Insight 2022: 'Series of unplanned crazy events' produces legend of Layla

Oct. 28—WEST LIBERTY — Appalachian culture is legendary for its storytelling, especially tales circling around nature. Think Bigfoot, the Mothman and the wampus cat.

They have a story like that in these parts. It's of a simpler and surely bygone time, when a high school could get away with having a live cougar in its basketball gym and on the sidelines of its football field while its athletic teams were competing, without sending everyone into a waiver-signing frenzy.

The difference is this story actually happened, and seemingly everyone in town knows it, or at least a variation of it.

Layla, a rescued cougar who served as Morgan County's mascot, sat on the stage of the gym with the late veterinarian Dr. W.G. Holbrook during a basketball game in the late 1970s. A player went to the baseline nearest that stage to inbound the ball.

His back to the stage — and to the big cat — that player felt a tap on his shoulder.

It wasn't from a referee, a passing fan or an opposing defender who'd gotten too close.

It was a paw.

Dr. David Fugate, who has in large measure taken over Holbrook's role as the veteran veterinarian of the West Liberty Veterinary Clinic, remembers the story. So does Bill Allen, a record-setting quarterback at Morgan County in the early 1980s. Both brought it up, independently, to a reporter asking what it was like having Layla around in those days.

One piece of that story slipped the minds of most who know it, though, including Fugate and Allen. The player Layla tapped was from a visiting team, so his identity was not as widely remembered as the rest of the legend.

As it turns out, that player went on to become one of the most prominent athletic directors in northeastern Kentucky as part of a coaching and administrative career now in its fourth decade.

Informed that a reporter had learned this player's identity and interviewed him, Fugate grinned widely and bear-hugged that reporter, caught so off-guard it knocked him backward a step or two.

You know Sam Sparks as the former longtime athletic director at Russell, or as the basketball coach for the Red Devils or Sheldon Clark before that. Or, possibly, from his current gig as an assistant softball coach at Lawrence County.

In the late 1970s, though, Sparks was a Lawrence County student and basketball player himself. One winter evening, the Bulldogs traveled to West Liberty to meet the Morgan County Cougars.

There, Sparks encountered a cougar, all right.

"They didn't hand you a card when you walked in the door that said, don't worry, she's been declawed or defanged," Sparks said. "Just, you saw a cougar on the stage on a leash and thought, oh, well, here we go."

Sparks regardless went about his business, at some point during the game heading toward the baseline to inbound the ball.

(By way of confirming why Sparks would have been doing that — as Allen remembers it, a player had been fouled going toward the rim just before the incident with Layla. Chris Trusty, a former Morgan County athletic director and assistant basketball coach, as well as Sparks's godson, recalled the ball rolling onto the stage to begin this encounter.)

The baseline isn't generally one of the easiest places from which to inbound the ball, due to the angles involved and tight quarters, especially in front of a stage. But Sparks had more to contend with than whatever defense the Cougars on the floor presented.

Holbrook would have had Layla restrained with a log chain and a leather collar, Fugate said. But that didn't stop her from reaching out a front leg, as if just to remind someone who had gotten into her space whose space it was.

"I felt the paw on my shoulder, I know I did," Sparks said. "I guess she tried to grab me on the shoulder. I thought, good gracious."

Sparks doesn't remember much in the immediate aftermath of that.

"I don't know if I got a five-second call," he said, chuckling. "I don't know if I even was able to finish the game or not. I don't know how to quite describe the experience, but vividly, that's one of my most memorable experiences of that gym."

And, obviously, one of the most memorable experiences of many Morgan Countians of the day. But it was only one memory of Layla, whose impact in West Liberty went beyond athletics.

Fugate remembers visiting Holbrook's clinic on a field trip as a kindergartener in 1977 and seeing Layla there.

Holbrook acquired Layla in about 1975, Fugate said, from a local couple who had purchased her in Lucasville, Ohio, but quickly realized they were in over their heads and couldn't properly care for her.

Though Layla wasn't exactly domesticated, Holbrook couldn't have released her to the wild because she had lived in captivity too long, Fugate said. So he had her canine teeth and claws removed and boarded her in what amounted to a large terrarium behind the clinic's barn.

Holbrook fed Layla a diet that included cat food and fresh meat, complete with ground-up bones to ensure she got the necessary calcium and phosphorus.

And, with the local high school's nickname being Cougars, Holbrook put Layla to work in the community as a real-life mascot.

That opportunity was, of course, serendipitous, or perhaps just a fluke. West Liberty, which consolidated with Cannel City to form Morgan County in 1954, had been the Panthers, Red Devils, Devils and Blue Devils. The change from red to blue came in 1944, when the band's red and black uniforms were worn out and band director Carl Reeves decided his charges would look good in blue and gold uniforms, reported The Licking Valley Courier.

Ezel, known as the Rockets, merged into Morgan County in 1974, at which time the mascot became Cougars, according to "Panthers, Devils and Cougars: Encyclopedia of Morgan County Basketball," compiled by W. Lynn Nickell.

That was before Holbrook took custody of Layla, so Morgan County didn't become the Cougars because of her, Fugate said. But she regardless was a good fit.

"To have a live mascot, that's pretty unique in high school, right?" Allen said. "But when you throw in it's a real cougar, that's pretty special. We were proud, and I would say thankful, for Dr. Holbrook, for what he did with that."

Fugate, who earned a Cougars basketball starting position as a senior in 1989-90, broke his arm five games into the season diving for a loose ball and returned in time for the regular season finale, recalled Layla making an obvious impression on opponents — even before her interaction with Sparks.

"You didn't go to the game to see Doc and the cougar, but it added a little something to it," Fugate said. "Like Breathitt County, they fire that cannon off when they score a touchdown. That'll get in your head, boys. 'What about that cougar down there?'"

It's difficult to imagine a live cougar — defanged and declawed or not — attending a high school athletic event today. Fugate comically likened the scene to a "hillbilly" Siegfried and Roy.

"If there's any one story to illustrate how times have changed, it's that in 1975 there was a cougar sitting in a chair on the stage during a high school basketball game," Fugate said. "That's not gonna happen now, and it took a series of unplanned crazy events."

Concurred Sparks: "I know, heck, when I was at Russell and other places I've seen, they won't even hardly let you bring your dog into soccer games anymore, let alone a cougar."

Layla died in the mid-1980s, but she remains a presence at Morgan County basketball games. She is stuffed and displayed in the lobby in the entrance to the recently refurbished Veterans Memorial Gymnasium.

Holbrook died in 2016 having practiced veterinary medicine for 50 years. His clinic lives on — and displays a photo of Layla in an office to this day.

"He was the best mentor that you could ever pick," said Fugate of Holbrook, for whom he worked for 15 years. "Old-school, treat people good, work hard, don't get above your raising, treat everybody the same. It don't matter if somebody's got money or not, you treat them the same.

"And 25 years later, we've got seven vets and 40 staff. All really because he laid a good foundation. And Layla was a big part of that."

She also contributed to a small-town atmosphere that Allen remembers fondly. The former Cougars stud signal-caller lived in Lexington, where he had played for Kentucky, and worked as a bank president by the time his son, Beau, played high school football. Lexington Catholic's trips to the mountains to play Belfry and Johnson Central felt a little like going home, he said.

"For (Beau Allen) to be able to experience the smaller communities and the pride that those communities take in their high school sports programs ... it's different," Bill Allen said. "I'm not saying (an urban high school atmosphere and approach) is better, or worse, anything like that; it's just different. I thought that was sort of neat, for him to be able to experience that."

Sparks, for his part, hoped to be able to return to the scene of the incident in the old Morgan County gym — "my all-time favorite gym," he said, which is still standing downtown — when he visited West Liberty for the Sorghum Festival in September.

Fugate, who turned 50 this fall, considers it a privilege to have grown up in the sort of setting that fostered Layla.

"It's almost like the past is a better past than it probably was. We romanticize it," he said. "You can't write that script. ... It was a unique thing that I remember as a child. That's in an important group of things, something you can remember when you were 5, the way I count it."

(606) 326-2658 — zklemme@dailyindependent.com