Ralph Hacker went from Bearwallow to Madison County Sports Hall of Fame

Our friend Ralph Hacker stopping by pregame to visit with Tom Leach and Mike Pratt. (Photo by UK Sports Network)

RICHMOND— Ralph Hacker hasn’t forgotten his roots.

The long-time University of Kentucky radio announcer was one of 10 individuals and four teams inducted into the inaugural class of the Madison County Sports Hall of Fame last Saturday night. Also inducted were former Kentucky men’s basketball players Billy Evans and Don Mills, along with legendary Eastern Kentucky University football coach Roy Kidd, who was in attendance.

Hacker spent 34 years on the University of Kentucky Sports Network and began his career on the airwaves as a teenager. He served for 26 years as a color analyst with the late Cawood Ledford and called the 1996 and 1998 national championship games at Kentucky. Overall, he covered three national championship teams, seven Final Fours and four football bowl games while covering the Wildcats.

“Did I ever think about being inducted into the Hall of Fame? No. No way,” he said. “Like everybody else out there, I was just trying to survive. If there ever was a person that had help in his life, it was me.”

The long-time radio voice of the Wildcats thanked his grandmother, uncle and aunt, his dad, wife and his daughter, cousins, his youth league and high school coaches, including fellow inductee, the late Madison Central coach Don Richardson.

“It’s nothing that I did with what all these other guys did,” he said. “People have asked me about going into the Hall of Fame, but let me tell you, when you grow up out in Bearwallow, with a blacktop road that ended a mile and half from the the grocery store and from the post office — there was no running water, everybody had an outhouse — and the nearest telephone was two and a half miles away, electricity had not yet been installed, you become humbled very, very quick.”

In his early years, Hacker recalled there was “no cable television, no TV and no over-the-air broadcast TV.

“Streaming is what happened when it rained and the creek rose,” he said. “The only communication that we had with the outside world was a battery-operated radio.”

He recalled listening to Cincinnati Reds and St. Louis Cardinals games and the University of Kentucky Wildcats.

“There were no stations in Richmond or Berea,” he said. “Eastern (Kentucky) remained uncovered at that particular time. When WEKY (1340 AM) went on the air in 1953 or so, I listened to every Eastern ballgame that I could pick up, but that had to be in the daytime … because it wouldn’t reach Bearwallow at night.”

It was John Sullivan who gave Hacker his first job at 15 and asked him at the time, “What kind of experience do you have?”

“I remember replying, ‘I’m 15-years-old,’” he said. “He said, ‘Oh yeah, I forgot.’”

Looking back on his achievements, Hacker said he’s “amazed and I can’t believe it.’”

He also recalled working alongside Ledford and one of his former teachers, Caroline Moore.

“Cawood was a teacher, a mentor, a friend and an older brother,” he said. “As we worked and traveled together for over 20 years, I never had a closer friend than that man.”

“Perhaps the most important people in all my life, as far as being in the public life, was Caroline Moore. Caroline was my speech teacher in high school at Madison Central and she was a great speech teacher.”

“She saw something in me and she nurtured that, whatever it was and (I would) have given up and went back to Brassfield (on) a farm… I have been blessed beyond measure. Don’t ever forget where you came from. I thank you for remembering that I came from here.”

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Keith Taylor is the sports editor for Kentucky Today. Reach him at Keith.taylor@kentuckytodaycom and via Twitter at keithtaylor21.