The new Wildcats coach and former player brings humility, for the first time since the Tubby Smith era, and a sense of communal ownership.
Start with the hair. What little there is.
“He can grow a full head of hair,” insists Mark Pope’s wife, Lee Anne. “And there would be no gray in it.”
Yet the men’s basketball coach of the Kentucky Wildcats has shaved his blonde hair down to a short stubble for most of his adult life—your basic jarhead Marine recruit look—because it’s simply easier. His cut is so low maintenance that when his four daughters were little, they sometimes did the honors of giving dad’s dome a shave. If they messed it up, who would even notice?
At age 52, Pope isn’t much of a coiffeur. Among the many stylistic shifts accompanying the new coach at Kentucky, this is one of the most telling. Not the hair itself, but what the hair represents.
“I don’t think there’s anyone who spends less time thinking about himself than Mark,” Lee Anne continues. “He’s the most secure human being I’ve ever been around.”
Some of Pope’s predecessors had the audacity to view the most enormous job in college basketball as their own vanity project. Kentucky has been a place for peacocks in the past—at least until the Peacocks of Saint Peter’s began the final defrocking of the most recent proud bird to strut the sidelines in Lexington. John Calipari and Rick Pitino brought towering egos to Big Blue Nation, and Adolph Rupp was no shrinking violet in the program’s early years.
Big personalities for a big job. That was fine as long as they were big winners, which was the case most of the time.
Rupp’s run spanned decades, winning four national championships and becoming a cherished state icon—but even The Baron of the Bluegrass was forced out at 70 by a state age law that might have been finessed if he were still at the top of his game. For Pitino—who arrived at Kentucky with a bald spot but notably left without it—his star burned bright for eight years and then he was lured off by a massive NBA contract. For Calipari, the vanity project took a sharp turn in the wrong direction in the latter half of his 15-year tenure, necessitating his bailout move to Arkansas in April.
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.
“The Kentucky fans want their program back,” says John Clay, longtime columnist for the Lexington Herald-Leader. “Pope wants to give it back.”
There 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. It invades opposing gyms. It takes over neutral sites. It is ubiquitous and eternal.
