First, they called him “The Machine.”
Then “The Champ.”
Today, he’s simply “The GOAT.”
And don’t forget “the Babe Ruth of Cornhole” that folks with a sense of history have called him.
Which got us to thinking that when the Northern Kentucky Sports Hall of Fame inducted Alexandria’s Matt Guy in February, they should have flipped the script. Normally an inductee gets up and thanks everybody – and the NKSHOF folks – for the honor.
For Matt, who has literally taken a new sport in America and made it in his image over the past two decades, maybe the NKSHOF folks should have thanked Matt for his honoring them by agreeing to join them.
When you say this to him, Matt laughs. “Yeah, I am a pretty big deal,” he says with a self-deprecating giggle at the very thought of it.
He may not have been big enough, strong enough or fast enough to be any kind of sports star at Campbell County High School, but there was this. By the time he was 18, Matt was one of the No. 6 horseshoe player in the world thanks to his dad getting him an early start.
And then thanks to his own hand-eye coordination and ability to repeat and compete, Matt Guy would dominate and grow his new sport thanks to his travel schedule of some 40 weekends a year.
He’s the first person named to the Cornhole Hall of Fame. And he’s got his own baseball – err – cornhole collector’s trading card. He’s thrown out the first pitch at a Milwaukee Brewers game, surrounded by the four racing sausages from Johnsonville, one of the major sponsors of the American Cornhole League’s national tour.
But despite working five days a week at his primary job as a sales rep for Cincinnati’s Stigler Supply Company, the 53-year-old is on the road much of the time. This weekend he’s in Nicholasville for the Kentucky State Championship.
Other weeks, with son Bret – his doubles partner – he could be jetting off to LA. Or wherever they’re firing off those multi-colored cornhole bags in a rapidly expanding sport that’s made it to ESPN.
He has “more than half-a-million frequent flier miles” now and can see a day when the sport that’s growing to Australia and Europe will “entice” him to venture there.
Although with a full week’s schedule of work at his sales job – he works 12 hours a day a couple of days on those weeks when he has to take off a Friday to fly to California.
How does he maintain that schedule? “My wife (Beth) asks me that all the time,” he answers. “It’s challenging. But I’ve always been that way.”
Can you make a living doing this yet as one of the 256 certified cornhole professionals? “Probably not if you have a wife and kids and a mortgage payment,” Guy says. “But some of the younger guys, 18-to-25-year-olds who can still live at home, are trying it now.”
The top guys can make something like $60,000 a year, Matt says. And the players do have sponsors along with national sponsors on their jerseys like Bush’s Baked Beans, Mike’s Hard Lemonade and Johnsonville.
A typical tournament might offer $5,000 for a singles win and $5,000 each for doubles although his son did win a $100,000 doubles tournament in Los Angeles that paid him $50,000.
So it’s getting there. And Matt is staying there at the top. Right now, his points per round – with a 12.0 perfect in a sport where you get three points for a throw directly into the hole – Matt is at 11.7 and No. 1. And leading the league for the third straight year.
Surprisingly, Matt is the only established pro with a background as a horseshoes champ where the key is repeating over and over a throw of a two-pound, 10-ounce piece of steel 40 feet.
In cornhole, you’re tossing a soft two-sided bag weighing one pound a shorter distance of 27 feet. “But there are lots of strategies,” Guy says of the ability to block and knock out of the way. Which is why the two-sided bags have a fast side and a slow side, so they can slide and knock others out of the way at the hole or catch and hold.
“There are thousands of them (different models and colors from 60 manufacturers),” Guy says of the bags that retail for $90 or so. His favorite is the blue Fire Cornhole. But he’ll take four sets with him to a tournament because you have to use a different color from your opponent. And they speed rate the bags’ sliding capabilities from 1-10. He’ll usually go with a 5 on one side, an 8 on the other.
Matt’s success had him on his first set of collector’s cards back in 2011. And as part of the deal, they gave him 500. “It’s a sad story,” he says after he left them on his car one day and drove off, losing a couple of hundred in the process.
But since he was always getting asked for autographed cards, by charity groups or individuals, he found himself going on E-bay and buying his own cards back so he could give them to people.
The rewards of starting out with a sport that’s also just starting out are many, Matt says, even if the money is not there yet. Three straight World’s Championships. And in the first-ever televised Cornhole tournament from Las Vegas on ESPN, he won both the singles and the doubles with son Bret.
“Not ashamed to say I cried like a baby,” Matt says of his reaction to winning the World’s with his son. Hard to beat that in any sport.
But at his NKSHOF induction, the “King of Cornhole” – another of his titles – and the custodial supplies salesman said, “my next goal is to get into the toilet paper hall of fame.”
HOW GOOD IS NORTHERN KENTUCKY HIGH SCHOOL BASKETBALL?
The final media polls for girls’ and boys’ basketball in Kentucky just validated the thought all season that this has been an unprecedentedly good year for high school basketball in Northern Kentucky. Two of the top four girls’ teams in the state – No. 2 Cooper and No. 4 Covington Holy Cross, the two-time All “A” Classic champ — could face each other in the Ninth Region semifinals Friday. They have not played one another this season.
And two of the top five boys’ teams in the poll – No. 3 Newport and No. 5 Covington Catholic could also meet up again, that is, if a fast-rising Cooper doesn’t catch CovCath when they meet in the semis next Sunday.
Don’t miss them. Plenty of room at Truist Arena starting Sunday.
Contact Dan Weber at dweber3440@aol.com. Follow him on X (formerly Twitter) @dweber3440.