BY MIKE FIELDS

One of my favorite stories involving the late, great Tates Creek football coach Roy Walton had him teaching Phys-Ed when a group of students walked into the gym and collectively stared at him.

“What are you looking at?” Walton asked.

A girl spoke up: “We’re studying the Neanderthal Man in history, and our teacher sent us down here to see what one looks like.”

Walton took it in good humor. He was around Lexington high school football for more than 30 years, and his shock of white hair always made him look older than he was.

The actual Neanderthal Man never coached the Wing-T or the triple option, but high school football has been played in Lexington for almost half of the city’s 250-year history.

Searching the Herald-Leader archives, the earliest reference to local high school football I could find was a 1903 article about a game between Kearney and Lexington, which Lexington won 11-0.

Lexington High school claimed at least two “state championships” in the early days of high school football. One came in 1911 when its only loss was to a college (!) team — State University (which became the University of Kentucky). Lexington also claimed a “mythical” title in 1918.

Before integration, Lexington’s original Dunbar High School was a football powerhouse, most notably when Norman Passmore became the Bearcats’ coach in 1952.

Unfortunately, in the days of segregation, Dunbar didn’t get much main-stream media coverage. But it is documented that Passmore compiled a 92-16-6 record in 16 years, highlighted by three Kentucky High School Athletic League state titles and four undefeated seasons.

The Kentucky High School Athletic Association was established in 1917 but it didn’t start conducting football playoffs until 1959.

(That, incidentally was one year after Neanderthal Man Walton got his first head coaching job at Lafayette.)

John Heber was a football coaching giant in the days before the KHSAA-sanctioned playoffs. He coached Lexington Senior (later Henry Clay) from 1923 to 1957. His Blue Devils won multiple Central Kentucky Association titles, but his overall record is apparently lost to history. A conservative guess would be that Heber’s teams averaged six wins a season, which would give him more than 200 career victories.

Lexington football teams have enjoyed moderate post-season success since the KHSAA began its football playoffs. They have won eight KHSAA state championships and finished runner-up 18 times in 66 years.

Bryan Station was the first city team to win a state title. It came in 1971 under first-year coach Terry Clark. The Defenders’ defense was suffocating in a 14-3 beat-down of Madisonville at UK’s Stoll Field.

Tom Kearns and Markus Hardy were among the standouts for Bryan Station. But the most impressive feat of the night came after the game when Clark shimmied up a goal post and hung a helmet on top of one of the uprights.

Tates Creek followed with a state title in 1972. Walton’s Commodores, led by Clark Young, Brian Hiler and Gary Moore, whipped Ashland 16-7 to top off an undefeated (13-0) season.

Henry Clay was the next Lexington school to take home a championship. Coach Jake Bell’s Blue Devils, led by Jim Anderson, Dick Burke and Tim Owsley, thumped DeSales 20-7 to finish an unbeaten (14-0) season.

That was my second year of covering sports for the Herald-Leader, and at the time there were only four football-playing high schools in town: Bryan Station, Henry Clay, Lafayette and Tates Creek.

Since then that number has doubled.

The new Paul Laurence Dunbar High School opened in 1990, and only six years later it came close to winning a state title. Coach Mike Meighan’s Bulldogs lost a 35-34 heartbreaker to Nelson County in the 1996 finals.

Lexington Catholic hired Bob Sphire to start its football program in 1991. He methodically built the Knights into a powerhouse, capped by a state title in 2005. Led by record-setting quarterback Justin Burke, they blistered Bowling Green 49-21 in the finals.

After Sphire left for a coaching job in Georgia, Bill Letton kept Lexington Catholic on the winning road. The Knights, sparked by Winston Guy and Shane Israel, won a state championship in 2007 by overwhelming Lone Oak 49-7 in the title game.

Lexington Christian Academy, Frederick Douglass and Sayre didn’t need much time to build championship programs.

LCA, which opened in 1989, didn’t start playing football until 2002. Paul Rains took over as coach the next season, and four years later he had the Eagles in the finals against Beechwood. They lost 38-35 after a fourth-down pass was intercepted in the end zone in the closing minutes.

But Rains had LCA back in the finals in 2009, and the Eagles prevailed. They manhandled Mayfield 55-19 behind Lucas Witt, Dominique Hayden and Branden Burdette.

Douglass, Lexington’s sixth public high school, opened in 2017 and quickly established itself as a football juggernaut. Nathan McPeek’s Broncos were state runners-up in 2019 and 2021 before galloping to a championship in 2022. They beat Bowling Green 28-7 to cap an undefeated (15-0) season.

Sayre played football from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s before giving up the sport for more than 40 years. Then, in 2018, the Spartans hired former NFL quarterback Chad Pennington to rebuild their program.

It was a genius move. Sayre won a state championship in 2024, clipping Raceland 27-22. Quarterback Luke Pennington (the coach’s son) and wideout/defensive back Brock Coffman were the leaders as the Spartans finished off a perfect (15-0) season.

I knew Lexington was flush with football talent when I started working here.

In my first season I watched five players who would go on to play in the NFL: Bryan Station’s Dermontti Dawson (NFL Hall of Fame), Marc Logan and Cornell Burbage; Lafayette’s George Adams, and Henry Clay’s Byron Ingram.

In my last season covering the city, Lafayette had a pair of future NFL linemen — Landon Young and Jedrick Wills.

As Lexington celebrates its 250th anniversary, I can’t help but think that Roy Walton would have celebrated the city’s football history the way he celebrated his biggest victories: by lighting up a cigar, and remembering all the great players, coaches and games Lexington’s high schools have produced over the years.