That’s because about 25 UK fans, mostly adorned from head to toe in blue and white, packed Mom’s Restaurant to fill out their NCAA brackets, register for door prizes and talk about their favorite subject, UK basketball.
To celebrate the occasion, Hilda Ratliff, the longtime owner of Mom’s, added blue dye to her famous gravy. When one waitress delivered a plate of biscuits and gravy, Ratliff said: “Looks like it belongs in an Easter basket.”
Ratliff, 81, graduated from high school in 1960 in Hindman, Ky., and moved to Ohio the next day carrying two IGA grocery bags with all her possessions. Her story isn’t much different than most transplanted Kentucky natives who left for better employment opportunities.
“I lived way up in a holler and the only things we had to do was pick strawberries and blackberries,” she said.
But there was UK basketball. This was before the family owned a black and white TV so Ratliff sat around the radio and listened to the games. When the battery started to die, Ratliff poured water down a pipe that covered a wire and the radio “blared up,” she said.
She has followed the Wildcats ever since.
“When you’re born in Kentucky,” she said, “you’re born a basketball fan.”
Jim Porter, 83, a retired Monroe High School teacher, also recalls those early days when his family gathered around the Crosley radio and listened to the games. The battery, he said, was larger than the radio.
“It was like a religion,” he said. “My dad always said, ‘There will be no talking during the game.’”
He graduated from South Portsmouth High School in 1957, taught for six years in Wyoming, then moved to Franklin for a higher paying job in Monroe. He taught there from 1967-1990. He has owned UK season tickets since 1976.
On Wednesday night, he traveled to Lexington to watch Reed Shepherd, a junior at North Laurel High School and a UK commit, play in the state basketball tournament.
When asked about UK basketball, Porter said: “It’s in your soul brother.”
He said the UK fans will gather at Mom’s every Wednesday morning until the Wildcats lose.
Earlier, as Porter filled out his NCAA bracket, he slowly printed Duke on one of the lines.
“Every time I write Duke,” he said, “it comes out Puke.”
And on this Wednesday, even that would have been blue.
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