If you’re a college football fan, there are a couple of things you know going into this weekend.
The game of the year could well be Saturday’s opener between No. 1 Texas and defending national champion Ohio State in Columbus. And as has been the case for the last 38 years, Lee Corso will be right there for us. And for college football.
And with that one final appearance, the 90-year-old known as “Scooter,” will bid us goodbye on ESPN’s iconic College GameDay show.
And while it’s easy to think of Lee as the TV guy – and Florida man — who has so much fun putting on those mascot hats with his predictions that ESPN will retire with him after Saturday’s final pick, what many don’t know is how much of a Northern Kentucky connection Lee brings with him.
For example, that 430 number that’s being reported for the headgear picks he’s made over the years is one short. Nick Wilson, now the new principal at Newport High School but back in 2009 the AD at Bellevue High School, would know.
It was the week of the annual Bellevue-Dayton “Battle for the Paddle” rivalry game and he thought he’d take a shot and see if Bellevue alum Tom Cundy, a fraternity brother of footballer Corso at Florida State, could influence Corso to come early for his scheduled speaking date at the Northern Kentucky Athletic Directors’ Hall of Fame induction in October of 2009 and do the Bellevue pep rally.
“Corso owes me, he’ll be there,” said Cundy, who founded one of the nation’s major independent insurance and employee benefit agencies in Ft. Lauderdale after the 1951 Kentucky state tennis champion’s days as a top tennis player at Florida State. Cundy and Corso were there as part of the first group of athletes recruited for the former women’s college as it turned co-ed.
But the tricky part was this was just months after Corso’s stroke and months before he would be cleared to do speaking engagements. “We were ecstatic,” Wilson says, when he said “Yes” and soon would be looking at “the biggest crowd ever at Ben Flora Gym,” Wilson said.
But he had one more ask. Would Corso do one of his headgear picks for the Bellevue-Dayton game? Corso had a question: “Is this a friendly rivalry like Army-Navy or more like the hate of Ohio State-Michigan?”
“Ohio State-Michigan,” Wilson said of the longest rivalry in Kentucky history that reached 150 games in 2023. And so when they asked Dayton for a headgear for the pick, the Greendevils said “No” and they had to find an old one in Cincinnati at Reading High School where they are the Devils.
And yes, in his patented okey-doke move where he looks like he’s going to pick one mascot, then puts on the other head, the Dayton Devil did get kicked aside for the pick as Corso donned the Bellevue Tiger. Today, that devil head is autographed by Corso and on display at Reading High School.
“Coach Corso stayed and talked to every single person, signed every autograph,” Wilson recalls of that day. “It just shows what kind of person he is, doing that after his stroke.”
And the soft spot he has in his heart for Bellevue, where he first stopped by at the Loyal Café, just down the street from the three-room house Cundy grew up in with his mother. I know. I got a call one day in 1986 from Cundy who said I should head down to the Loyal and say “Hi” to his buddy, Corso, who had already earned some degree of fame after his time as a college head football coach.
Calling his employment choices “crazy,” Corso laughed at how “I’ve worked for 14 years at head football coach at two of the world’s greatest basketball schools – Louisville and Indiana.”
Corso would talk about a Northern Kentucky recruit and longtime multiple sport coach at multiple schools who helped him get off to a quick start: “Covington Catholic’s Rick Hornsby was one of the toughest kids I ever got for Louisville.”
They also talked about one of their fraternity brothers and fellow Florida State athletes – Burt Reynolds. Yeah, that Burt Reynolds, Corso’s roommate and football teammate. And the guy, Cundy laughed, they had get girls for them.
That wasn’t my first time around Corso. As a recent Xavier grad getting ready to coach at CovCath as it started its football program. I’d read Bear Bryant’s book and knew how serious a job coaching could be.
But with new U of L coach Corso headlining the Kentucky high school coaches’ summer clinic at Eastern Kentucky University, I headed down to Richmond. And got an entirely different slant on football coaching. That as tough and disciplined you had to be to do it right, you could also have a whole lot of fun.
A whole lot of fun. It didn’t take long to realize that my football gig could be even better than I’d hoped.
But it was the Bellevue connection that was the strongest for Corso, son of Italian immigrants who moved from Chicago to Miami when Lee was in high school. And met Bellevue’s Cundy who, after his time in the U.S. Marine Corps, would become friends with many of the nation’s business leaders while winning the Horatio Alger Award for outstanding success in working with many of the nation’s largest corporations.
He’d also introduce me to his neighbor and best buddy – also a Northern Kentucky guy – jockey Eddie Arcaro from Southgate, maybe the best who ever rode in a race. That was the way major networker Cundy worked. And Corso became a part of it.
While Corso got to do just a couple of Louisville and UK games each on College GameDay, I got to keep up with him on the 15 or so University of Southern California games he did including a number of Rose Bowls when I was in LA covering the Trojans.
Lee would let me hang out with him all day for a couple of his times at USC as he prepared for a big game and I’d write about what that was like. And what was so obvious was how hard he’s worked — harder now after the stroke — through the years: That as much as he could be spontaneous and ad lib through the show, it had always been the result of meticulous preparation that maybe only a football coach could master.
Lee would worry about the right word, the exact emphasis he should put on this angle or that. And then his natural gift for the moment – as that time he called timeout when his Indiana team was leading Ohio State 7-6 in a game (first time the Hoosiers had led the Buckeyes in more than 25 years) – so they could take a photo of his team with that score on the scoreboard in the background.
Who does that? Lee Corso does. And did.
And this weekend, the world of college football – and many of us in Northern Kentucky – will have the chance to thank Lee for what he’s given to us and the game – a sense of the joy that it is a game – and what it can offer us if we do it right.
The way Lee Corso always has.
Contact Dan Weber at dweber3440@aol.com. Follow him on X (formerly Twitter) @dweber3440.