnam Stadium remains the Tomcat record, but belongs in the state record book as well.
I’m sure he would been proud to own the state record for so long.
