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LOUISVILLE MAGAZINE 9.14 57 While weighing the constitutionality of several major public- and private- sector actions during his 22-year career as a federal judge (including ending Kentucky's ban on gay marriage), John Heyburn has steadfastly refused to relinquish his passion for the smallest of details. ederal District Judge John G. Heyburn II quit running before he turned 30 because his knees bothered him. It wasn't that he couldn't run. It was that he couldn't run hard. He had run cross-country at Harvard, for a team whose winning streak remains unbeaten more than 40 years later. His mile record of four minutes, 25 seconds at the Boston academy where he went to high school was retired unbroken more than 25 years after he set it. And he just kept getting faster. In his last year at Harvard, he could run the mile in just over 4 minutes, 10 seconds. But if he couldn't keep training, even as he neared 30, he couldn't see the point. "I just sort of stopped. It was hard for me to run in an unserious way. I just felt if I ran, I was compelled to run to train," Heyburn says. So he went back to golf, the sport he frst took up as an eight-year-old. His handicap has been as low as two, which would put him in the top 5.5 percent of U.S. male golfers. Heyburn's book-lined chambers in the U.S. Courthouse at Sixth and Broadway would make an elegant little apartment, with its gold crown molding, rich wood wainscoting and abundant natural light from a trio of windows. Heyburn points to a photograph beside one of him with Sen. Mitch McConnell. It's a picture of his Harvard track coach, Bill McCurdy. "An amazing guy," Heyburn says, using his favorite superlative. "He imbued us with a sense that, if we worked hard, we could get better, and we could beat anybody, and we were tougher and stronger and better than anybody. And back then, to a great extent, we actually were." He still thinks about McCurdy's lessons, although these days his challenge is grave. Heyburn, tall and apparently vigorous, has been in treatment for rectal cancer almost nonstop since October of 2011. During my visits to Heyburn's chambers — despite the presence of two tables, a couch and chairs — the judge sits at his desk and I sit across from him, like a visitor to the assistant principal's ofce. My third and fnal visit begins awkwardly. Heyburn ushers in three young people — two clerks and an intern — wearing meticulous ofce attire. He does not introduce them. Silently, they take seats at a corner table. (Te jury?) Heyburn speaks in full, orderly sentences. His gestures refect an underlying confdence. It's not unusual for him to make a point with both arms open wide. Although he chooses his words carefully, there is no sense that he has to slow down to select just the right one. But just now, he sounds uncertain. "I know you're going to write a fair arti- cle. An OK article," he says. I note the swift demotion in my journalistic ability and try not to slump in my chair; how would the jury read that? He fears I may misinterpret things, he says. He's worried I don't understand the 1960s and the unrest on college campuses like Harvard, from which he graduated in 1970. He notes that I don't know anything about Lou- isville politics in the 1980s. He ran for county attorney in 1981 and for county judge executive in 1989 and lost, races we talked about a few days earlier. "I want to make sure," Heyburn says. He pauses. "You've gotten at least my take on it. Mostly. You don't have a real understand- ing of those campaigns. You don't know the people involved." I want to say that yesterday I interviewed an astronomer about dark matter and the behavior of low-surface-brightness galaxies and what that says about the standard model of cosmology. Is this really more complicated? But after our nearly four hours of conversation, I feel the logic behind this uncharacteristic and halting monologue from the man who has made some of Kentucky's most important judicial deci- sions. It's the logic of a man who will not run if he cannot run hard. Heyburn wrote 50 drafts of his 2004 ruling upholding the Jeferson County Public Schools' By Jenni Laidman Photos by Mickie Winters right to use race as a factor in assigning students to schools. (Te U.S. Supreme Court over- turned the decision in 2007.) He wrote at least 25 drafts of both of his recent decisions ending Kentucky's ban on gay marriage, which is now under review by the Sixth District Court of Appeals in Cincinnati. Before his 1999 decision to lift the order that frst compelled JCPS to remove barriers to equal education in 1975, he not only reviewed the legal arguments that led to the original desegregation order (and, with his clerks, studied the case law), but he read widely about the civil-rights movement and its leaders. Can I blame him, then, for feeling uncertain of something so feeting and seat-of- the-pants as an interview? He prizes systematic thought. He likes precision. He values numbers and details and ftting them into a coherent picture through closely reasoned argument. He has a high regard for history; his own interest in it is so deep that his reading is almost exclu- sively confned to it. His idea of a ripping yarn is Teddy Roosevelt in the Amazon or a book about the personal lives of folks like Edward R. Murrow and Averell Harriman during World War II. Tere is, of course, nothing I can say to reassure him. To my relief, he drops the topic. Whatever brought on this sudden concern about how the past will be portrayed, it's not because he fears criticism. H eyburn has held his federal judgeship since August 1992, appointed by the frst President Bush and recom- mended for the post by McConnell, Heyburn's friend and long-ago political co-strat- egist. Despite Heyburn's Republican credentials, he's no darling of the right. Tere's actually a YouTube video, created after the judge declared Kentucky's same-sex-marriage ban unconstitu- tional, that purports to be a message from God to Heyburn — as though God had no access to better means of communication. Others like F