Jock Sutherland, legendary basketball coach and radio personality, has died

Charles “Jock” Sutherland, the legendary high school basketball coach who led six teams at three schools to the Boys’ Sweet 16 and took his alma mater, Lafayette, to the state championship in 1979, has died at the age of 95.

Sutherland retired from coaching after the 1979 championship, but he capitalized on his notoriety as one of the commonwealth’s most outspoken basketball personalities by later becoming the radio color analyst for the University of Louisville’s men’s basketball team, a post he held for 19 years with Louisville’s WHAS-AM station.

“He was truly genuine and a guy who absolutely adored high school basketball and the Sweet 16 specifically. It was only natural that when he retired, Ralph Hacker hired him at WVLK to work games with us,” said UK Sports Network’s Dick Gabriel, who hosted WVLK’s “Sports Line 59” where Sutherland got his second career going. “I learned as much about life from Jock as I did basketball because it seemed like he experienced everything.”

“Jock could spin a yarn better than a Harlem Globetrotter could spin a basketball,” said Mike Fields, a longtime Herald-Leader high school sports writer. “He embellished more than a few of his stories, but he didn’t need to embellish his coaching ability.”

Sutherland guided Gallatin County to its first Sweet Sixteen in 1959, and Harrison County to its first Sweet Sixteen in 1961. He has been inducted into both the Kentucky Sports Hall of Fame and the Dawahares/KHSAA Hall of Fame.

Retiring after his greatest coaching achievement in leading Lafayette to a 36-1 record and the 1979 state championship, Sutherland explained, “I was the worst high school basketball coach in the world my first game at Gallatin County. The last night I coached at Lafayette, I was the best. I went from the bottom to the top, so I figured that was a damn good time to quit.”

Becoming ‘Jock’

A native of Lexington, Sutherland went to Lafayette High School and played for its greatest coach, Ralph Carlisle, in the mid-1940s, a few years before Carlisle led the Generals to state titles in 1950, 1953 and 1957. They wouldn’t win another for 22 years.

Sutherland picked up his nickname while serving in the Army at Fort Benning after graduating from the University of Kentucky. According to biographer Stuart Warner, Sutherland had achieved great success as the basketball coach of his division’s team and one day he was announced as Coach “Jock” Sutherland by an enthusiastic public address announcer from Pittsburgh, the home of a popular college and pro football coach by that name.

The nickname stuck, Warner said in “Jock, A Coach’s Story” — so much so that Sutherland’s wife, high school sweetheart Theresa May “Snooks” Dudley, soon began calling him that, too.

After finishing his stint in the Army, Sutherland returned to Kentucky and began coaching at Gallatin County in 1955. In his fourth season, he led the small school to its only 8th Region title and appearance in the Sweet 16.

Stories by and about Sutherland soon became legend.

In his first season at Gallatin with his team trailing by 30, Sutherland ventured too far out into the court, causing an official to slam into him. The angry ref warned that every step back to his bench would be a technical foul. Sutherland threw up his hands.

“My players thought that meant to come get me,” he told the Herald-Leader in 1987. “They picked me up and carried me all the way around the floor. The official threw his whistle down and stomped on it. He said he didn’t have to take that crap for $10 a night.”

Another time, Sutherland became so upset with his team’s play that he went up into the stands to chat up a fan. He ended up buying the fan’s Ford Mustang.

Against Clark County one year, his team was called for 11 traveling violations. He told his team, “If you like to walk so damn much, you can walk home.” They didn’t walk home from Winchester, but the bus wasn’t right outside the gym.

Sutherland coached at Gallatin for four years, Harrison County for seven, Madisonville for one and Lafayette for 11. He took Gallatin County to the Boys’ Sweet 16 once, Harrison County three times and Lafayette twice.

But Sutherland’s time at Lafayette was split into two stints. After his first year back at his alma mater in 1968, Sutherland accepted an offer to be a college assistant for his old fraternity brother at UK, C.M. Newton, the new head coach at Alabama.

There Sutherland helped Newton break Alabama’s color barrier by recruiting Wendell Hudson, the Crimson Tide’s first Black athlete, in 1969.

He returned to Lafayette in 1970 and led them to the state tournament in his first season back.

With standout guards Dirk Minniefield and Junior Johnson and 6-foot-6 Tony Wilson, Sutherland’s 1978-79 Lafayette team went undefeated in the regular season, which included a run through the Louisville Invitational Tournament and wins against teams that featured Sam Bowie and Charles Hurt.

“When you look at our talent, who we played, and our final record (36-1), we had to be one of the top five teams ever in Kentucky,” Minniefield told the Herald-Leader in 2004.

The Generals’ only loss that season came in a shocking 71-67 defeat to Tates Creek in the 43rd District Tournament finals. While Sutherland blamed himself for the loss, the defeat also probably motivated his team to go on to win the state championship.

Sadly, one year after retiring at Lafayette, Sutherland’s wife of 30 years suffered a cerebral hemorrhage during the night and died at the age of 50.

A new career

During that same time, Sutherland had caught on as a commentator on WVLK-AM radio’s “Sports Line 59” with Gabriel. There Sutherland began his infamous criticisms of then-Kentucky basketball coach Joe B. Hall. He began knocking the UK offense as out-of-date, “rocking-chair ball,” as he put it.

The jibes did not sit well among UK’s faithful.

“No one had really gone on the air and ripped Joe B. Hall like that before,” Gabriel told the Herald-Leader in 1987.

While Sutherland’s comments might have been too much for UK’s hometown station, at Louisville’s WHAS-AM he found a welcoming audience. He began making appearances there for a semi-weekly talk show with Van Vance and became the color analyst with Vance for the University of Louisville men’s basketball games.

That’s quite a departure for someone who graduated from UK and grew up watching the Fabulous Five. During his early high school coaching days he would scout opposing teams for Adolph Rupp and even Hall. He scouted every game for UK’s 1978 national championship team.

Sutherland’s time with Louisville included three Final Four appearances and its 1986 national championship under coach Denny Crum.

When he began working with the Cardinals program, he discovered “Louisville people are my kind of people,” he said in 1987. ”I was a Denny Crum fan before, but that’s when I started being a Louisville fan.”

In the years after the famous feud with Hall, Sutherland expressed regret for how harshly he spoke of the Kentucky coach.

“That (ripping Hall) is the worst thing I’ve ever done,” Sutherland told the Herald-Leader in 1999. “I was striking back at the world. My coaching job was gone, and my wife was gone. I was saying things that I knew were wrong when I was saying them.”

After his retirement from radio in 2001, Sutherland named the Hall controversy as his biggest regret.

“I’ve apologized to Joe Hall many times over and he’s accepted,” Sutherland said. “What I did, it was almost cowardly. I hate it.”

A new life and love

Soon after he began working with WHAS, Sutherland met and married his second wife, Phyllis “P.J.” Rodgers, and they began building their dream home in Nicholasville at the edge of the old Lone Oak Golf Course.

He was living a dream life again as the man UK fans loved to hate. One son, Glenn, became a dentist; the other, Charles, an attorney. Both were UK fans.

“I don’t know of anybody that’s luckier than I am,” he said in 1987.

When Crum retired in 2001 and Rick Pitino was hired to succeed him at Louisville, Sutherland’s time at WHAS ended as well. Though sad to step away, he clearly relished his time with Louisville and his ability to rile up Kentucky fans.

“I could get under their skin, couldn’t I?” he told the Herald-Leader.

In the years since, Sutherland regularly made appearances at Lafayette’s annual Jock Sutherland Classic basketball event up until just a few seasons ago. He cherished his time at all of his stops and regularly kept in touch with players on his teams at Gallatin County.

When Lafayette made its run to the 2001 Boys’ Sweet 16 championship, Sutherland rooted along the way. Then-Lafayette coach Don Adkins remembers Sutherland watching from the wings at Rupp Arena during those days. He’d also come around to Lafayette from time to time.

“He told me one time, “Donnie, you need to turn out the lights, grab you a chair and sit at midcourt and listen to the voices,” said Adkins, who led the Generals to their most recent state championship in 2001. “There are so many stories about Jock that are just unbelievable — not just about basketball, but about life. He just lived life to the fullest. It was always a pleasure to talk to him and be around him. It really was.”

His connection with Lafayette was like no other.

“My utopia coaching basketball was Lafayette, because that’s who I am,” Sutherland told Mike Fields in 2016. “I love this place.”