🎶This is for the one who swings the hammer/ Driving home the nail…🎶 Alabama, 40-Hour Week, 1985
Mike Lewis’s last three years at Hopkinsville High (1983, ’84, and ’85) were successful. He went 8-3 in 1983, 9-4 and played for the 3A championship in 1984, and went 8-2 and missed out on the playoffs in 1985 owing to being in the same district with one of the better Paducah Tilghman teams in its illustrious history. Mike Lewis was a high school football star who was a fixture on Fleming Thornton’s ’66 state championship team, was the son of James “Butch” Lewis who played on the Tiger OL for Ralph Mills’s undefeated championship team in 1940, and led the Tigers to the championship game in 1984, where the Tigers lost to Tom Duffy’s Danville Admirals. All in all, that is a ton of “Lewises” seemingly in the midst of Tiger football success. Coincidence? No sir. It was a program reaping the benefit of hard work from a hard, tough guy.
HB Lyon, Scouting Director, “KPGFootball”
Elizabethtown, KY: Mike Lewis knows all about tough. Mike Lewis knows all about “hard.” Mike Lewis knows exactly what being a “lunch pail” player or coach entails. Lewis embodies it and has most all his life.
Lewis was tough. Players coached by Lewis were too. It was demanded. It was a requirement for playing for Mike Lewis.
I called coach “Cheese” owing to his cheddar-like, sanguine hair and complexion. Lewis also had a yellow truck which was called the “cheese mobile.” His truck was cheese colored or he was somewhat colored like a wheel of cheddar; either way, he became “Cheese” to both students and players.
Lewis was the son of an all-time “lunch pail” player in his father Butch. Lewis had played for a lunch pail guy in the late Fleming Thornton.
Lunch pail players are those guys who put on their hard hats, every day, come to work and give you everything they have. It isn’t often flashy. Sometimes, it can be less than spectacular.
It is always consistent. It is most often effective.
Former Colts running back, Frank Gore, was described as a lunch pail player by his coach, Chuck Pagano. Pagano once said about his RB that “[Gore’s] one of those guys, he’s a hard hat and a lunch pail guy. He gives us everything he has, every single day…No body has more passion and love for this game, and love for his teammates, than that guy and it shows…”
[Frank Gore] is one of those guys, he’s a hard hate and lunch pail guy…
Chuck Pagano, NFL Football Coach
James “Butch” Lewis was that guy for Hopkinsville all-time halfback, “Terrible” Tommy Gray and the Tigers’ head football coach, Ralph Mills. Lewis was described in the 1941 edition of the “Orange and Black (yearbook)” as “…the warhorse on the Tiger squad, playing a steady game and standing out in the team’s famous, five-man line that rebuffed all attacks.” Lewis’s improvement, according to the yearbook, had “…helped bring the team out of the ranks of mediocrity.”
Mills’s team would finish 11-0, co-champion of the All-Kentucky conference, and awarded a Kentucky state football championship by governmental decree. Pretty far from mediocre wouldn’t you say?
The Tigers wouldn’t hit pay dirt again, championship-wise, until 1965 and 1966. Fleming Thornton, a Dawahares KHSAA Hall of Famer would be the coach of those teams and Thornton would boast a young scrimmage-line stalwart named Mike Lewis. This would be Butch’s son. Mike Lewis would matriculate to the college ranks where he would continue playing.
After playing in college, Lewis went into the teaching profession and gravitated toward coaching. Lewis got the Hopkinsville High School job, at his alma mater, post-Danny Sundberg. Sundberg would succeed Fleming Thornton as Athletics Director.
Lewis, in 1984, would take his Tigers back to a title game. Lewis had first been as a player. Now, he would return as the head coach.
Lewis’s Tigers would lose its first-string QB to injury (David East) in 1984 and also its second string QB to basketball (James “Jimbo” Binkley). The Tigers would move a TE over to QB (Joey Brenner) to initiate its wishbone attack.
Lewis’s ’84 team would make the title game in spite of losing its first string QB to injury and its second string QB to basketball
Friday Night Fletch
The Tigers would ride its wishbone offense, with its stout straight six-man front, with some wide tackle six mixed in, to Louisville, Kentucky and a date with Tom Duffy’s Danville Admirals. That game didn’t go as planned. Some days you’re the windshield, other days you’re the bug.
Coach Lewis would draw a 213-game winner (Tom Duffy, 213-79), and a Hall of Fame football coach (Danville, Highlands, and Henderson County), who ended his career with a spotless 4-0 record in title games as his opponent. Lewis came home a runner-up, went 8-2 the next year, and then went to East Hardin after a year as an assistant for Dan Goble at Christian County.
Coach Sundberg, AD at the time of Lewis’s resignation, told KPGFootball, “[Lewis] walked into my office and tendered his resignation. I wadded it up and threw it back at him, hitting him in the chest. In the end, he didn’t have it in his heart to stay.”
We asked Coach Lewis once why he left his alma mater to go to Elizabethtown for the East Hardin job. The soft spoken man of few words declined to answer me. Lewis just softly said, “There were reasons I won’t go into. I don’t want to get overly negative. Leave it at this, I loved my hometown and my alma mater and had wonderful years there. I just felt it was time for me to go.”
So he went.
I kind of lost track of Coach Lewis after his leaving for Hardin County. He headed up the program at East Hardin. He moved to Central Hardin when it opened its consolidated school.
There were reasons I won’t go into. I don’t want to get overly negative.
Mike Lewis on why he left HHS for East Hardin
I interviewed one of Coach Lewis’s better players, Chuck Hughes. Hughes was a first team all-stater for Coach Lewis, signed with WKU, and became a multi-year starter for the Hilltoppers.
He told us, “Coach Lewis was a tough, hard man who demanded those traits from his players. You weren’t going to come out of a Lewis run program soft. You were going to be hard. You were going to be tough.”
Hughes continued, “It was seldom flashy. It was almost never sophisticated. It was effective and it won games. We weren’t splitting atoms…”
This author learned a lot from Coach Lewis. I played in his program a year and quit him. I wasn’t tough enough.
I would get tougher. I would get harder. Age can do that to a person.
Every person has opportunity in life to show his mettle, to exhibit his grit. Football is the first time for many, but it certainly isn’t the last.
When it was time for me to “stand up” in life, I did. Maybe it was Coach Lewis’s example which emboldened me. Perhaps…
I talk with Coach Lewis regularly. Lewis tells me he regularly reads my articles. He has read Coach Sam Harp and my book, Football 101: Boo-Boo’s a Quarterback.
Maybe the best thing I can reflect in this article is the following…while I quit Coach Lewis and his program when I was a kid, Coach Lewis never really quit me.
Mike Lewis is a friend. Mike Lewis is a mentor. Mike Lewis is someone I greatly admire.
Lewis, in refusing to quit me, ended up teaching me an ultimate and infinitely more valuable life-lesson. I would never quit anything or anyone again, even when the opportunity presented.
This is Friday Night Fletch, reporting for KPGFootball, reminding you to PLAY THROUGH THE WHISTLE!
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My name is Bryan Todd, I played for Coach Lewis at East Hardin his first time around, 1974-77. He was right out of college and not much older than his players. I was the starting quarterback and free safety my junior and senior years, 1976 & 1977. We ran the split back veer option on offense and a 60 defense. We very seldom threw the ball, but not many could stop our read option. Our defense was top 10 in the state only allowing 77 points in 11 games. Coach Lewis was intense and very enthusiastic as a coach. He encouraged and pretty much demanded discipline both on offense and defense. Coach Lewis had a lot to do with me receiving a full scholarship to the University of Louisville when I played from 1978-82. After graduating from UL in 1983, I went back to East Hardin and coached football, basketball, and track. When our Head Coach at East left after the 1987 season, I got on the phone with another assistant at East that played for Coach Lewis when I did. That was Bobby Lewis, no relation to Mike. We strongly encouraged him to come back and Coach at East again. He ended up interviewing and took the job. It was fun moving him back! Coach Lewis was very successful his first round at East and did equally as well his second stint at East. He became the first head coach at newly built Central Hardin High School in 1990.
Coach Lewis has remained a very close friend throughout my adult life. I was very honored and fortunate to Coach his daughter, Kelli in basketball at Central Hardin. She was a very good basketball and softball player. His son, Chad was also a very good athlete. He was a quarterback for Coach Lewis at Central Hardin and later coached at John Hardin. I could write a book about Coach Lewis and his family, including his wife Shelia. She might be the toughest one in the family! Thanks for this great article on a man that touched the lives of many young boys that grew up to be tough, successful, and honorable men just like Coach Lewis, better known as “Cheese” and “Buff”! That story will have to be told later. GOD BLESS Coach Lewis and his family!
Thank you for this. You have filled in some gaps for me I couldn’t find elsewhere.
Friday Night Fletch
Joe Hall here…. I too am a former player of Coach Lewis. Although he was only a coordinator for me while at Central Hardin, we grew close as I played quarterback for him. I was no Bryan Todd, but his “lunch pail” coaching style really helped shape me as a player and ultimately propelled me to compete at the highest of levels within the district/state. “Cheese” deserves any and all credit thrown his way, for his impact on Kentucky football, as well as many young men who are still toting their lunch pails each day because of him!!
Joe, thanks so much for your input!