UK basketball fan travels over 500 miles to attend Cats’ practice
October 18, 2013
By Nick Gray | Sports editor
The cliche “basketball season starts in October in the state of Kentucky” is used extensively this time of the year in the Bluegrass.
But the cliche is true for one UK graduate who has moved to a football-centric state and is skipping work to travel more than 500 miles to watch Big Blue Madness.
Steve McNulty graduated from UK in the Class of 1977 with a bachelor’s degree in agriculture. He now lives in Dothan, Ala., a city of 65,496 people in the southeastern part of the state of Alabama.
McNulty, 57, is a manager at a ConAgra Foods plant and is taking off work on Thursday to travel for UK’s first public practice. Dothan is 588 miles away from Lexington, which is “about a nine or 10-hour drive,” McNulty said.
“I am ready to see the lights and Calipari introducing the new team,” McNulty said. “I think we’re going to be really good this year and I’m really, really excited.”
McNulty got tickets to Friday’s event after his son, Spencer McNulty, an agriculture senior at UK, camped out. Spencer McNulty and his friends will cook out with Steve McNulty beforehand. Friday will mark Steve McNulty’s first time attending Big Blue Madness.
“I would have paid for them,” he said. “I usually go through the Alumni Association (for regular and postseason tickets) and they’ve been pretty good, so I would have paid what they told me.”
Steve McNulty also has a daughter, Amanda McNulty, who graduated from UK in the Class of 2010.
He last traveled to Lexington for a basketball game in February 2012 during the national championship season for a conference game.
Steve McNulty said he has attended every Final Four the Cats have been in since 1978 except for the 1984 Final Four in Seattle, Wash., where UK lost to Georgetown University, the eventual national champions, led by All-American forward Patrick Ewing.
Steve McNulty’s favorite story in his Final Four travels derives from his first trip in 1978 to St. Louis, Mo.
“In 1978 in Seattle, my friend and I were in Key West for 10 days, came back to Lexington, then drove up to St. Louis and got into the 1978 National Championship,” Steve McNulty said.
Steve McNulty has not only a piece of history from that event, but physical photographic proof that he was there.
“My picture is actually in Sports Illustrated. It was one of the pictures of the year (in 1978). I’m right in the middle, down underneath (head coach) Joe B. Hall. It was cool. Really cool, actually.” Steve McNulty said. “My picture is in Rupp Arena (also), in the Papa John’s picture. It’s the Final Four picture and I’m right in the middle of that.”
In that Final Four, the Cats, under Hall, won their fifth national championship.
Steve McNulty said last year’s struggles did not deter his efforts to come up to Kentucky.
“There’s no way I would miss this,,” Steve McNulty said. “When you’re blue, you’re always blue.”
