The result was a series providing credible evidence that players were receiving cash payments, that their coaches were involved, and that this practice had been going on for years. Jeffrey A. Marx and Michael M. York won the 1986 Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting for the series, “Playing Above the Rules.’’ It was the first Pulitzer for the Lexington paper.
The reaction of Kentucky Wildcats loyalists was fierce: circulation and advertising boycotts, protest rallies, and daily attacks on talk radio. A letter to Mr. Black read: “Dear Sir: May the sprays of a million polecats fall upon your presses and linger there through eternity. Go Big Blue!’’
In 1999, the St. Paul Pioneer Press reported on the outrage over its own investigation of similar abuses by the University of Minnesota athletic program, and spoke with Mr. Black, who said: “We had bomb threats, had to evacuate the building once or twice, had to put security on my home for a time. A few people canceled. One of the first was a man in the mailroom who saw the papers coming off the presses and canceled his free subscription.’’
During his decade in Lexington, starting in 1977, Mr. Black increased daily circulation nearly 30 percent and Sunday circulation by more than 60 percent, and combined the company’s two newspapers, The Herald and The Leader, into The Herald-Leader in 1983.
Journalistically, he took on another Kentucky sacred cow, the coal industry; sharpened the editorial page so much that a Republican politician called it “the fang and claw’’; and exposed wrongdoing in used-car businesses at the expense of lost advertising.
