Why Mark Pope, the coach of Kentucky, chose to follow a legend

MARK POPE was not sure.

He stated that there was a time when he was nervous about the job, even though he knew it would have good things and bad things. This was after it was clear that he was Kentucky’s choice.

Pope was the head coach at BYU, which had the second-most wins in Utah. If he got the job, he would be in charge of the most successful men’s college basketball team ever, after John Calipari, who led his team to a national title and four trips to the Final Four in five years.

Pope said he thought about it for a moment that night: “You never follow a legend, right?” “You never follow a legend.”

Pope chose to do it anyway, even though Kentucky fans had publicly called for more well-known and famous teachers. But in the months since, Pope has won over a lot of doubters by just being himself. The fact that he is real and the speed with which he is building his first team have turned worry into excitement about his first season.

But when he held his first news conference at Rupp Arena, it was hard not to think about what was at stake.

Pope was going on a charter bus with dozens of other past Wildcats players through campus, through a loading dock, and onto the court. It was the most important moment of his career.

Pope told the crowd, “The hopes are higher at Kentucky than anywhere else.” “That’s the standard and that’s the history of Kentucky. If you don’t hang a banner, then you haven’t had a successful season. And I love that.”

Getting there by bus? It hadn’t been Pope’s style to make something so flashy. But at Kentucky, everything is blown out of proportion. At that time, it was another reminder that he was no longer living in the mountains of Provo, Utah, but in an active volcano that has made life harder for everyone who has had the job for the past 30 years. Most of the time, you get burned in Kentucky.

More than 15,000 fans, many of whom had just hired Pope hours before, stood up and cheered for the captain of Kentucky’s 1996 national championship team and their new boss as Pope got off the bus that April Sunday.

Pope said, “It was like getting together with family.”

Before Pope took the mic at his first news conference to present himself to the Kentucky fans, some of his old teammates told him of the work that was ahead.

“My former teammates were like, ‘Don’t mess it up, man … Don’t mess it up,'” Pope said.

“He just had that quality of loyalty and leadership that made a team great,” former Kentucky coach Rick Pitino, right, said of Pope. Photo by Andy Lyons/Getty Images

Pope had been warned one last time by Tony Delk.

Before the Kentucky Wildcats won the national title in 1995–96, every practice was a fight. The team was led by Rick Pitino and had nine future NBA stars. But five days before the Final Four in 1996, Pope set a series of hard screens on Delk during a team drill. Delk would go on to win the Most Outstanding Player award at the 1996 NCAA tourney. Pope was told to stop by Delk.

Instead, Pope moved to the top of the key and set the same hard screen that had worried Delk before on the next play and four more times after that.

“It was like maybe five minutes from when we ran the play, and I go by him and I just hit him in his midsection,” he said. “He drops and he’s down for the count. I said, ‘Mark, I gave you a warning.’ And Coach Pitino was like, ‘Tony, go run on the treadmill!'”

Delk’s warning wasn’t enough to get Pope to change his job. Pitino said Pope was chosen as captain of that Kentucky team because he always did what he was supposed to do, even if his friends didn’t like it at the time because he put up hard screens on Delk.

Pope’s dedication to detail and coaching helped him get where he is today in basketball. He left Washington and went to Kentucky in 1994 after Lynn Nance was fired as coach after only two years with the team. His friends noticed right away how carefully he worked, how happy he was, and how willing he was to do the work.

Pitino said that because Pope is smart, he thought he would do something other than teaching in the future. He was a Rhodes Scholar candidate and later went to Columbia University’s medical school while he was in the NBA before deciding to become a teacher.

But his friends knew he was a good boss. He spoke for and translated for Pitino. Just after one game, Pitino told the players that he wasn’t happy with how they played. But before he could finish, Pope got up and spoke to everyone.

Delk said, “He’s like, ‘We’re being lazy.'” “And we’re like, ‘Wait a minute? What the heck? What do you mean complacent?’ You know, we were working our butts off. We’re doing everything the coaches asked for. That stuck in the back of my mind. The main reason I was mad was that I didn’t know what ‘complacent’ meant. I had to go to the library and look the word up.”

Pitino said: “Every little thing that I would say, he would back it up to the team. He just had that quality of loyalty and leadership that made a team great. I’ve coached very few Mark Popes in my life.”

During his basketball career, these traits also made him a likeable person. People who have followed Pope’s life for decades say that he has always been able to connect with people from different backgrounds.

Even though Pope only averaged 1.9 PPG in the NBA over six years, his attitude helped him stay in the NBA for almost a decade. He also played in the CBA and overseas.

When Pope played for the Milwaukee Bucks in the early 2000s, George Karl was their head coach. “I always thought Mark was going to be a leader,” Karl said. “He had a respectful fear but a tremendous amount of courage in almost everything he did. And I think he understands his challenge at Kentucky is going to be difficult, but I think he’s also excited about the challenge of getting it done.”

In April of last year, Tubby Smith sat down for breakfast at his hotel in Phoenix just as Calipari walked in. Soon after, Pope, who was staying at the same hotel, showed up after working out. Pope asked for a picture with two teachers he had always looked up to as they talked.

After only 24 hours, Calipari said he was leaving Kentucky to take the job in Arkansas that became available when Eric Musselman left for USC. A few days after that chance meeting, Pope became an unusual choice for the job in Kentucky.

Smith said, “It was really strange.” “Now that I look back on it, I can see how people might have said, ‘They must have been plotting something.'”

Smith may understand Pope’s situation better than anyone else in the world. The former Kentucky assistant coach was hired to take over for Pitino in 1997. Pitino had won the national title in 1996 and made it to the title game the next year before leaving to join the Boston Celtics. In his first season, Smith won a national title. He then tried for almost ten years but failed to do so again. Since 2007, he has lived in Minnesota.

Smith said, “Well, you’re always on at Kentucky.” “You have to win and you have to be productive. And even when you win, sometimes it’s not enough. Obviously, every coach wants to win championships. We all want to win. But it’s not as easy as it looks or as it seems to win. And at Kentucky, you have the tools, you have the resources, but even with that, you’ve got to have some luck. But I think [Pope] will do a great job.”

Pope is not a stranger who is hearing stories about what happened in Kentucky that are meant to warn others. He’s been there and loved it. After Pope agreed to the gig, he could have eased people’s expectations. He didn’t.

“You think about how Coach Pitino changed the game with the 3-point line,” he said. “You think about how Coach Tubby revolutionised the game in terms of being a great citizen for the game. You think about Cal revolutionising the game in terms of recruiting. Kentucky is a great program. Kentucky is a leadership program. So how do we continue this beautiful [legacy]?”

When future NBA stars John Wall and DeMarcus Cousins led the team to the Elite Eight in 2010, Calipari, who had been hired before the 2009-10 season, gave the school new hope. After two years, Anthony Davis won the Wooden Award and led the Wildcats to their first national title in over ten years. Overall, from 2011 to 2015, Calipari made it to the Final Four four times out of five years.

But over time, he lost control of the best young players in the country. And when the transfer portal turned into the most important place for talent in the country, Calipari’s ability to bring in top students no longer meant as much. His last four years with the team, they had a nine-win season and lost in the first round of the NCAA tournament twice, which is something the fans of Kentucky can’t forgive. But those mistakes made room for a new voice.

Pope has already started making the school more like him and his style. Calipari mostly refused to do interviews with local and national news outlets near the end of his term. He had given up running his own news conferences to his aides. After going 9-16 in 2020–21 and losing in the first round of the NCAA tournament three times in a row, Calipari seemed to give up.

Not Pope, who has kissed babies and posed for pictures with a lot of Kentucky fans. He has also travelled all over the country and even to another country to put together his first team. He flew to South America to watch Lexington’s five-star talent Jasper Johnson play in the FIBA U18 AmeriCup. He then went around the United States to use the transfer site to build a team from scratch. He sent a signed shirt to country music star Dolly Parton a few weeks ago. He and his team also worked with Habitat for Humanity to build a house and went to the first game of the Kentucky football season against Southern Miss, which was delayed for two hours because of storms. He did not sneak the group through a VIP door. Instead, he and the players waited outside the gates with everyone else. Every move Pope made this summer, both locally and nationally and abroad, was tracked by the Wildcats’ social media accounts. For example, Pope recently went to the US Open and sat in a VIP box.

A radio host from Lexington, Kentucky, named Drew Franklin said, “There will be a tailgate for Kentucky basketball at the next football game, and you can just come and meet the players.” “That never happened under [Calipari]. It was almost like a president. You had to call someone to call someone to get to [Calipari]. Now you just walk out your front door and there’s a high probability you’re going to run into Mark Pope somewhere in Lexington.”

Pope seems to be telling his devoted followers that he’s ready to work harder than anyone else who might have applied for the job. He is running for office as a basketball coach.

One of Pope’s predecessor’s strengths was that he never shut down doubters. This helped. In fact, not long after Pope got there, a well-known booster spoke out about how disappointed he was with Kentucky’s choice. Pope never backed down.

“Give me his number,” he told Mitch Barnhart, the sports director at Kentucky. “I’ll call him.”

“We talked, and now he’s one of our top supporters,” he said.

“The only thing I worry about is I think he’s overextending himself too much,” Pitino told me. “I just hope he doesn’t get fatigued. It’s a long season, and he’s just doing everything to satisfy the thirst of the fans. I just don’t want him to fatigue himself because it’s great to do what he’s doing and he ingratiates himself very well to the fan base, but also, he has to have a lot of energy in that tank because the SEC is really tough.”

“At the University of Kentucky, it’s got more eyes on it,” Pope said of the rabid fan base. “It’s got more attention on it than any other program.” Photo by Andy Lyons/Getty Images

Pope took a call on a stifling July afternoon near the border between Georgia and South Carolina. He was trying to deal with the extra attention the letters “UK” on his clean white polo shirt were getting.

At the busy Peach Jam event in North Augusta, South Carolina, the new head coach of the Kentucky men’s basketball team rushed from one room to the next. Fans, coaches, and friends all tried to catch his eye in the hallway.

Someone yelled, “Hey, Coach!” before Pope turned to give him a quick fist bump.

A boy called out, “Coach Pope!” Pope looked at the boy and nodded his head.

Pope didn’t stop, though, and the phone stayed in his ear.

“There are more eyes on it at the University of Kentucky,” Pope said. “It’s got more attention on it than any other program.”

So far, Pope has found a good mix between going after flags and making a plan. Most importantly, he has found time to enjoy it all. He used the portal to put together a team that was ranked in the top 25 going into the season. His group is made up of pros and playmakers who believe in what Kentucky can become.

Who drew Lamont Butler from San Diego State? “Well, just him as a person and as a coach,” Lamont Butler said. “I feel like he really prioritised recruiting me, and I felt like he had a great vision for me for this year and even for the future, which I really respected and I really wanted to be a part of.”

Early in September, five-star prospect Jasper Johnson from Lexington chose to commit to Kentucky over Alabama and North Carolina. This was a huge win for the first-year head coach, who had already gotten a commitment from Malachi Moreno, a seven-foot-1 centre prospect from the same state. Moreno said he liked Pope’s offensive plan at BYU. Pope’s offence helped the team make more than half of its field goal tries last season and gave big guys a lot of opportunities to play.

“He was just honest with me, and he told me what I was really good at and what things I could get better at,” he said.

“And then he told me he could coach me on what I could get better at.”

Pope sat in the middle of the court at Peach Jam to watch A.J. Dybantsa, who is the top pick in the class of 2025, and a group of skilled possibilities. Calipari hung out with his friends on the sideline, including TCU’s Jamie Dixon. Outside, Bill Self laughed, and Sean Miller looked for a seat. The trainers who go to the biggest grassroots event every summer treat it like a holiday, and if they can fit it in, they often play nine holes at a nearby golf course.

But not Pope. The next day, he would get on another plane and fly back to Lexington to watch former Kentucky players play in The Basketball Tournament, a $1 million game where the winner gets everything. He sat at Peach Jam in North Augusta that day and watched Dybantsa and his friends play, dribble, and move as they played.

He had his phone in his right hand. His book was on the couch.

“There are great programs all around the country with incredible fan bases, and the vast majority are in this league and in the Big 12,” he said. “And then there is just Kentucky and it’s almost unexplainable. It is a one-of-one in that sense.”

French All-American and former teammate of Pope’s said, “I think the fans are going to fall back in love with him and really appreciate what he’s going to bring.” “Because he’s going to be a hard worker. He’s going to demand excellence. I’m looking forward to it. It should be an exciting time in Lexington.”