Here's a selection from CUT TO THE CHASE, the long-anticipated book co-authored by legendary anchor-reporter Alan Cutler and Dr. John Huang. Below this excerpt you can read everything you need to know about the book and how you can get a copy for yourself or someone you know.

Ch. 79 — The Great Tim Couch

"Most of the time with a great sports hype, it ends up being not true. Not in the case of Tim Couch from Leslie County, Kentucky. He was like the Paul Bunyan of quarterbacks. He could do nothing wrong.

"Tim Couch shows up to Lexington on a Friday night to play at Tates Creek High School, and it's the largest crowd I've ever seen pack that stadium. People were everywhere. Just watching him warm up was an 'oh my gosh' experience. He had a charisma about him that was shocking for a high school kid.

"I can't think of another player during my time covering Kentucky that changed the program more than Tim Couch. John Wall or Jamal Mashburn in basketball? Maybe? I'm OK with that. But who else would be there? The beautiful part with Tim Couch was they finally found him the right coach. Hal Mumme was perfect for Tim Couch.

"Unlike Elliott Uzelac, the offensive coordinator during Bill Curry's last year when Tim was a freshman, Mumme played to Tim's strengths. Uzelac started Tim Couch at Florida for his very first game. Powerful Florida — who shut UK out. Uzelac had Tim Couch run the option. Uzelac should have been fired the next day.

"What Kentucky did to Tim during his freshman season was almost as dumb as what the Browns did for Tim's career in Cleveland.

"Coaches might know sports better than I do, but coaches can still do really DUMB things. I'll always believe that Elliott Uzelac was upset that he didn't become the head coach at Colorado. From there it spiraled down. I always thought that when Elliott Uzelac was at Kentucky, he was a bitter, angry man. There were a few times after I talked to him when I left thinking, 'This dude is mad at the world.'"

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(LEXINGTON, Ky.) – Alan Cutler, the former long-time sports anchor-reporter at LEX18, is back in the news. The man best known for chasing Billy Gillispie down the hallway on the day he was fired has written a book—called, appropriately, CUT TO THE CHASE. The flamboyant New York native first arrived in Lexington in 1981, left for top-rated KDKA-TV and KDKA-AM in Pittsburgh in 1984, before returning to the Bluegrass three years later for an amazing run as the most dominant sportscaster in his viewing region. He retired in 2018 after the Kentucky Derby, one of his loves.

“Over the years, I’ve been able to interview a lot of newsworthy people,” Cutler said at the outset of the project. “I’m not trying to brag, but it’s something I know I’m good at—it’s a gift. People seem to open up to me, and I’ve accumulated a lot of interesting and entertaining stories along the way.”

Bold, opinionated, and revealing, CUT TO THE CHASE—with a special foreword by John Calipari—chronicles some of Cutler’s most memorable encounters during his riveting forty-four year broadcasting career. From calling Little League Baseball games in Farmington, New Mexico, to his tenuous relationship with Rick Pitino, as the long-time host of the Cincinnati Bengals Radio Network, to his thoughts on the current state of UK Basketball and Football—Cutler lays it all out on the line for the True Blue fan.

Told in his usual brash, confident, and no-holds-barred manner, the book—painstakingly crafted over a two-year period with Dr. John Huang—captures Cutler doing what he does best…beating everybody to the punch in telling stories people want to hear.

“Throughout my career, I never worked for any TV station,” Cutler writes in the book’s introduction. “I worked for you—the True Blue fan. TV paid me, but I was always delivering for those that watched or listened on the radio. There were times my aggressive philosophy caused some clashes with management, but that goes with the territory. You probably remember when I was chasing UK Basketball coach Billy Gillispie after he was fired. All I was trying to do was what I always did, working hard to get the story—nothing more, nothing less. It almost got me fired.”

CUT TO THE CHASE is currently available on Amazon.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08GTJ2DSC

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