In our series SEC Connections, we take a quick look at coincidences, partnerships and parallels between The University of Texas at Austin and our sister schools in the Southeastern Conference. This week, The University of Kentucky.
Edrick Floréal, who led the Wildcats’ track and field program from 2012 to 2018, became head coach for the Longhorns (men and women) in June 2018. So far at UT, he has brought home the 2022 Men’s Indoor Championship and the 2023 Women’s Outdoor Championship.
Both universities have business schools named after automobile executives. At Texas, the business school is named for the late Red McCombs, an alumnus who gave $50 million to the college in 2000. McCombs built an auto sales empire based in San Antonio before branching out into media, cofounding Clear Channel Communications (now known as iHeartMedia), and ownership of sports teams, including the San Antonio Spurs, Denver Nuggets and Minnesota Vikings. Upon his death in 2023, at age 95, his fortune was estimated at $1.7 billion. The McCombs Foundation has donated more than $118 million to charity.
At Kentucky, business students attend the Gatton College of Business and Economic after Carol Martin “Bill” Gatton pledged $14 million in 1995. Wildcats also visit the Gatton Student Center. Graduating from UK in 1954, Gatton began as an automobile dealer in 1959. He died in 2022 at 89. In May 2023, Gatton’s namesake foundation donated $100 million to the UK College of Agriculture, Food and Environment.
Within the last five years, Texas and Kentucky faculty have conducted joint research in psychiatry, population health and energy and the environment.
The Longhorns’ Kevin Durant, nicknamed “KD,” plays for the Houston Rockets, while Wildcats’ Anthony Davis, nicknamed “AD,” plays for the Dallas Mavericks. Durant grew up in Maryland in the eastern outskirts of Washington, D.C., and came to UT in 2006. Davis grew up in Chicago and reported to Lexington in 2011. Davis has played for three NBA teams, and Durant has worn six NBA uniforms.
One of the precursors of The University of Kentucky was Transylvania University, and UT Regents Professor Thomas J. Garza wrote the book “Slavic Blood: The Vampire in Russian and East European Cultures.” This SEC Connection is pure silliness, of course, but does surface some interesting facts:
“Transylvania” means “across the woods,” and the name originally stems from the university’s founding in the heavily forested Transylvania Colony, which existed in western Kentucky for only a year before the American Revolution. In another connection, one 1810 graduate of Transylvania University was none other than Stephen F. Austin, the Father of Texas. In 1865, Transylvania University merged with another private university with a religious affiliation, Kentucky University, and took its name.
But to take advantage of the Morrill Act that created public land-grant universities, the school spun off its Agricultural & Mechanical College in 1878 as an independent, state-run institution due to the separation of church and state. And in 1908, Kentucky University re-adopted the Transylvania name to avoid ongoing confusion with its now more famous daughter institution, the University of Kentucky.
The term “Transylvania” became associated with Dracula in 1897, with the publication of Bram Stoker’s novel “Dracula,” in which the fictional vampire count lives in Transylvania, a region of Romania. Professor Garza is University Distinguished Teaching Associate Professor in the Department of Slavic and Eurasian Studies and founding director of the Texas Language Center. He teaches Russian language and literature at all levels, foreign language pedagogy and courses in contemporary Russian culture.
OK, hear us out: Jim Bowie was born in Kentucky in 1796 and moved to Texas in 1830, fighting in the revolution at the Battle of Concepcion, the Grass Fight and the Battle of the Alamo, where he died. But he is also famous for the fearsome Bowie knife he used, which was not created by him but by his brother, Rezin Pleasant Bowie, for him. Rezin was a slave trader, smuggler, land speculator and treasure hunter — and giant knife innovator — who died in New Orleans. His widow, Margaret Neville Bowie, moved to Austin and in 1853 built a house on Waller Creek that is now the oldest structure on the UT campus, sitting just south of Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd. UT acquired the property, now known as the Watson House after a much later owner, in the late 1960s.
Perhaps the most famous cultural export of the state of Kentucky is the fried chicken that puts the K in KFC. But Texas has its own take on crispy yardbirds, the San Antonio-born Church’s Fried Chicken, now known as Church’s Texas Chicken, never mind its Atlanta headquarters that keeps tabs on 1,700 restaurants in 25 countries from Belarus to Guyana. Impressive as that is, Church’s has a ways to go if it wants to catch top KFC’s 30,000 worldwide locations. On the other hand, KFC announced this year that it is moving its headquarters from Louisville to Plano, or as one headline put it: “Colonel Sanders is Moving to Texas.”
