The night Reds legend Don Gullett scored 11 touchdowns. From the Herald-Leader archives.

Editor’s note: Don Gullett, who died Wednesday at age 73, was known nationally as a Major League Baseball pitcher who won multiple World Series with the Cincinnati Reds and New York Yankees. Years before, Gullett, a native of Lynn in northeastern Kentucky, played multiple sports at McKell High School in Greenup County. In 2007, Herald-Leader columnist Mark Story revisited one of Gullett’s most memorable nights. From the Herald-Leader archives, here is the story Mark told about a high school football Friday in 1968.

The night of 11 touchdowns

SOUTH SHORE — In the nation’s sports history, Don Gullett will forever be linked with Cincinnati’s Big Red Machine.

The hard-throwing, left-handed country boy who became the ace of the Rose-Bench-Morgan Reds and one of George Steinbrenner’s early free-agent splashes with the Yankees.

Yet in the sports lore of his native Kentucky, the name of the man who was on the roster of four straight World Series champions (1975 and ‘76 Reds and ‘77 and ‘78 Yankees) lives on for a reason having nothing to do with throwing a baseball.

On the night of Nov. 8, 1968, Gullett was carrying a football as the star halfback for the old McKell High School in their regular-season finale at county rival Wurtland High.

Things began simply with Gullett scoring a 1-yard touchdown run. He soon scored another TD. And another. And another. And another. And another ...

By the time the game had ended, the 6-foot-1, 180-pound senior had achieved something that no player had ever done before in the recorded history of Kentucky high school football.

He’d scored 11 touchdowns.

In a game McKell won 72-7, Gullett accounted for all 72 points (he also kicked six PATs) himself.

Both are state records that stand to this day.

“You want to know what I remember about that game?” Tom Wright, then the McKell quarterback, says now. “I scored a touchdown, too. And they called it back.

“I always teased Don that it must’ve been him clipping on that play.”

If you have access to Doc Brown’s DeLorean and could travel back to rural Greenup County around 1965, it is likely that no one even then would have been surprised had you told them that Don Gullett was going to set an enduring Kentucky high school sports record.

His life always had something of a Hobbsian (as in Roy) tint to it. It seemed all he had to do was pick up any ball and he was soon excelling in that sport.

Jack Gullett, an older brother, says he remembers Don as a little boy more than holding his own against teenagers far larger than he in pickup football games played in country fields.

From that point on, “nothing he ever did surprised me,” Jack Gullett said.

As a high school basketball player, Don Gullett once scored 47 points in a game.

In baseball, Gullett once threw a perfect game, striking out 20 of the 21 batters he faced in the seven-inning high school contest.

Yet it is his most spectacular night on the football field that has stood the test of time in the state record books.

Which carries a tad of irony. Looking back, the locals don’t recall being especially wowed on the night of the 72-point outburst.

“I was at the game,” says William Bentley, a pharmacist in South Shore. “It was just him running up and down the field.”

Danny Bentley, William’s brother and a pharmacist in Portsmouth, Ohio, says, “We left early. I remember that. It was a terrible game to watch.”

Says Jack Gullett of his younger brother’s big night: “He just ran all over the place. They couldn’t do a thing with him.”

What the game lacked in competitive tension, it more than made up for with dramatic numbers.

Gullett scored on runs of 1, 17, 10, 43, 2, 65, 80, 36, 8, 70 and 10 yards. He finished with 410 yards rushing, 342 of that coming on his touchdown runs.

The 72 points and 11 TDs broke the prior state single-game record of 68 points and 10 touchdowns set by Herbie Phelps of Old Kentucky Home High School in 1962.

Yet when the game was over, there was a bit of a bad taste on the McKell bus over the fact that Coach Jim Hastings did not call off the dogs in a game that was totally out of hand. Six of Gullett’s TDs came after halftime, three in the fourth quarter.

“Coach should have never left (the starters) in there so long,” Wright says now. “There’s no question we ran up the score. It wasn’t the right thing to do.”

On the ride back to South Shore, Gullett was all but apologetic. “Don and I were close,” Wright says, “and I remember distinctly, he came over to me and just said, ‘There wasn’t much I could do about that.’”

(My attempt to reach Don Gullett for an interview last week met with the same success Wurtland had in containing him on that night in 1968: None.)

Gullett had begun his high school sports career at Wurtland, before transferring to McKell. That’s the kind of thing that tends to create bad blood between intra-county rivals.

“But our coach was in his first year,” Wright recalls, “so I don’t think he even knew much about that. I think he was just trying to build a name.”

If so, it worked.

The headline in the Nov. 9, 1968, edition of the Lexington Herald was “Gullett Sets Record With His 72-Point Outburst Against Wurtland.”

“All the plays seemed to be working perfectly,” Don Gullett modestly told the Herald.

Three days later, The Courier-Journal quoted a Trinity High assistant, who had seen Gullett earlier in the year while scouting another team, as saying that the Greenup County product was as good as the most talented running backs in Louisville.

The C-J also interviewed Bill Robinson, the Wurtland coach. He sounded none too happy about the running-up-the-score issue. “We’re disappointed they did that to us,” he said.

Still, Robinson went on to say that “a lot of Gullett’s touchdown runs were through the middle of our line with two or three of our guys hanging on his back. He’s so strong through the chest, that if you hit him there, he’ll break one tackle after another.”

There must’ve been something in the air on Nov. 8, 1968.

While Gullett was scoring 11 touchdowns, a back named John Hamilton of Tompkinsville High ran for eight TDs in an 81-30 rout of Warren Central.

After 72 points and 11 TDs, what do you do for an encore?

One week later, Gullett had exactly one touchdown — a run of 52 yards — as McKell fell to Lynch 28-13 in the Class A playoff opener.

Still, he finished 1968 with 240 points, best in the state.

Word of the exploits of the running back in Eastern Kentucky reached the ears of a coach important in the football history of the commonwealth.

Down in Tuscaloosa, Ala., Bear Bryant figured any player who could score 11 touchdowns in one game merited a look.

Soon after, it just so happened that one of Alabama’s assistant basketball coaches was planning on heading to Kentucky to scout a promising hoops guard (at Mason County) named Ronnie Lyons.

In his capacity as Alabama athletics director, Bryant sensed a prime opportunity to get more recruiting bang for the travel buck.

So he ordered basketball assistant Jock Sutherland — actually, Bryant would have issued his demand to “Jack” Sutherland — to also pay a visit to McKell High to see Don Gullett.

“For two years, every damn day, it was ‘Good morning, Jack,’ ‘Hello, Jack,’” Jock Sutherland says now of his tenure working with Bryant.

Sutherland headed to Greenup County with a slide show sent by Bryant to demonstrate the grandeur that awaited Gullett if he chose to play college football at Alabama.

When Sutherland got to McKell, he asked to see the star athlete.

He says he was instructed to go to the gym.

Before he even got there, Sutherland says he could hear, over and over, a loud sound of “thwaccckkkk.”

“I walked in there and there’s a guy throwing a baseball harder than I’d ever seen,” Sutherland says now.

The guy who scored 11 touchdowns in one game never made it to Tuscaloosa.

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