Jim Mashek

BUTTRY LEAVES IMPRESSIVE LEGACY AT BGHS

OK, confession time.

I met Tanya Buttry, Turner’s Mom, before exchanging a single word with Bowling Green High School basketball star Turner Buttry.

Mrs. Buttry (forgive the formality, but my late Momma hailed from Tennessee) was helping out at the scorer’s table, in the BGHS Arena, a fine facility that I was also seeing for the first time. She was pleasant and accommodating and had a keen interest in what was going on, on the basketball court, so my curiosity kicked in.

(Imagine that.)

The Purples were playing host to Barren County, a few days after the 2020 New Year, and I’d caught on with a local web site and magazine that caters to high school sports. I’d been doing this kind of work since Jimmy Carter’s final few weeks in the White House, but I was still nervous. Wanted to make a good first impression, that kind of thing.

Mrs. Buttry told me her son was one of the Purples’ players, and she nodded in Turner’s direction, as he went through the layup line or something.

Two or three things immediately came to mind:

I figured Turner Buttry must have really busted a hump in practice, because he was considerably smaller than the majority of guys on the court.

Two, he still had a little bit of a babyface. And three, the dude could SHOOT.

Now, here we are, roughly 27 months later, and Tanya Buttry was talking about her son, Kentucky’s “Mr. Basketball.”

Stop the proverbial presses.

Bowling Green High School has its second “Mr. Basketball,” an award the Kentucky Lions Club’s Eye Foundation presents every year. It’s held after the KHSAA Sweet Sixteen, when it’s convenient for coaches, administrators, other officials and parents to meet in a celebration that is the Commonwealth’s collective obsession:

Basketball.

Shane and Tanya Buttry were there, Sunday evening, with their adolescent son, Turner.

So was BGHS coach DG Sherrill. Some of Turner’s peers, across the state. His next coach, Eastern Kentucky University’s A.W. Hamilton.

(OMG, I just looked it up. Mr. Hamilton was born two years after I got outta college …)

“My heart was racing,” Turner Buttry said a couple hours later, in the car with his parents, returning to Bowling Green.

His name was called.

The 5-foot-10 (more on that later) shooting guard was now walking with the likes of erstwhile University of Kentucky stars Jack Givens and Rex Chapman, the original “Doctor of Dunk,” Louisville Male’s hypnotic Darrell Griffith, the late WKU All-American Jim McDaniels, from down the road at Allen County-Scottsville, and another underdog, the late, great Wes Unseld, of Seneca High School, U of L and later, the Washington Bullets.

The Bullets won an NBA championship about six weeks after I got outta college, too, and you tend to remember sports stars when you’re trying to segue into adulthood.

(Hey, I haven’t given up yet …)

Welcome aboard, Turner Buttry. It’s been quite a ride, to be sure.

“My phone’s been blowing off the hook,” Buttry said in an excited but measured tone. “We’d been in town for the (Sweet Sixteen) tournament for a few days, and some coaches told me they thought I had a good chance. You hear things. One of the television guys in Lexington said at the presentation, ‘Do you know how hard it’s been to keep this secret?’

“We both just kind of laughed and I said, ‘No, sir.'”

That’s always been his modus operandi, mind you, but it’s obviously served him well.

The first time I watched him play, Buttry was still in a development phase of his game (and, let’s be honest, that IS a perpetual process), but you can see how it has paid off in the long run.

Polite. Accountable. Determined. Oh man, does this guy have some drive.

It’s kind of contagious.

“Those young (BGHS) guys, they wanted to be led,” Buttry said. “They came right up and told me. They had a lot to do with it. They made me look like a leader.

“It’s really a team award, when you look at it.”

Said BGHS guard Curtis Lin: “Turner’s the heart and soul of this team.”

Two months or so after my first interview with Turner, the KHSAA and other high school athletic assocations across the country were shutting down sports indefinitely.

The COVID-19 pandemic was raging out of control.

Bowling Green was the KHSAA 4th Region runner-up that year, falling to crosstown rival Warren Central in the championship game, but high school sports got put on ice for a while. There was no Final Four. Teenage baseball and softball players were left in limbo, having no real opportunity to showcase their talents during the academic year.

And Turner Buttry’s game was starting to take shape.

Fast forward another year, and the Buttry family was in Lexington, not far from where Turner spent most of his childhood, and this time the Purples were playing in the Sweet Sixteen.

The first half was coming to a close, and Bowling Green was already decidely in front of University Heights Academy, a prep school in Hopkinsville. The ball was inbounded into Buttry’s hands, and after taking a couple of dribbles, he launched a 70-foot shot from the left, uh, sideline. (I don’t think you can call it the ‘left wing.’)

And it fell right through the net.

The Purples were going to win, anyway, but those three points left little doubt about any of it.

In the quarterfinals, however, Bowling Green ran into 6-foot-10 Maker Bar and Ballard High School. The Bruins held off a late challenge or two to claim a 61-53 decision.

That’s when I had another interesting interview with Turner Buttry.

He was pretty much all that DG Sherrill had coming back, for the 2021-22 season. Isaiah Mason and Connor Cooper and Jacobi Huddleston were moving on. Buttry was going to have to assume an unusual leadership role.

“Yes, I did have to prepare myself for that,” Buttry said Sunday evening.

Buttry and a couple fellow seniors, smooth shooting guard Curtis Lin and rough-and-tumble, backup forward Brad Gurley, were joined by a team largely comprised of sophomores and freshmen. Shoot, DG Sherrill had an eighth grader, too, in flashy guard Trevy Barber.

“I think he did embrace that role, as a leader,” Sherrill said, “but beyond that, he’s a really good player. You just don’t see kids his size getting Division I offers. Turner just plays with tremendous energy.

“He’s a really deserving kid. We’re really proud of him at Bowling Green.”

They’re also proud of him at Warren Central, Greenwood and even South Warren — the Purples’ arch-rival on the football field — perhaps in large part because of his engaging personality and drive to succeed.

One of the first calls Buttry took was from Warren Central swingman Jaiden Lawrence, whose season just ended in a memorable KHSAA Sweet Sixteen championship game, the Dragons’ pulsating 43-42 loss to No. 1-ranked George Rogers Clark on Saturday night at Rupp Arena. Lawrence, Buttry and Greenwood star Cade Stinnett, who shared the 4th Region Player of the Year honors with Buttry, have played together in AAU basketball for the last two or three years.

Also, Caden Veltkamp, the South Warren quarterback/power forward, came to Buttry’s signing ceremony with Eastern Kentucky University at the BGHS Arena. Lawrence and Stinnett were there, too, along with a couple others.

(Veltkamp would graduate early from South Warren, after the Spartans’ impressive run to the KHSAA Class 5A state football championship, and he’s enrolled at WKU and will participate in spring football drills with the Hilltoppers in the next few weeks.)

These kind of kids are genuinely happy for one another.

“That’s my brother,” Lawrence said Sunday night. “We always enjoyed playing together in AAU ball. Competing. That’s one of the hardest working guys I’ve ever seen.

“We always pushed each other. We wanted to be great.”

I exchanged a series with text messages with Turner, while Warren Central was knocking off one top-flight opponent after another at Rupp Arena. Buttry and Lawrence had a couple chances to talk, after a game, in the Rupp concourse.

Buttry’s numbers are impressive.

He averaged 23 points, 3.5 assists and 3.2 rebounds per game. He shot an eye-opening 54 percent from the field, and even more impressive, 53 percent from 3-point range. The Purples finished the season 26-7. Three of those defeats came at the hands of Warren Central, the eventual 4th Region champon that finished as the runner-up in the prestigious Sweet Sixteen.

Turner Buttry is not inclined to taking bad shots, but if push comes to shove, he’ll do just about anything to win. He almost singlehandedly kept Bowling Green in the KHSAA 4th Region championship game, just two weeks ago, before the Dragons squeezed out a 58-50 victory at Diddle Arena.

It was finally over, an exceptional high school career, and Buttry did some interviews, exchanged pleasantries with Lawrence and a couple other Dragons players, before embracing WCHS head coach William Unseld. (And Wes Unseld’s cousin, by the way.)

Bowling Green had a “Mr. Basketball” two decades ago, when Josh Carrier won the award on his way to the University of Kentucky. Greenwood’s Daymeon Fishback took home the hardware in 1996, on his way to stardom at Auburn University. (He’s the court-side analyst for the Tigers’ radio-TV team.)

And now we have Turner Buttry, the 5-foot-10 star of the Colonels, I mean, Purples. Basketball is a way of life for him, and he wanted to list himself as a 6-foot guard while finishing his career at Bowling Green.

You know, play the part.

(I told him I did the same thing, when talking to college football coaches while finishing up in high school. My 40 time? That was an even a bigger obsession …)

“Turner was probably the most consistent player in the state,” Purples coach DG Sherrill said. “He’s raising the bar, for everyone on our team, and he’s still going, strong. Relentless. A super kid.”