Steve Ortmayer (UK Athletics Photo)
One thing Jon Sumrall remembers well about former Kentucky assistant football coach Steve Ortmayer is just how detailed he was about everything from coaching tight ends to special teams to anything else that then-head coach Rich Brooks needed.
“Coach Ortmayer is a good man and great coach,” said Sumrall, a former UK linebacker and grad assistant who now coaches linebackers under Mark Stoops. “He was very detailed, very intelligent. Just a smart football guy.
“He was just an absolute prince of a man. Loves people, I really enjoyed my time around him and we kept in touch through the years.”
Sumrall was one of many to reach out to Ortmayer when he found out the former UK coach had Stage 4 cancer and Hospice had been called in recently.
Sumrall can still laugh about the time he was on Neal Brown’s staff at Troy and Troy went to LSU and won a homecoming night game — something that doesn’t happen at LSU.
“Immediately after the game we are celebrating. I get on the bus and I have so many text messages,” Sumrall said. “One of them is from Ort. I was special teams coordinator for Neal and he said congratulations on the win and what a big deal it was for us to beat a team like LSU.”
“But then he added something like, ‘Your configuration of your hands team (on kickoff return), you were a little bit off on your alignment.’ And he was right and I knew it.”
Sumrall says just knowing former Oakland Raiders owner Al Davis trusted Ortmayer to work for him and be part of a Super Bowl champion “tells you a lot” about what kind of coach and person he is.
“He has had an impact on so many people through football. It’s amazing,” Sumrall said. “He had a huge impact on my life and a ton of other people. He’s meant so much to the UK program and he will always be part of the Kentucky football family.”
