I first met Luther Blanton at a Senior League baseball game at Huff Park in the summer of 1983. As you would expect, if you know either of us very well, we talked sports.
We continued to talk sports, at least once a week, for the next 43 years, including our last conversation last week at Harlan ARH just before Luther left with his sister, Donna, to travel to Lexington. He had been diagnosed only a couple of weeks earlier with stage four liver cancer. We talked a little Harlan County basketball, for only a minute or two, before he was wheeled out to her car. I shook his hand as he left, knowing it was probably going to be the last time I’d see him. Luther and I aren’t huggers and rarely even shook hands. Usually, we’d confirm the next game we both planned to attend and let it go at that.
I’ve spent quite a bit of time trying to think what I should write about the guy who traveled all around the state with me watching sports. I’ve written many tributes in the past about former coaches and players who I got to know over the years, but this is the toughest one. My friend Jack Miniard told me yesterday in an email that he knew I’d find the words when the time was right. I guess today is the time.
For a Harlan County sports historian like myself, Luther went back to an era that fascinated me but I knew little about. Luther lived it and saw all the great players and coaches up close from scorers tables in gymnasiums around Harlan County and eastern Kentucky. He started keeping the scorebook as a student at Wallins High School in 1957 when “Big Jim” Howard, like many others of that era, coached all the sports. He liked to talk about how Big Jim would listen to University of Kentucky basketball games while he coached, and once started screaming about a big basket for the Cats when nothing was going on in the Wallins game that warranted any emotion.
Luther was keeping score before integration and often talked about the Wallins vs Rosenwald game when John Hale was one of the officials. It was “the Purple Devils vs the Red Devils with Hale in the middle,” he’d say.
He was there in the early 1960s when the 52nd District Tournament featured 12 teams “and took all week to play” before consolidation starting reducing that number, first with Benham and Black Star in 1961 then all the black schools in 1963 and then Wallins, Loyall and Hall into James A. Cawood High School in 1966. Luther moved from Wallins to JACHS and kept the book in basketball and helped film football in the early years of the school. He had a disagreement with a former Cawood football coach in the mid 1970s and moved on to Harlan where he worked with coaches such as Ken Condra and Doyle Troutman and finally Billy Hicks. When Billy left for Corbin in 1986, Luther returned to Cawood and from one coaching legend to another with Mike Jones. During this time, Luther continued on a decades-long tradition of being the official scorer for the 52nd District Tournament. The 2021 district tournament was the 61st straight tournament that Blanton attended even though he had stepped down as official scorer several years earlier.
Somewhere around the mid 1980s, Luther met my dad at Rax, and they eventually became best friends and held court each evening as a group of regulars gathered for dinner. John Baker, who was one of the regulars, along with his wife, Molly, shared their thoughts on those years in a Facebook post earlier this week.
“There is a great reunion in Heaven this evening,” said the Bakers. “Luther Blanton the founding member of The Rax Pack, has gone home. Around the table with Luther is co-founder John Henson, Big Jim and Dottie Morgan, Wix and Marilyn Unthank, Willard and Jennie Carmichael, David Davies, Charlie Dozier and Lige Buell. I know there are many others in this special group that I have missed, but what I miss most is the love, friendship and fellowship this group had. I can imagine someone asking Luther what took you so long and John Henson saying somebody was bouncing a ball somewhere. I sure loved the time I spent with this group.”
The gatherings have continued at Rax with Friday dinners. Luther was always the first to arrive. I sat in for my dad the past couple of years with Danny and Charlene Castle and Britt and Donna Lewis as other regulars.
After going through a second consolidation in 2008, Luther moved on to Harlan County High School to keep the book and stayed on the job until the end of the 2013 season, when HCHS lost to Clay County in the regional finals. He remained a regular at HCHS games and sat on the bench at Rupp Arena in 2017 when the Bears won their first regional championship and the first in Blanton’s decades of following basketball in the county. He made the trip to Lexington in 2024 and saw the Bears’ amazing run to the state finals. I know we both agreed that was the highlight of our many years of chasing basketball games across the state. My sister once compared our passion for sports to the movie “Twister” — while Bill Paxton and Helen Hunt chased tornadoes we chased basketball games.
As we all do, I’ve adjusted to life without my parents and other family members and close friends. Just like Luther, I’ll continue to follow the games as long as I can and remember all the stories and conversations and laughs on the road trips and at scorers tables across the state, even though I doubt it will ever be quite the same.