The new Wildcats coach and former player brings humility, for the first time since the Tubby Smith era, and a sense of communal ownership.
“He can grow a full head of hair,” insists Mark Pope’s wife, Lee Anne. “And there would be no gray in it.”
Pope and Lee Anne laugh together during a charity event in August. / Matt Stone/The Louisville Courier Journal / USA TODAY NETWORK Enter Pope. Re-enter humility, for the first time since the Tubby Smith era. Re-enter a sense of communal ownership. We’ll see whether national championship contention makes a reappearance as well.Lexington Herald-LeaderThere are generations of stories about Kentucky basketball fan ardor, which runs as deep as the coal mines in the eastern part of the state and flows as strong as the Ohio River that forms the northern border from Ashland to Paducah. Big Blue Nation packs 23,000-seat Rupp Arena.
By then, athletic director Mitch Barnhart was angry. Two-time national champion Dan Hurley declined interest in the job, opting to stay at Connecticut. One-time national champion Scott Drew got down the road far enough with Barnhart to have his wife and kids visit Lexington for a look around, but Drew pulled out to stay at Baylor. The program’s umpteenth daydream about hiring Billy Donovan did not go anywhere.
Pope, with his actual game jersey, poses with Barnhart during his introduction in April. / Sam Upshaw Jr./Courier Journal / USA TODAY NETWORK But after a day of venting about who didn’t take the job, Kentucky fans came around to having one of their own in the job. They got behind the hire.The news conference was not ideally timed to draw a crowd—it was a Sunday afternoon during the final round of The Masters. But when Pope and UK officials got to Rupp, lines were already forming to get in hours ahead of time.
Pope exits the bus with the national championship trophy as he enters Rupp Arena in April. / Clare Grant/Courier Journal / USA TODAY NETWORK “I just think Kentucky needed a breath of fresh air, and someone who is going to represent the name on the front of the jersey,” he says. “The people don’t care about what players do after they leave. They care about what they do at Kentucky.”
The roars in Rupp eventually stopped, and everyone else went home. Mark Pope went to work, having a staffer get him into his new office in Memorial Coliseum. That’s when reality hit him. Or, in a crisis, leave it in your jersey. Former Pope teammates tell the story of one particularly brutal Pitino workout that pushed the center to the point of nausea. Rather than let Pitino see him break down and throw up, Pope vomited in his jersey and kept practicing.
Pope’s practice intensity was such that future lottery pick Antoine Walker would become annoyed, asking Pitino to put someone else on him during scrimmages. That relentless ethic helped Pope hang around the NBA for six seasons before being cut by the Denver Nuggets. Mark Fox’s first coaching job was a graduate assistant and then a full-time coach at Washington while Pope was a freshman and sophomore there. The two lived in the gym after practices—Pope getting up extra shots, Fox shagging rebounds or occasionally playing one-on-one against him. During a successful head-coaching stint at Nevada, Fox started getting inquiries from Pope about joining his staff.Fox moved to Georgia in 2009, and Pope insisted he was ready to get into the profession.
“No job was too small for him to do all the way,” Fox says. “He did the big jobs, he did the small jobs, he did scouting, he’d handle equipment. He did all of it.”
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