In a bluegrass state of mind.(Brief Article)

In 1944, the University of Louisville hired the young man Peck Hickman for what he called "the worst job in America." He would coach the school's basketball team. The previous six seasons, Louisville had won a total of 25 games. It lost twice to Alfred Holbrook.

Its gym seated 500 people. On its biggest box-office night, Louisville took in $210. For coaching, doing the laundry and marking the basketball-court lines on the gym floor, Hickman was paid $200 a month.

By 1959, Hickman's talent, skill and perseverance had raised Louisville basketball to unprecedented levels, as proved when his team went against the University of Kentucky's defending national champions in the NCAA Tournament's Mideast Regional.

"Our boys were scared," Hickman said, as well they should have been. Kentucky was the time's gold standard, four times the national champion, coached by the irascible Adolph Rupp, who had been inducted into the Hall of Fame the same year Hickman took the worst job in America.

But Louisville beat Kentucky, 76-61, after which Rupp shook Hickman's hand and said, "By gawd, you laid the wood to us tonight." Hickman later added: "I don't know if it's true, but one of my players told me that Adolph was really raking his kids up one side and down the other after the game. He said Adolph told them, `You know what Louisville's eating tonight? T-bone steaks. They're winners. You guys get a dollar to eat hamburgers.'"

It's 80 miles between the universities of Louisville and Kentucky. It's a beautiful drive on I-64 past horse farms and over the Kentucky River. In the basketball-beating hearts of Kentuckians, though, those 80 miles separate Darkness from Light, Good from Evil, Saint from Sinner.

Louisville fans dismiss Kentucky zealots as insufferably arrogant dolts, and Kentucky fans consider Louisville zealots hopelessly deluded elitists. These people don't like each other--for all the reasons that create tensions between neighboring major universities fighting for the same tax dollars, the same players, the same customers--all inflamed by political wars colored by race, class and religion.