The most sensitive task in any conflict is operating behind enemy lines.

There was at least one fairly well-known Kentucky sports figure hoping the Wildcats didn't beat Tennessee in football on Saturday for the first time since 1984.

"We root for the Orange in my house," said Rodney Woods.

That's the least you'd expect from a guy who named the middle of his three sons Peyton after a certain Tennessee quarterback.

It's exactly what you'd expect from a guy whose ceiling board in the basement of his Monticello-area, Ky., home is an orange-and-white-squares replica of the Neyland Stadium end zones.

If you are under 35 and follow basketball in Kentucky, you likely know Woods, 53, as the longtime high school coach at Wayne County. Six times he has coached the Cardinals to the boys' Sweet Sixteen, most recently in 2004.

However, if you've got "experience lines" around the eyes, you likely also remember Woods as a basketball player for Ray Mears at Tennessee during the Ernie Grunfeld-Bernard King era in the 1970s.

Woods paved the Chris Lofton path some three decades before Chris Lofton.

As a boy growing up in Four Mile, Ky., Woods worshiped Adolph Rupp and his Kentucky Wildcats. In 1971, during his senior year at the now-defunct Lone Jack High School, Woods recalls seeing then-UK assistant Joe B. Hall in the stands at two of his games.

When he was invited to visit UK for a game against Auburn, Woods was thrilled. Yet, once there, he said Rupp told him that he was too old to drive to Four Mile and Four Mile was too small to land a plane.

Therefore, the Kentucky head man wasn't coming to see the 5-foot-10 guard play.

Conversely, coaches from Tennessee came to watch him play in 17 consecutive games, Woods recalls.

When it came time to make a college decision, Woods said his heart was with Kentucky. His dad, however, told him to go with the school whose actions showed that it most wanted him.

He signed with Tennessee. Instead of playing for UK, he tormented UK.

In his first game against Kentucky, Woods scored the final six points as Tennessee rallied to a 65-64 win in 1973.

In his final game against Kentucky, he overcame an ankle injury to score 14 points and dole out 10 assists in an epic 103-98 Vols' victory over the UK team that would go on to be the runners-up in the 1975 NCAA tournament.

"We should have recruited him harder," Joe B. Hall said last week.

Sort of an early Lofton deal?

"It was," Hall said. "Rodney was always a thorn in our side."

Football friends

In Knoxville, Woods was a freshman when he first met a senior offensive lineman on the football team. Even then, Woods said he figured that lineman, Phillip Fulmer, had coaching in his future.

"He was a heck of a player, a very, very good lineman," Woods recalled of the UT head coach. "Phillip was a very intelligent guy. He was sort of the coach of the linemen even when he was playing.

"And you know how football players sometimes can be a little rough? Well, that wasn't Phillip. He was a very nice guy."

Woods did more than play basketball at UT. He also was a center fielder in baseball. Among his teammates was another two-sport standout, Condredge Holloway, the famous scrambling UT quarterback of the 1970s.

Bonded in Orange, those relationships have held.

Before Woods' father died in 1997, he said Fulmer called Clyde Woods. While on a recruiting trip in Georgia, the Tennessee coach spent 30 minutes talking on the phone with the ill father of a guy he'd known in college.

"Phillip has always been very nice to me," Rodney Woods said. "When he called my dad, that just meant the world to my family."

Woods said when he takes his three sons (besides Peyton, they are named Landry for Tom Landry and Riley for Pat Riley) to the Vol Walk before UT football games, Holloway comes over when he sees them.

The former QB turned UT assistant athletics director will give the Woods boys -- now 12, 10 and 8 -- some small UT souvenirs.

Woods wonders if college athletes today form the emotional ties with their schools that he did. This is how deep his run.

In the South, it's not unusual for homes in which the spouses root for different schools to have a novelty welcome mat.

One side will be Alabama red, the other Tennessee orange. It will have the words "A House Divided."

"I met my wife (Cynthia) in Corbin (Ky.), and I was thrilled when I found out she went to Tennessee," Rodney Woods said. "I tell her, that 'house divided' wasn't going to work here. This had to be an all-Tennessee family."

Even if behind enemy lines in Kentucky.