There was a moment, he admitted, after it was clear that he was Kentucky’s choice, when he stood alone at home and grappled with apprehension about a job that offered both spoils he knew well and obstacles, too.
Pope was the head coach at BYU, the second-winningest program in the state of Utah. If he took this job, he would be the head coach of the winningest team in men’s college basketball history — following John Calipari, whose run included a national title and four trips to the Final Four in five years.
“You never follow a legend, right?” Pope said he wondered for a few minutes that night. “You never follow a legend.”
Pope decided to anyway, even after Kentucky fans had publicly campaigned for more notable and successful coaches. But in the months since, Pope has converted a lot of the naysayers by being himself. That authenticity — and an accelerated push to build his first team — have turned concern to excitement about his first season.
But on the day of his introductory news conference at Rupp Arena, it was hard not to consider the stakes.
It was the biggest moment of Pope’s career, and he was riding on a charter bus carrying him and dozens of former Wildcats players through campus — and then through a loading dock and onto the court.
“The expectations at Kentucky are higher than anywhere else,” Pope said to the crowd. “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.”
Arriving on a bus? That kind of flashy statement hadn’t been Pope’s style. But everything at Kentucky is exaggerated. In that moment, it was another reminder that he was no longer living in the mountains of Provo, Utah, but had now entered an active volcano that has turned up the heat on every person who has held the job over the past 30 years. At Kentucky, you usually get burned.
Once Pope descended the bus’s steps on that Sunday in April, more than 15,000 fans — many of whom had decided to embrace the hire only hours earlier — rose and cheered for the captain of Kentucky’s 1996 national title team and their new leader.
“It was like a family reunion,” Pope said.
Pope’s former teammates reminded him of the task ahead just before he grabbed the microphone to reintroduce himself to the Kentucky fan base at his first news conference.
“My former teammates were like, ‘Don’t mess it up, man … Don’t mess it up,'” Pope recalled.
