Tom Leach has a plan to call both of UK’s games with Georgia and Gonzaga

The Kentucky football team will kick off against No. 1 Georgia on Saturday at 3:30 p.m. EST at Kroger Field.

On Sunday, the No. 4 Wildcats men’s basketball squad will tip off with No. 2 Gonzaga at 7:30 p.m. EST at the Spokane Arena in Washington state.

The two marquee Kentucky Wildcats sports events will take place exactly 2,160 miles and 28 hours apart.

Yet from the time the UK men’s basketball schedule was announced, Kentucky radio play-by-play announcer Tom Leach scoured for a way to ensure he could call both games.

“There are a lot of good things about my job — and one of them is getting to call the big games,” Leach said Wednesday. “Why pass up a chance to do one (of this weekend’s big games) if it is possible to do both?”

Figuring out a way to make that possible was the challenge.

If it had come to picking between broadcasting the football and men’s basketball Cats this weekend, it would have been an easy choice. “If it hadn’t been possible (to do both games), I would have done the football game,” Leach says.

In a practice set when the venerable Cawood Ledford was “The Voice of the Wildcats,” the UK radio broadcast team has always prioritized football games over hoops contests when there is a November conflict.

The most historically resonant example of that practice came on Nov. 17, 1979.

That day, a Kentucky men’s basketball team featuring senior star Kyle Macy and set to debut a ballyhooed Joe B. Hall recruiting class led by Sam Bowie, Derrick Hord and Dirk Minniefield was slated to play Duke in the Tip-Off Classic in Springfield, Mass. The same afternoon, Fran Curci’s football Wildcats were facing Florida in Gainesville.

So Ledford and radio broadcast analyst Ralph Hacker called the football game, where a walk-on quarterback from the state of Florida, Juan Portela, quarterbacked Curci’s Cats to a 31-3 pasting of the Gators.

It fell to Dick Gabriel (play-by-play) and Jock Sutherland (analysis) to broadcast the UK basketball game, an 82-76 overtime loss to Coach Bill Foster’s Blue Devils.

“As long as I can remember, we’ve always done it that way,” Leach says of choosing football over basketball in November conflicts. “I think Ralph (Hacker) may have mentioned that you finish up (the season) that you started (first). You started football earlier, it’s coming down to the end of their season, where basketball is in the early stages of their season.”

In the case of this weekend’s conflict, Leach really didn’t want to have to choose.

Yet he ruled out trying to fly from Lexington to Spokane, Wash., commercially on the day of the game as too risky in terms of flight delays, etc. ...

“One Monday night, I was doing the (Mark Stoops) radio show, and I just asked the people from UK (Athletics), ‘Hey, are there any flights going out to Gonzaga after the football game that I could catch a ride on?’” Leach said. “Fortunately, the answer was, ‘Yes.’ So it worked out.”

Leach will fly to Spokane on a plane that UK has chartered for donors (who pay for their own seats on the flight).

So after describing the action as Stoops’ Troops face off with defending national champion Georgia, Leach will sleep in his own bed, then catch an early Sunday morning flight to the left coast for John Calipari vs. Mark Few.

The top-five battle between the Wildcats and the Zags may have lost a bit of national luster after both teams took defeats this week. No. 4 Kentucky suffered a come-from-ahead loss to Michigan State on Tuesday night in the Champions Classic in Indianapolis, falling 86-77 in double overtime to Tom Izzo’s tough-minded Spartans.

Meanwhile, No. 2 Gonzaga got run off the floor by No. 11 Texas on Wednesday night in Austin, falling 93-74.

Still, Cats vs. Zags is “a big game,” Leach says. “Great individual matchup with Oscar (Tshiebwe) vs. Drew Timme. At least for the moment, it’s two top-five teams. It’s going to be a six-year series, so it’s exciting to be part of the first one.”

After calling the basketball game, Leach will spend Sunday night in Spokane, then fly back Monday with the rest of the UK radio broadcast team on the Wildcats team plane.

Leach’s hope is to get back to Lexington in time to serve as host for both the Stoops and Calipari weekly radio call-in shows Monday night.

“It’s a little crazy schedule, but when you get to the end of your life, you probably won’t be thinking about the great, extra sleep that you got,” Leach says. “You’ll be thinking about the fun experiences that you had.”

Providing the play-by-play to Kentucky football vs. No. 1 Georgia and UK basketball against No. 2 Gonzaga within a 28-hour window after traveling 2,160 miles to do so should qualify as memorable.

“I can’t imagine there have been many times when Kentucky football and Kentucky basketball have both been playing top-five teams on the same weekend,” Tom Leach says. “To get to broadcast both games is a treat.”