How The Courier Journal changed sportswriter Dave Kindred's life during Hall of Fame career

Two moments from Dave Kindred's first Kentucky Derby linger in the sportswriter's decadeslong highlight reel.

The first is trying to decipher what jockey Don Brumfield meant when the Nicholasville native told reporters, "I'm the happiest hillbilly hardboot you've ever seen" after riding Kauai King to victory in 1966. The second is being assigned to stand by the starting gate as the thoroughbreds were loaded in one by one.

"It was just basically to make sure nothing untoward happened," said Kindred, who was 25 years old at the time and just four months into what he described as a life-changing 12 years at The Courier Journal. "That no jockey got thrown off or horses got hurt or anything getting into the gate; that the start was smooth."

Just like that, they were off and running. So, too, was Kindred's illustrious career.

"Everything I ever did," he said, "I did first at The Courier Journal — and often did it better at The Courier Journal."

Fifty-seven years later, Kindred on Friday will be inducted into the Kentucky Journalism Hall of Fame in Lexington alongside the late, Pulitzer-Prize winning Courier Journal reporter John Fetterman and three others in the 2023 class. It's the latest in a long line of accolades for the 81-year-old Illinois native, who received the PEN/ESPN Lifetime Achievement Award for Literary Sports Writing in 2018 and the Associated Press Sports Editors' Red Smith Award in 1991.

Kindred, whose career also includes several books and stops at The Washington Post, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The National Sports Daily and The Sporting News, hasn't visited the commonwealth much over the past 10 years. Part of this week's trip, he said, will be spent at the Kentucky Horse Park with some friends who are accompanying him from Illinois.

The sprawling farm reflects the role The Courier Journal played in Kindred's writing life. He won't call Kentucky's largest newspaper a "training ground," but said it was there that the late sports editor Earl Cox "turned me loose and let me do a little bit of everything."

"Earl Cox changed my life, and The Courier Journal changed my life," Kindred said. "Everything I ever wanted to do in the newspaper business I got done mostly because I had such freedom and ambition at The Courier Journal."

Finding Muhammad Ali, basketball stories in The Bluegrass State

Kindred arrived at The Courier Journal and The Louisville Times in 1965 after attending Illinois Wesleyan University and reporting on central Illinois sports for The Pantagraph for a couple of years after graduation. He had goals of one day becoming a columnist but started out on on the copy desk; and it was there that Cox assigned his first big break less than a year into the gig.

Louisville native Muhammad Ali, then known as Cassius Clay, was back in town. Kindred said Cox's instructions were simple: "Go find him." So he took his 4-year-old son and went to an art studio owned by the boxer's father located a couple of blocks from The Courier Journal building on Broadway and asked Cassius Clay Sr. if he knew where the young boxer might be spending the day. Clay Sr. said, "Just go to the West End, and you'll see him."

"I went and found him," Kindred said, "and then kept finding him for 50 years."

Kindred said his pursuit of Ali spanned 17 fights, 10 of which were championship bouts, and more than 300 interviews with the man who became known as "The Louisville Lip." Ali eventually came up with a nickname for Kindred, calling him "Louisville" in an homage to his beloved hometown.

Basketball also dominated Kindred's time at The Courier Journal. He covered Kentucky's 1966-67 season, the worst in Adolph Rupp's storied tenure. And he has fond memories of watching Wes Unseld and Butch Beard play at Louisville. When the Cardinals were in the market for a coach to succeed John Dromo, Kindred "kind of forecasted" the hiring of Denny Crum with a column spotlighting the former assistant to John Wooden at UCLA.

"I was certainly first to say, 'Hey, Louisville, here's a guy,'" Kindred said.

Before hoops season gripped the commonwealth, Kindred would spend time traveling from Ashland to Paducah "and everywhere in between," stopping to write stories "wherever I saw a kid bouncing a basketball." These tours helped him gain a deeper understanding of The Bluegrass State — and took him to some strange places.

"I wrote a story about a basketball team somewhere in Western Kentucky that practiced in a tornado cellar," he said. "The ceiling was about 8 feet high."

A 'life-affirming' beat back home

For the past 12 years, Kindred has reported exclusively on prep sports — the Morton High School girls basketball team, to be specific. He and his wife, the late Cheryl Kindred, started attending games when they moved back to central Illinois in 2010; and after a few games he offered to cover the Potters with accounts on their website and his Facebook page.

"Like the old war horse," Kindred said during a "60 Minutes" segment in 2021, "I couldn't sit there and not write about what I saw."

Kindred found more than stories sitting in the bleachers. He told "60 Minutes" the team and its community "were light" during dark times, including a stretch where he lost a grandson to addiction, had his mother die three months later and then had his wife suffer a stroke that left her unable to communicate. "What started as fun," he said during the segment, "became life-affirming."

Kindred has a book publishing in September about the experience titled "My Home Team: A Sportswriter's Life and the Redemptive Power of Small-Town Girls' Basketball." He plans to spend a 13th season on the beat as the Morton Potters look to bounce back from an underwhelming 19-11 campaign but isn't sure "if it'll be my last or not."

"I'm healthy enough to do it, and I like the writing of it," he said. "I don't write about it as if I'm critiquing the basketball; I just go and try to find something that's fun to write."

Spoken like the kid who used to run to the train station near his childhood home to pick up copies of The New York Times for Red Smith's Sunday column and never looked back.

Reach Louisville men's basketball reporter Brooks Holton at bholton@gannett.com and follow him on Twitter at @brooksHolton.

This article originally appeared on Louisville Courier Journal: Dave Kindred among Kentucky Journalism Hall of Fame 2023 inductees