OSUBasketballJunkie
Never Forget 31-0
Cincy
6/8/06
6/8/06
Frustrated fans go public
But student paper refuses to run group's anti-Coach Smith ad
BY C. RAY HALL | THE (LOUISVILLE) COURIER-JOURNAL
Richard Cheeks and some like-minded University of Kentucky basketball fans are so distressed that they tried to buy a full-age ad in the UK student paper to air their grievances with coach Tubby Smith.
Cheeks, a Jessamine County engineer and lawyer with two degrees from UK, is an adjunct professor in civil engineering at his alma mater. He's also something you've probably never heard of: a forensic engineer.
Which means: "I investigate foundation failures, slope failures, ground-water problems, and then testify in court."
Cheeks thinks he has spotted enough cracks in the UK basketball foundation to incite him, and others, to speak out.
"There's a group of us - it's hard to say how many, but maybe 500 to a thousand of us - who believe that Tubby Smith is not good for the UK basketball program," he said Thursday.
"We see the program in decline. ... We don't want it to decline the way the Louisville program did in the latter years when Denny Crum was there. We don't want it to decline to the point that the North Carolina program did when Matt Doherty was there.
"So we decided that we were going to begin to get our message out."
Cheeks and a group called Concerned Fans For UK Basketball sought to buy a $1,700 ad in the Kentucky Kernel.
The paper turned down the ad, inspiring Cheeks to alert the media, whose coverage inspired fans to give Cheeks an earful.
One, said Cheeks, is a longtime UK fan from Paris who called "to say he's had similar feelings and he's glad to hear someone speaking up."
Others were less friendly.
"I've gotten a lot of e-mail in the last 24 hours," he said. "Frankly, most of the e-mail has been very ugly. One just had three words: racist Nazi pig. And some of them are threatening."
Cheeks said he has no regrets about going public: "I won't live in fear," he said.
He couldn't get his ad into the Kernel, but he said an editor there has asked him to write an opinion piece for the UK paper.
Smith could not be reached for comment.
UK basketball spokesman Scott Stricklin said: "No one wants Kentucky basketball to be successful as much as Tubby Smith does. Being that he's one of the nation's winningest coaches, he pretty much knows what it takes to win championships, because he's done it here.
"We have a passionate fan base. Any time you have a group of passionate fans, it's not unusual to provoke a minority to react over a season that's not as good as we might have all wanted it to be.
"But that group certainly doesn't represent the vast majority of Wildcat fans who we hear from on a daily basis who support Coach Smith."