An Eastern Kentucky basketball hero comes home to create ‘a treasure in the mountains’

After years of a friend imploring Pat Tallent to return to his Floyd County roots, the former Kentucky high school basketball star, business executive and high-level amateur golfer had done just that.

Tallent had bought a house adjacent to Prestonsburg’s StoneCrest Golf Course, a city-owned venue that sits atop a mountain whose top was previously removed to extract coal.

An accomplished golfer who won the men’s U.S. Senior Amateur title in 2014, won the British Senior Amateur in 2015 and has played many of the world’s great golf courses, Tallent was both intrigued and dismayed by what he saw at StoneCrest.

“I’m sitting in my backyard looking at these open sores of what used to be bunkers,” Tallent says. “I mean, it was awful.”

Once he played the course, Tallent, 71, saw big-picture potential for StoneCrest, a course that has a fascinating backstory.

“The layout here is pretty good,” Tallent says. “But the design was awful. The bunkers were way too big. They were in the wrong place. They were the wrong shape. They were impossible to maintain.”

From Tallent’s discontent with what he initially saw at StoneCrest, there arose a big idea.

With the proper investment, Tallent wondered, could this mountain-top golf course be made into a magnet for golf tourism into Eastern Kentucky?

Saying ‘no’ to UK basketball

Pat Tallent is a member of an exclusive club: an instate high school basketball star who turned down the University of Kentucky.

There were four Tallent brothers — Bill, Bob, Mike and Pat — who all became hoops stars at Maytown High School in Floyd County.

In 1969, Pat, the youngest of the four, helped lead Maytown to the semifinals of the Boys Sweet Sixteen.

One of Pat’s older brothers, Bob Tallent, was a reserve guard on the University of Kentucky’s 1966 NCAA Tournament runner-up team. The following season, Bob Tallent moved into the starting lineup alongside returning All-American Louie Dampier in Adolph Rupp’s backcourt.

That 1966-67 Kentucky season went badly awry.

En route to a 13-13 season — Rupp’s only non-winning year as UK head coach — frustrations ran high. In what became a late-season loss at Tennessee, Bob Tallent threw a pass intended for Dampier that sailed out of bounds.

The Kentucky coaches immediately pulled Bob Tallent from the game. The frustrated player, who was playing with an ankle injury, talked back to Rupp and his hard-nosed assistant, Harry Lancaster. The following day, Rupp instructed the UK equipment manager not to issue Tallent gear when he showed up for Kentucky’s practice and to tell him he was off the team.

Rupp’s harsh treatment of Bob Tallent came back to bite UK when Pat Tallent, a sweet-shooting 6-foot-3 guard, emerged as a high-major college prospect in the class of 1972. Coaches such as Louisville’s Denny Crum and LSU’s Press Maravich made the trek to Floyd County to woo Pat Tallent.

Then-Kentucky assistant Joe B. Hall came, too. Hall brought a letter from then-UK President Otis Singletary promising the Tallent family that with Rupp at the university’s mandatory retirement age of 70, Hall would be the Wildcats head man the following season.

After he had to leave Kentucky, Bob Tallent transferred to George Washington. In his one season, 1968-69, playing for GWU, he averaged 28.9 points a game.

Tallent had joined the George Washington coaching staff — and was in charge of recruiting when his younger brother, Pat, was a high school senior in 1972.

“Bob basically said, ‘Pat, what do you think it is going to look like if I can’t recruit my own damn brother?’” Pat Tallent says. “That’s kind of how that went.”

At George Washington, Pat Tallent scored 1,725 career points and averaged 20.8 points over his three varsity seasons.

Had he gone to UK, Pat Tallent would have been on the 1974-75 Wildcats team that fell to UCLA in the NCAA title game. He sometimes wonders if he could have made a difference in that outcome had he chosen differently.

Instead, at George Washington, he earned an accounting degree with honors and made contacts that helped him land a job at Price Waterhouse. That in turn put Tallent in position to become chief financial officer at World Resources Co.

“You take a path,” Tallent says. “If I’d gone to Kentucky, I would have been a whole different guy in a whole different world.”

‘We’re very fortunate’

The StoneCrest Golf Course has a story of its own.

It starts in 1990, with a proposal to spend $2.1 million to add nine holes to what was then a nine-hole golf course at Prestonsburg’s Jenny Wiley State Park.

In 1996, with the backing of two powerful Eastern Kentucky Democrats, then-Governor Paul Patton (Pikeville) and then-State Rep. Greg Stumbo (Prestonsburg), that proposal had broadened into building a new 18-hole golf course, 134 upscale housing lots and a 40-acre industrial site on a former strip mine near Prestonsburg.

By 1999, the cost of the project had reached $21.3 million, with funding coming both from the state of Kentucky and the federal government.

Adherents of the project said that, if it succeeded, it would revolutionize Eastern Kentucky by showing what could be done with land reclaimed after mountain top removal.

Critics predicted it would be a boondoggle.

Owned by the city of Prestonsburg, the par-72, 7,011-yard StoneCrest Golf Course opened in 2001.

“I played it when it first opened, and it was nice,” says Jim LeMaster, the former UK basketball player and ex-Kentucky state representative. “But I think over the years, it got into some disrepair.”

By 2023, former Prestonsburg mayor Les Stapleton told the Floyd County Times, “We have been losing a tremendous amount of money for several years” running the golf course.

Meanwhile, in 2021, Pat Tallent’s wife, Cindy, was chief financial officer for ZeniMax Media Inc., when the company was acquired by Microsoft for $8.1 billion.

“All of a sudden, we get a (financial) windfall,” Pat Tallent says.

So when Pat Tallent decided he wanted to restore StoneCrest, he and his family were in a position of financial strength.

“We’re very fortunate to have (Tallent) come back home and invest in the way he is investing in this community,” says Rick Hughes, the acting Prestonsburg mayor.

Not everyone was on board when the city first turned the golf course over to Tallent. There were so many rumors about what was going on at StoneCrest, the city had to call an open meeting to dispel them.

Among the rumors was that StoneCrest was going to become a country club.

“That can’t even happen,” Hughes says. “There’s a deed restriction on the property that says (the StoneCrest land) has to be open to the public and used for recreation.”

Early in 2023, the city of Prestonsburg signed a four-year contract turning management of StoneCrest over to a Limited Liability Corporation affiliated with Tallent.

Among the changes Tallent has wrought, he has made StoneCrest more challenging “for good players,” he says, by moving the bunkers “to where they are likely to hit the ball.”

Yet by having multiple tee placements on each hole, the course is still accessible for the less-accomplished golfer because they can hit from the shorter tees and take the bunkers out of play, Tallent says.

In perhaps the most impactful change, Tallent paid excavators to have old trees and brush that had grown up around the golf course removed. That was done to get better circulation of air onto the golf course’s bentgrass, Tallent says.

However, the removal of the brush also reopened the vistas from the mountain-top golf course into the surrounding area. Given the scenic views from StoneCrest, no matter what you shoot, your good walk won’t be spoiled.

“We’ve got a treasure in the mountains, there’s no doubt about it,” Hughes says of StoneCrest.

By terms of his four-year agreement with the city of Prestonsburg, Tallent has the option to buy StoneCrest once he has invested at least $1 million in facilities improvements. Tallent says his investment in StoneCrest is already near $2 million. Yet he has not yet exercised the option.

“And I don’t know that I will,” he says. “I am not trying to make any money. I’ve got money. I would love if we could get it up where the city is making something. Think of what the city could do with extra money.”

Tallent says to get StoneCrest across the profitability threshold, it will take attracting golfers from nearby cities such as Huntington, W.Va. (74.8 miles from the course), Lexington (121), Louisville (193), Cincinnati (197) and even Pittsburgh (350).

Toward that end, he is studying the feasibility of building a 16-room lodge at StoneCrest to facilitate “stay and play” golfers.

Says Pat Tallent: “What I am trying to do is show people down here that there are things in Eastern Kentucky they should be proud of — and this golf course is one of them.”

Inspired by Jasper Johnson, which family can claim to be the ‘First Family of UK Sports’?

It’s officially time to be worried about the arc of Mark Stoops’ Kentucky football program

What having 18 ex-Cats on active NFL rosters tells us about the UK football program