What’s the proudest moment in UK sports history? Here’s Mark Story’s top 10.

When five former Kentucky Wildcats players were taken in the first round of the 2010 NBA Draft, UK men’s basketball coach John Calipari boasted to ESPN that the achievement was “the biggest day (ever) for the University of Kentucky.”

In response, a veritable who’s who of UK basketball greats pushed back against Calipari’s statement. The minor hullabaloo that ensued led to an interesting question: What is the proudest sports moment in University of Kentucky history?

This summer, I set out to answer that question — and ended up with a list of 157 memorable achievements by athletes/teams affiliated with UK.

One could justifiably say the 14 NCAA championship teams that the University of Kentucky has so far produced — eight in men’s basketball; four in rifle; one each in women’s cross country and volleyball — have yielded the proudest moments in UK sports history.

However, what I define as the greatest athletics achievements have resonance that is larger than sports. That “wide lens” approach informs the following list of the 10 “proudest moments” in UK sports history:

10. 1988 women’s cross country national title. Coach Don Weber’s team — Lisa Breiding, Valerie McGovern, Kristy Orre, Sherry Hoover and Denise Bushalow — did more than give Kentucky its first NCAA team title in a sport other than men’s basketball.

It was also the first NCAA championship won by a UK women’s team.

9. 1998 men’s basketball NCAA Tournament win over Duke. Six years after Christian Laettner had broken Kentucky hearts with his famed NCAA Tournament buzzer-beater, Coach Tubby Smith’s “Comeback Cats” got sweet revenge by staging a stirring rally from 17 points down with 9:38 left in the game to stun Mike Krzyzewski’s Blue Devils 86-84 in the Elite Eight.

8. 2020 volleyball national title. With the coronavirus pandemic severely limiting social interaction during the 2020-21 school year, Kentuckians who were largely confined to their homes were desperate for a UK sports team to provide a feel-good distraction.

Instead, the Kentucky football team went 5-6 and the Wildcats men’s hoops program produced a 9-16 clunker. It fell to the UK volleyball team, coached by Craig Skinner and led by star players Madison Lilley, Avery Skinner and Alli Stumler, to “pick up the state” with an exhilarating run to the NCAA championship.

7. Football’s 1951 Sugar Bowl victory. Oklahoma entered the 1951 Sugar Bowl ranked No. 1 in the nation and riding a 31-game winning streak. Coached by Bear Bryant and led by Babe Parilli, Bob Gain and unexpected bowl hero Walt Yowarsky, UK pinned a 13-7 upset on the Sooners that, to this day, remains the most impressive football victory ever by a Wildcats team.

6. Jenny Hansen’s gymnastics national championship three-peat. In 1995, Kentucky star Jenny Hansen did something that no woman had done before in NCAA gymnastics competition: She won the all-around individual national title for the third straight year.

The Somerset, Wisc., product left UK having accounted for a remarkable eight NCAA championships (three all-around, five event) by herself.

5. 1975 men’s basketball NCAA Tournament win over Indiana. Coached by Joe B. Hall and led by seniors Kevin Grevey, Jimmy Dan Conner, Mike Flynn and Bob Guyette, UK ruined previously undefeated Indiana’s bid for an unbeaten national title by beating Bobby Knight’s Hoosiers 92-90 in the NCAA Tournament Mideast Region finals.

In so doing, Hall and his team showed that Kentucky basketball could compete at an elite level in the post-Adolph Rupp coaching era.

4. Jim Green’s first track national championship. When the Kentucky sprint sprint star won the 60-yard dash in the 1968 NCAA Indoor Track and Field Championships, Green became the first Black athlete to win a national title in any sport while competing for an SEC school.

A product of tiny Eminence High School in Henry County, Green would leave Kentucky with two NCAA individual national championships; eight SEC event championships; and with a UK degree in special education, the first Black athlete to graduate from the University of Kentucky.

3. The 1948 Olympics men’s basketball competition. With Adolph Rupp serving as an assistant coach for Team USA, five players from Kentucky’s 1947-48 NCAA championship team — Cliff Barker, Wallace “Wah Wah” Jones, Alex Groza, Kenny Rollins and Ralph Beard — earned gold medals playing for the American squad in the London Olympics.

2. The 2020 Olympics. Delayed to 2021 by the coronavirus pandemic, the 2020 Games displayed the powerful all-around athletics department UK has built. In Tokyo, Kentucky Wildcats athletes, both present and former, combined to win 10 medals — seven golds and three silvers — in the sports of track and field, rifle and basketball.

Add in gold and bronze medals won in fencing by two former Notre Dame stars enrolled in the UK medical school, and the medal-count for athletes affiliated with the University of Kentucky was 12.

1. Nate Northington’s debut. On Sept. 30, 1967, Kentucky defensive back Nate Northington broke “the color line” in Southeastern Conference football by logging 3:17 of playing time in a 26-13 loss to Mississippi at Stoll Field.

Northington’s breakthrough as the first Black player to play in a SEC football game was tinged with grief. The Louisville product had planned to share the integrating of SEC football with his roommate Greg Page, a Black defensive end from Middlesboro. Instead, the night before Northington made history, Page died. He had been paralyzed 38 days prior in a freak accident in a non-contact drill in a UK practice.

Given the prominence of SEC football, the role Kentucky played in its racial integration is easily the proudest moment in Wildcats sports history.