Jerry Tipton's Kentucky Basketball - NYTimes.com Charles Bertram/Lexington Herald-Leader Jerry Tipton of The Lexington Herald-Leader watching Kentucky practice at the Superdome. He has covered the team since 1981. NEW ORLEANS - Jerry Tipton answered what seemed like an innocuous radio question last week about which Final Four team could give Kentucky the most problems. Tipton, the longtime Wildcats beat reporter for The Lexington Herald-Leader, said Ohio State. The next day, Tipton received a voice mail message from someone who identified himself as Chris from Pikeville. Chris from Pikeville was not happy. Chris from Pikeville was incensed. He called Tipton unprintable names, asked Tipton to hop aboard the Kentucky bandwagon and ended the call with "see ya, and I wouldn't want to be ya." Tipton, 60, shrugged and tapped his favorite button on the keyboard. "I keep my delete key well-oiled," he said here Friday on the eve of Kentucky's national semifinal against Louisville. That's pretty typical. It's almost like the mentality of Kentucky is beyond the regular rules. Of journalism or anything else. Anything short of reverence is subject to ridicule. Few better understand the passion and intensity of Big Blue Nation or know more about Kentucky basketball than Tipton. He has chronicled the program since the 1981-82 season, through national championships and stints on probation, through six coaches, for more than 1,000 games. He has received death threats and diatribes, been shouted at by future N.B.A. stalwarts and even opened the occasional fan letter, yet never considered another line of work. An e-mail he received earlier this season read, "I can't wait for you to die, so I can urinate on your grave." Basically, another day at the office. Tipton asks for neither sympathy nor understanding. Such missives, he said, come with the job he always wanted, the job he never left. His wife and two children actually root for Kentucky, and whenever he might complain, they remind him that he writes about a program as rich in tradition as any in the history of college basketball. Not a bad gig. And Tipton does write, all the time, about all things Kentucky hoops, about coaches and players, about recruiting and rivalries, few nuggets too small or obscure to not merit a mention. His lengthy, somewhat legendary notes column runs year-round, a full 65 inches each Sunday. Tipton witnessed the famous shot by Christian Laettner that pushed Duke past Kentucky at the N.C.A.A. tournament in 1992. He watched Kentucky make 3 of 33 shots in the second half of a national semifinal collapse against Georgetown in 1984. He covered the 1995-96 team that won so often, so easily, that Tipton still labels it the best Kentucky team he ever covered, including this one. Speaking of "83-"84, Sam Bowie told Tipton that season that Kentucky wanted to become the greatest team ever assembled. Tipton called Coach John Wooden, who basically called that blasphemy. Soon after, Charles Barkley and Auburn knocked off Kentucky, and when someone asked Coach Joe B. Hall after the game about Bowie's quotation, he wagged a finger at Tipton and said: "Why don't you ask him? He's the expert on greatest teams! The beginning of Tipton's article the next day read something like this: "Kentucky can settle for being the greatest team ever disassembled." This Final Four feels different from others, more like a reunion for a reporter who covered Kentucky long enough to spar with Rick Pitino, now in charge at Louisville, and John Calipari, the current Kentucky coach. In fact, before Kentucky hired Pitino in 1989, Tipton uncovered the file of the N.C.A.A."s investigation into Pitino at Hawaii. His subsequent article elicited the opposite of Southern hospitality. Of course, the same fans who raged against Tipton for his Pitino coverage will almost surely rage against Pitino on Saturday for the same reason they once lauded him; his style once aggressive, now, overly so. "He didn't always write good things about me, but I wasn't bothered by it," Pitino said. He's a good guy.