Brown: Kentucky lost its best football ambassador with former EKU coach Roy Kidd's death

Roy Kidd hated Western Kentucky.

As the head football coach at Eastern Kentucky from 1964 to 2002, he held the kind of competitive hatred where he remembered every perceived slight whenever the teams played — and held it against the Hilltoppers.

So when the news spread that WKU was planning to end its football program in 1992, then-Western coach Jack Harbaugh said Kidd was the first call he received. It wasn’t to celebrate the demise of his rival.

“He told me how disappointed he was that Western decided to close it down and he was going to do everything in his power to see if it could be changed,” Harbaugh told The Courier Journal on Tuesday.

Kidd died Tuesday at the age of 91. The Hall of Fame coach is remembered in the same light by many of his coaching adversaries as he is by the Colonels’ 41 former players who signed NFL contracts, and the 55 All-Americans he helped produce during his 39 seasons as head coach.

He wasn't just one of the best coaches to grace a sideline — his 314 career wins ranked No. 2 in NCAA Division I-AA history when he retired. He was the best ambassador for football the Commonwealth of Kentucky has ever had.

There was a time when EKU and WKU both played in I-AA, which is now known as Football Championship Subdivision, and their annual meeting on the gridiron was the biggest football rivalry in the state. This was while Kentucky and Louisville were still in their 70-year wilderness between 1924 and 1994 where the two schools did not play each other in football.

Thanks in part to Kidd’s support, the rivalry never had to take a break. After his call, the WKU Board of Regents narrowly voted to keep football at the school.

Roy Kidd was free to hate Western again. And Harbaugh has never forgotten.

“That story for me just celebrates the gentleman that Roy Kidd was, and is, in my mind to this day,” Harbaugh said.

Kidd got his start coaching as a head baseball coach and assistant basketball coach at Madison Central High School before taking over the Madison Model High School football job from 1956 to 1961.

The Kentucky High School Athletic Association at one point called the highest individual honor it gave out to a prep football player the Roy Kidd Award.

“All the things that man has done for this state is incredible,” current EKU coach Walt Wells said Saturday after the Colonels’ 28-17 loss at Kentucky.

Kidd, who won I-AA national titles in 1979 and ’82, was an old-school coach who believed in discipline, but he also wasn’t so set in his ways that he was closed to innovation. When the game changed, Kidd changed with it. He was ahead of the curve when it came to recognizing Florida as a hotbed for recruiting and began a pipeline of players to Richmond, Kentucky.

Harbaugh said Kidd is the last of a generation. Today, no one is staying at one school for 39 seasons, especially with the kind of success he had. A bigger school offering the kind of life-changing salary would have hired him away.

There was only once that longtime EKU sports information director Karl Park believe Kidd was going to take another job. It came after the 1989 season, when Jerry Claiborne resigned as Kentucky’s head coach.

“He wanted to be the coach at UK,” said Park, who now serves as EKU’s executive director of its Hall of Fame and coordinator of the Worn Cleat Club. “But Bill Curry had the name coming from Alabama and all and he didn’t get the job.”

That was the last time he seriously considered leaving EKU. The school built a statue of its coaching giant in 2017 that now overlooks the north end zone in the stadium it named after Kidd in 1990, on the street it named Roy and Sue Kidd Way.

Wells said during a Worn Cleat day, when its football alumni return back in August, Kidd showed up. The team sang its victory song, “Cabin on the Hill,” as he shared with his current players what Kidd meant not only to EKU, but to the greater Richmond community and the state.

Wells joked that the players see his statue every day, “so they know he was successful,” but he’s determined not to let Kidd’s legacy stop at that.

“I know our players will always know,” Wells said. “And it’s our job not to let anybody forget.”

Reach sports columnist C.L. Brown at clbrown1@gannett.com, follow him on Twitter at @CLBrownHoops and subscribe to his newsletter at profile.courier-journal.com/newsletters/cl-browns-latest to make sure you never miss one of his column.

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This article originally appeared on Louisville Courier Journal: EKU football coach Roy Kidd: One of Kentucky football's greatest icons