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Jim Brown attended every University of Kentucky home football game for 64 consecutive years until illness halted his tally in 2009. Bob Wiggins has gone to more than 1,500 UK men's basketball games, home and away. Husband and wife Wendell and Vickie Bell rooted at approximately 100 different competitions involving the school's Wildcat teams last year alone.
Talk about pride in the academy! These passionate enthusiasts of intercollegiate athletics give new meaning to the term diehard fan (and campus supporter). They're not alone. Institutions of higher learning nationwide count patrons who can't be beat among ticketholders. What motivates such boffo buffs?
Brown, 95, took in his first UK football game as a freshman in 1938. Upon graduating from Kentucky with a B.S. in business administration in 1942, he was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the U.S. Army Air Corps and flew missions as a navigator/bombardier on a B-25 in Asia during World War II. His discharge occurred just in time for the 1945 college football season. He became a mainstay at every Wildcat home game for seven decades.
"I did not set out to establish any kind of a streak," Brown, whose career entailed the construction business, a lumber company and real estate, said in a phone interview from his home in Lexington, Ky. "It just happened. I have loved UK football from the time I was a little boy [in Bowling Green, Ky.) in the 1920s and began reading about the team in the...