An Abusive Coach, Rock Hudson, and a Kentucky Football Players Sex Scandal

Have sort of a different football story to start the day with :).

The Courier Journal Newspaper has a very interesting write up today about a book that I suspect many Kentucky fans will not like to have intrude on their magical year. That is The Thin Thirty: The Untold Story of Brutality, Scandal and Redemption for Charlie Bradshaw's 1962 Kentucky Football Team.

I am planning to order this one today. I find this book interesting on so many levels and it is telling a story I never heard of before. It appears that this Coach had some serious problems and pretty much was very abusive of his players. From a team mutiny that reduced the team from 88 to 30!!!!, Abusive Coach/Player relationships, Fixing games, to a very intriguing sex element.

As to the sex part:
The sex scandal centers around activities at the Lakewood Drive home of wrestling promoter Jim Barnett and his partner, Lonnie Winters. (Ragland doesn’t name many UK players, citing his belief they were victims.)Barnett and Winters lure players with money, food and alcohol, and later pay football players for sex. Rock Hudson, who became involved in Lexington’s gay scene while filming “Raintree County” in and around Danville in 1957, personally calls UK players at their dorm.

That is really not that shocking to me at all. I also suspect that scenarios like this were more common nationwide at that time than the average fan would think.

I truly believe that there are more gay/bisexual football players and college athletes ,then and now, than many fans realize for reasons that I think are obvious. I can see how especially in that time and that region players were taken advantage of in that way to perhaps a much larger degree.

Anyway sounds like a good book. The reviewer says :"In what’s shaping up as a season of celebration at UK, the 1962 story might be easy to set aside as a downer. It shouldn't be. It carries a sobering message of how damaging sports can be if allowed to turn the wrong direction and how men can triumph anyway".