Big Blue Heaven: Mark Pope’s Quest to Give Kentucky Basketball Back to the Fans

The new Wildcats coach and former player brings humility, for the first time since the Tubby Smith era, and a sense of communal ownership.

New Kentucky Wildcats head coach Mark Pope was animated during his introduction in April. / Sam Upshaw Jr./Courier Journal / USA TODAY NETWORK

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.”

Pope and Lee Anne laugh together during a charity event in August. / Matt Stone/The Louisville Courier Journal / USA TODAY NETWORK

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.”

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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.

The deceased have been buried in the jerseys of their heroes. The living keep buying jerseys for future interment attire. Money may not be flush for the rank-and-file fandom, but the Cats get their cut in portions great and small. 

A 1987 preseason intrasquad scrimmage in the tiny town of Jeff, Ky.—squirreled away in the mountains of Appalachia, just a few winding miles from neighboring Happy—solicited a $1,450 bid for the game ball from a local tire dealer. “I ain’t got no sense when it comes to basketball,” Ted Cook said upon receipt of the ball, speaking for an entire state.

But the greatest fan flex in Kentucky basketball history came last spring, when Mark Pope was introduced as the new coach of the Wildcats. The commonwealth’s zeitgeist was fully revealed on April 14.

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.

So Barnhart had pivoted to Pope, the BYU coach. His ties to the program ran deep—he was the captain of Kentucky’s loaded 1996 national championship team under Pitino. His NCAA tournament résumé ran shallow; he’s not won a game in the Big Dance. Should the winningest program in men’s history, owner of eight national titles, be entrusted to a coach who was just upset in the NCAA first round by Duquesne?

Unlike trying to convince those more accomplished coaches to come to Lexington, his interview went in reverse. Barnhart got the hard sell from Pope for why he should get the job. He is a geyser of positive energy, a slightly goofy 6' 10" presence with Labrador retriever enthusiasm and a med school brain. Pope’s pitch started with his vision for the introductory news conference.

“You can hire somebody that’s going to go up there and you’re going to hand them a jersey and they’re going to do a photo shoot and throw [the jersey] in the corner,” Pope told Barnhart. “But when we do this press conference, I’m going to bring my own jersey, and it’s got blood and sweat and tears on it from the national championship season. And that’s the difference between me and anybody else for this job.”

Pope, with his actual game jersey, poses with Barnhart during his introduction in April. / Sam Upshaw Jr./Courier Journal / USA TODAY NETWORK

Barnhart was sold, and the deal came together quickly, with word leaking out late on April 11. But the backlash from a fan base expecting to land a coach with championship rings was fast and furious—hence Barnhart’s anger. 

At 6 a.m. on April 12—4 a.m. in Provo, Utah, where Pope was—Barnhart called his new coach and told him, “I’m pissed. We’re taking this press conference to Rupp.”

Pope had misgivings. What if an unenthused fan base opted not to come? What if it’s friends and family and thousands of empty seats in a cavernous building?

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 battleship flipped,” Barnhart says. “I’ve never seen momentum change like that.”

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.

Meanwhile, Kentucky concocted a clever callback introduction. Pope and his family would enter Rupp on a bus, the same way he and the 1996 team did after winning the national championship the night before in New Jersey. But Pope added one last touch.

Before the appearance, UK had arranged a meet-and-greet for Pope with other former players. During that session Pope came up with an idea—let’s put all these former players on the bus, too. And so they did, with generations of Wildcats both famous and obscure walking off to resounding applause.

The 1996 team came off last, with Pope the final one to appear, holding the national championship trophy skyward. What greeted him was a stunning sight—roughly 19,000 people showed up for a news conference.

The very fact that this became a 1990s Kentucky love-in was a departure from the Calipari era. Cal gave nods to the program’s gilded history, but the Pitino era was not celebrated during his 15 years anywhere near the way it was when Pope and his teammates got off the bus.

Pope exits the bus with the national championship trophy as he enters Rupp Arena in April. / Clare Grant/Courier Journal / USA TODAY NETWORK

“I walked out of that bus into that arena and I don’t know why, but I felt emboldened and determined and couldn’t wait to state our case about who we are,” Pope says. “For some reason, in that moment, none of the worries and fears and doubts that should be crushing you at that time are there.”

The fan turnout was a sign of how eager Kentucky was to turn the page from the Calipari era. He won a lot—410 games, six Southeastern Conference titles, four Final Fours, one national title—but the Cal experience had gotten old, frustrating and increasingly bitter with first-round flameouts against No. 15 seeds Saint Peter’s and Oakland.

Cal sold Kentucky to recruits as a quick-stop NBA way station, and he expected the fans to embrace that approach as well. He talked generational wealth, they talked program loyalty. He was energetic in terms of community outreach in times of trouble, but his connection to the public felt largely transactional. As the program slid after 2015, Cal’s condescension, equivocation and excuse-making became more infuriating.

“It was Cal’s program,” Clay says. “It wasn’t really Kentucky’s program anymore.”

Pitino, who championed the hiring of Pope, echoes that sentiment without mentioning Cal.

“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.”

Calipari left Kentucky in April after a 15-year run that had turned sour. / Matt Stone, Louisville Courier Journal

With that as the backdrop, Pope hit every note the fans wanted to hear in his introduction. He was the anti-Cal, putting program first and individual star power and earning power second.

“Entitlement leads to sorrow and depression,” Pope said that day. “And gratitude leads to joy. What all of the future players will learn really quick, O.K., is that they are not doing those jerseys a favor by letting the jerseys clothe them. It will be one of the great honors of their life to put that jersey on.”

It was just a news conference. But it was a catharsis on a massive scale. 

“It was a revival of a lot of emotions for people,” Barnhart says. “You felt like you’d gone to church.”

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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.

“It was so quiet,” Pope says in that office last month. “There’s the thing of having 19,000 people at a press conference in an arena, which has never happened before, and that’s what everyone sees. What they don’t see is two hours later sitting down in that chair and me understanding that in 11 months, I have to hang a banner. And you’re just alone.”

Pope filled that alone time by doing what comes naturally to him—working insatiably. One of the reasons the Washington transfer became a captain on a super-talented team under Pitino was that they shared a maniacal zeal for the game. Nobody pushed players harder than Pitino, and Pope was fine with the pushing.

“Work was always my separator,” Pope says. “I found confidence out of work. I outworked you yesterday. I’m going to outwork you today. I’ll outwork you tomorrow. But I came here to Kentucky and I couldn’t do any extra work. I didn’t actually have the capacity for the first time in my life. But we were speaking the same language. Just leave it all there and crawl out of the gym.”

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.

The 1996 championship team had nine players eventually play in the NBA. Pope was the last of four Wildcats taken in that draft, going in the second round with the 52nd pick. Pope has referred to that Wildcats team as “eleven prima donnas and [walk-on point guard] Anthony Epps,” but Pitino disputes that characterization.

“Mark was the glue who held a lot of egos together,” Pitino says. “It was a tough team to manage to keep everyone happy, and whether he started or didn’t start never mattered to him. It was a bloodbath every day in practice, and he was the hardest worker.”

Pitino coached Pope at Kentucky in the mid-1990s. / Chris Day/The Commercial Appeal / USA TODAY NETWORK

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.

At that point, Pope took a road very much less traveled by former NBA players. He applied to medical schools and was accepted by Columbia. A Rhodes Scholar candidate while at Kentucky, he had the brainpower to go to an Ivy League med school with the intention of becoming a neurosurgeon.

During his pro career, Pope was set up (sort of) with Lee Anne, who is the daughter of the late Lynn Archibald, a former college coach. She was working as a talent booker for David Letterman and Pope was traveling the country playing ball, so there wasn’t a lot of time for the two to date. Their initial courtship was largely via email.

The 1999 NBA lockout afforded them more time to deepen their relationship. Marriage and daughters followed, and the career plan was set for Pope to become a doctor. But the burning passion he had for basketball didn’t carry over to medicine.

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.

Absolutely not, Fox said. Do not quit Columbia med school to get into this racket.

Fox moved to Georgia in 2009, and Pope insisted he was ready to get into the profession. “If you have to have surgery, you do not want me holding the knife,” Pope said to Fox. 

Fox relented, telling Pope on a Friday that if he’s serious about it, show up for a kids camp ready to work by Sunday. Pope talked to Lee Anne, who encouraged him to go for it in spite of how crazy it might have seemed. Pope drove down the Atlantic seaboard in time for the camp, and a career was launched.

His approach was, as always, full tilt. Fox remembers telling Pope that he wanted to put on a nice tailgate spread for a recruiting weekend during the 2009 football season. Orders were followed. “I show up and we’ve got everything,” Fox recalls. “It’s incredible.”

Months later, the Georgia basketball office got a bill from the university for a satellite dish that was bought without approval. Pope had bought one for the tailgate. The staff found it in a closet, wrapped in cable.

“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.”

Fox gave Pope his first coaching job and now is on the staff at Kentucky. / Darren Yamashita-Imagn Images

Pope moved on to Wake Forest and BYU as an assistant before getting his first head-coaching job at Utah Valley in 2015. He stayed four years, winning 48 games in the final two and setting himself up for a return to BYU as the successor to Dave Rose when he retired.

At BYU, Pope’s free-flowing, three-shooting offensive philosophy thrived. The Cougars were 110–52 in his time there, making the NCAA tournament twice (a third bid was lost to the pandemic in 2020). A Mormon, BYU was a great fit—but then Kentucky came calling, and for the second time in his basketball life, he removed himself from a comfortable situation to chase a bigger dream.

“I cannot live this life without seeing if I can go do it,” Pope says of his mindset when transferring from Washington to Kentucky. “For this one [the coaching decision], it’s a lot deeper. There’s some of that sentiment, Jack London, ‘I’d rather be ashes than dust.’  

“I don’t think we’ve been given this life to be dust—that has no interest to me. But also I have the relationship with this place where it changed my life forever. It was formative for me. I got kicked out of here at the end of my tenure as a different human being.”

Pope returns to a warm embrace. But it’s the offseason. Fans that love a coach today will fall out of love when losses arrive. Coaches change, but championship expectations never do at Kentucky.

“I understand the assignment,” Pope said at his introduction, a line he has repeated often since.

Nobody knows how good his first Kentucky team will be, but his staff features a trusted right-hand man: Fox. During the spring, when Pope was sitting in that empty office, one of his first calls went to his old boss, who had taken an administrative job at Georgetown. While waiting to hear about the job, Fox called Pope one day while he was driving through Cincinnati—he was either turning right to head north to see family in Milwaukee, or left to go south to Lexington.

“Turn left,” Pope told him. 

“When I first knew Mark, I was the youngest guy in the staff room,” Fox says. “Now I’m the oldest guy in the room. Hopefully I can see around the corner a little bit and let him know what could be coming. But this place to him, it’s sacred ground. He treats it that way daily.”

In terms of players, Calipari left nothing behind but a couple of walk-ons, so the roster rebuild was massive and hasty. Transfers have arrived from nine schools, including one of Pope’s former players from BYU and a freshman recruit who had committed to the Cougars. How it all comes together in what should be a murderously difficult SEC is pure guesswork.

Future recruiting—the one area where Kentucky fans may grow wistful for the old Calipari monster classes—is off to a fast start. Pope has a pair of national top-30 commitments for 2025, according to Rivals.com, and plenty of other irons in the fire.

Every game matters at Kentucky—something else Calipari never really grasped, given some of his early-season losses. But one will matter more than the others: Feb. 1, when Arkansas comes to Rupp.

Win or lose, the current coach of the Wildcats will understand that game isn’t about him. The visiting coach might not get that.

“I know this is about something bigger than me,” Pope says. “If I win 10 national championships in a row, it will always be so much bigger than me. I am just blessed to have this little window of time, like I did as a player, where I get to offer my best to this thing. And that’s this place, man. That’s what this place is. That’s why I love this place so much.”