The biggest college basketball programs in Kentucky each has an excellent radio play-by-play announcer who learned the craft at the feet of Cawood Ledford, who became an icon during his 39 years of broadcast Kentucky Wildcat games.
We’re talking about Paul Rogers, who has been doing Louisville games for more than 20 years, and Tom Leach, who has been the voice of the Kentucky Wildcats for about the same time span.
Even so, there’s a guy working in Owensboro who’s the unchallenged dean of the commonwealth’s play-by-play announcers. When Joel Utley called the exhibition game between Kentucky Wesleyan College and U of L early last month, he was beginning his 55th season behind the microphone for the Panthers, an eight-time national champion of what was known as the NCAA’s “small college” division when Utley began his career in 1961.
For years now, of course, it has been known as Division II, and that’s why Utley still is anonymous to College Basketball America. It’s tough to make a name for yourself when you’re laboring in relative obscurity, but that’s the thing about Utley: He has been content to be where he is and has never been tormented by a desire to make “the big time.”
As you might expect, he’s revered in Owensboro and everywhere the Panthers play. Coaches and players have come and gone over six decades, but Utley is always there, an institution, going about his business in his typical low-key but competent way. It’s impossible to imagine Wesleyan playing basketball without Utley at courtside.
“He’s a legend,” Roy Pickerill told a reporter a few years ago. “He’s indescribable. When he talks in the pregame show, he still gives you the person’s spelling of their last name. He still does it the old school way and people appreciate that.”
Pickerill is a legend in his own right. He has been Wesleyan’s sports information director for 44 years. He’s as much a part of the campus landscape as the administration building. Yet compared with Utley, he’s got a ways to go, as we say in Kentucky.
The ‘voice’ of national champions
Utley was “the voice” of Wesleyan’s national champions in 1966, ’68, ’69, ’73, ’87, ’90, ’99, and ’01. From 1998 through ’03, Wesleyan played in the D-II championship game every year. Other than whoever was UCLA’s play-by-play man from 1964-’75 – assuming that at least one person was there all those years — nobody in broadcast history can make such claims.
“You’re listening to the game,” said Pickerill, “but he makes it so visual, it makes it seem like you’re there at the game. He’s telling you what’s going on through his eyes, but he is very detailed and good at describing the action that people can imagine in their minds.”
When Utley was growing up in the western Kentucky town of Madisonville (also the home of former UK and Boston Celtic star Frank Ramsey), Ledford and Claude Sullivan were the state’s preeminent play-by-play announcers. But instead of trying to emulate either one, Utley was primarily a baseball fan who religiously followed the St. Louis Cardinals. His heroes were Harry Carey and Jack Buck.
After listening to their broadcast, he would mimic them, using earmuffs for a headset and stuffed sock for a microphone. No telling how many homers Stan Musial hit in young Utley’s vivid imagination.
He was a teenager when he worked his first Wesleyan game in 1961. At the time, the college was fairly new to Owensboro, having moved from Winchester, Ky., in the early 1950s. It’s main claim to fame in basketball was being the place where Linville Puckett and Bill Bibb played after quitting Adolph Rupp’s UK program before the 1954-’55 season.
A couple of years after Utley joined Wesleyan’s broadcast team, the school hired a former Rupp player named Guy Strong to coach basketball. He won Wesleyan its first national title in 1966, starting an exclusive club of Wesleyan coaches who have won the big prize. The other members are Bob Daniels (1968 and ’69), Bob Jones (1973), Wayne Chapman (1987 and ’90), and Ray Harper (1999 and 2001). Harper is currently coach at Western Kentucky University.
“I think everybody who has ever played or coached at Wesleyan would tell you that Joel is their best friend,” said Mike Pollio, who coached the Panthers to a pair of D-II Final Fours from 1980-85. “He’s the cement or the glue that holds the generations together and makes it seem like family at Wesleyan.”
Never a harsh word
Unlike most play-by-play announcers, Utley has never worked with a color analyst. He does the entire broadcast solo for Owensboro station WBIO. Nobody who has ever met him has anything unkind to say about him, and, says Pollio, “I’ve never heard him say a harsh word about anybody.”
And that includes Ifeanyichukwu Ude, a Wesleyan player. Although that’s the sort of name that would send many play-by-play announcers to an early retirement, Utley handled it in stride, as he seems to do everything.
Years ago, announcer Drew Deener, now a Louisville talk-show host and general manager of ESPN680 in Louisville, made a complimentary remark about Utley during one of his broadcasts. He didn’t think any more about it until he received a hand-written thank-you note from Utley, who also included some encouraging remarks about Deener’s career.
Deener still has the note, although it’s limp and falling apart because Deener has shown it to so many of his friends.
“That’s was one of the classiest things I’ve ever had happen to me,” says Deener. “Who takes the time to do stuff like these days? But it sure meant a lot to me and it told me a lot about why so many people think so highly of him.”
So far as can be determined, the longevity record for a play-by-play man is held by Max Falkenstein, who called the Kansas Jayhawks’ games for 60 years. Right behind him are two announcers from Iowa – Bob Brooks at 58 years and Jim Zabel at 56. Utley has not said anything about hoping to get the record, because that doesn’t fit his self-effacing style.
But he knows that Wesleyan fans want him to keep going as long as he can because, well, Joel Utley is Kentucky Wesleyan.
Billy Reed is a member of the U.S. Basketball Writers Hall of Fame, the Kentucky Journalism Hall of Fame, the Kentucky Athletic Hall of Fame and the Transylvania University Hall of Fame. He has been named Kentucky Sports Writer of the Year eight times and has won the Eclipse Award twice. Reed has written about a multitude of sports events for over four decades, but he is perhaps one of media’s most knowledgeable writers on the Kentucky Derby.