Kentucky’s keys are in the hands of a coach unlike any other

LEXINGTON, Ky. — This began with a threat. Not a thinly veiled threat. No. This was about as direct as it gets.

Mark Pope, all 6 feet and 10 inches of him, stood tall, pushing his shoulders back. Considering his size, his shaved head, and his background — a decade spent banging around the paint as a journeyman NBA center back in the late ’90s and early 2000s, when freedom of movement was a foreign concept and survival required withstanding elbows in the chest — he should be an imposing figure. Except Pope has this way of being impossibly likable. He looks and sounds like a human exclamation point. He throws around adjectives like he’s writing the latest “Hardy Boys” volume. Everything he sees or hears is brilliant! Or incredible! Or the greatest thing ever! Mixed in with the overloaded enthusiasm is the reality that Pope is, even though he’ll never admit it, an intellectual. He can spend hours discussing philosophy or theology. In a past life, he was a Rhodes scholar candidate on his way to becoming a doctor. He is, as his former coach Rick Pitino says, “smarter than 99 percent of college basketball coaches.”

Add it all up and Pope, no matter how big, isn’t intimidating.

That’s why the threat wasn’t his.

“I’m fair game, but if you say anything about the girls,” Pope warned, shaking hands inside his office at the University of Kentucky, half-smiling, eyes moving cautiously, “Lee Anne will burn your house down.”

Welcome to the Pope Family. There’s your postcard.

Last spring, they were scattered. Each one in his or her own world. Lee Anne was in Texas, visiting a brother in the hospital. Ella, the oldest, was off embarking on early professional life. Avery, then a college junior, was heading into tennis practice at Brigham Young University. Layla, a BYU freshman, was in Salt Lake City, prepping for that night’s Utah Jazz-Houston Rockets game, her makeup half-done for a dance team performance. Shay, the youngest, was home in Provo, Utah, in the throes of high school volleyball practice.

And Dad? He was in a job interview with Kentucky athletic director Mitch Barnhart.

Soon their cell phones were buzzing. Text messages in the family group chat. Pope told his wife and four daughters he needed them on a call. He mentioned a Zoom. No, no, one of the girls replied. Just start a group Facetime. OK. Everyone scrambled to find a quiet spot to talk, a little privacy. But then — where’s Shay? Volleyball practice wasn’t over yet. As the youngest, she is, of course, the favorite. They couldn’t start without her. Finally picking up her phone, Shay found a screen flooded with alerts. “Oh, my gosh.”

The call could hardly handle their collective wavelength. Wide eyes stared at screens, stared at one another. There was smiling, some lip-biting. Finally, Dad asked, “How do we feel if I go to Kentucky?” The tears started rolling.

This wasn’t a done deal yet. Pope told his family, “Listen, if anyone isn’t OK with this, I will stay at BYU.” He meant it. And he needed to hear from everyone on the call. He went around one by one.

Each daughter looked at her dad and saw a man who, in the moment, had somehow lassoed his whole life history and pulled it all together. Mark Pope was born in Omaha, Neb., to a family that followed his dad’s career. Don Pope took a job with Union Pacific in New York in the 1970s, when Mark was a kid. Then he took a job with Burlington Resources in Seattle. Don and his wife, Linda, raised six kids in Bellevue, Wash. Mark grew tall, starring on the basketball court, and accepted a scholarship to the University of Washington in 1991. Two years later, his coach was let go, setting off a chain of events that, you will learn, somehow led to his life unfolding with a charmed bliss he could never have imagined; and, ultimately, shaping the direction of college basketball’s winningest program — the Kentucky Wildcats.

So, yes, it was a big question.

Lee Anne went first, telling her husband she loved him and was proud of him. Yes. Then each of the girls. Yes. Yes. Yes. Go Cats.

Shay went last, sort of hiding her face from the screen. As the baby, she’s the only Pope girl who didn’t previously move around a lot as a kid, instead growing up primarily in Utah, spending her whole life in a singular world. Everyone on the call knew a move would impact Shay the most. Changing high schools, new friends, living in a huge spotlight. Hard stuff for a 15-year-old.

Shay peeked at the screen so her family could see her. Yes.

“I knew what Kentucky was, because my dad has talked about it so much, but I didn’t really get it,” Shay says now. “I was sad, but … it’s just, I love my dad, and he’s … he’s my favorite person, you know? This is, like, his actual dream. And that’s bigger than me being mad or sad about having to leave my friends, right?”

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Outside the family, there once existed a prevailing thought that maybe Pope wasn’t the man for arguably the biggest job in college basketball. It was April, to be exact. Back when all hell broke loose.

First, John Calipari, Kentucky’s second all-time winningest coach behind Adolph Rupp, pulled an all-time vanishing act, trading years of growing animosity for an out-of-nowhere move to Arkansas. The general feeling was shock, but understanding. Both sides — Cal and the Cats — probably needed a fresh start. If anything, those in Lexington were excited. It was assumed the program would land some big-time name. Scott Drew. Dan Hurley. Bruce Pearl. Or maybe even a demigod like Billy Donovan or Jay Wright.

But then Drew said no. And Hurley said no. Pearl and others were non-options, weighed by prohibitive contract buyouts. Donovan wasn’t willing to talk until after the NBA season. Wright was a pipe dream.

That led Barnhart to Pope. The fifth-year BYU head coach was a Kentucky legend; symbolically, maybe more so than athletically. He first arrived in Lexington in 1993, when Pitino brought him in as a transfer, hoping he’d be the glue guy for a team ready to win a national championship. Pope had started for two seasons at Washington, but would come off the bench for the dynamic, dynastic Kentucky teams of the mid-90s. A fire hydrant in the middle of a collection of Cadillacs — Tony Delk, Antoine Walker, Walter McCarty, Derek Anderson, Ron Mercer. He was co-captain of the 1996 national title team. He set screens like a door jamb, grabbed every loose ball and defended like a madman. All told, Kentucky went 62-7 in his two seasons. Pope earned a place in Wildcat lore and was drafted with the 52nd overall pick in the 1996 NBA Draft.

But, head coach? Of Kentucky? Pope had a nice four-year run at Utah Valley, and went 110-52 at BYU, but — c’mon. He never won a league championship. He never won an NCAA Tournament game. His 2023-24 team successfully navigated BYU’s difficult jump from the West Coast Conference to the Big 12, but flamed out in the first round of the big dance, losing to 11th-seeded Duquesne.

Kentucky fans are notoriously demanding and chronically online. The response to Pope’s emergence as head coach went as follows: He’s too unproven. He can’t recruit. The job is too big for him.

All of those things could very well be true.

Barnhart hired him anyway.

Now the keys to the kingdom are in the hands of a coach unlike any other in program history. He’s a coach who is, above all else, Lee Anne’s husband, and dad to Ella, Avery, Layla and Shay. He’s a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. He’s the first UK graduate to serve as head coach since Basil Hayden — a 1922 grad who coached the Wildcats in 1926-27. (Joe B. Hall, who led Kentucky to the 1978 national championship, transferred to, and graduated from, Sewanee.)

Sitting in his office, the 52-year-old looks around like a puppy encountering snow for the first time, and says, can you believe this? Like he wants it to feel like a shared experience.

“This is so awesome,” he adds. “And yet, believe it or not, it feels totally natural to me.”

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Lynn Archibald first became aware of Mark Pope sometime in the late 1980s. He began recruiting the 6-foot-9 center from Bellevue (Wash.) Newport High School as University of Utah head coach. Then, after being let go in 1988-89, continued the recruitment as an assistant on Bill Frieder’s staff at Arizona State.

It was a long line of suitors. Pope was among the best Class of ’91 high school players in the West. Maybe a notch below Jason Kidd and Cherokee Parks, but high on the list of top recruits nationally. In November 1990, he broke hearts by choosing hometown Washington over a list including California, Arizona, Syracuse, Utah and Kentucky. Arizona State wasn’t in the picture, but Archibald still thought highly of Pope. He typed up a letter congratulating him and welcoming him to the Pac-10 Conference.

That’s how Archibald did things. Old-school. He was self-made and appreciated those who were the same. His coaching career was the byproduct of a knockabout college playing career — some time at Utah State, a year at El Camino Junior College, a degree from Fresno State. He found some work coaching in the California prep ranks in the ’60s and threw himself into it. He dutifully attended camps conducted by Long Beach State head coach Jerry Tarkanian, who eventually hired him. Archibald spent two seasons at Long Beach State, then filled an opening at Cal Poly, then reunited with Tarkanian in 1974, joining his staff at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Two years in the desert were followed by one season at USC, then five as Idaho State head coach.

This would be Archibald’s life’s work — chasing the profession. Along the way, he and his wife, Anne, had two sons, Beau and Damon, and a daughter, Lee Anne.

After being let go at Idaho State, Archibald spent 1982-83 as Jerry Pimm’s assistant at Utah. He was surprised when Pimm took a job at Cal Santa Barbara that April, and more surprised when Utah asked him to take over. At the time of Archibald’s promotion, Tarkanian told The Salt Lake Tribune, “He is the finest person I know and is a great coach. Everybody loves him.” There are reams of quotes like this about Archibald. He was handsome, funny and curious. As a Mormon with a worldly view, he was a pioneer in international recruiting — tapping Yugoslavia, Venezuela, Nigeria for players.

Archibald’s family was part of every team he coached. Lee Anne saw Utah players Mitch Smith, Manny Hendrix and Kelvin Upshaw as superheroes. She changed schools every few years and rarely complained. She was a coach’s kid.

There was one last move, this time in 1994. Archibald returned to his home state of Utah, filling an assistant spot at BYU — the perfect place to settle with a family in full bloom. The Archibald kids were off chasing their own dreams by now. Lee Anne was on her way to New York City for, get this, a job as David Letterman’s personal assistant. Damon landed a scholarship to play ball at Boise State. Beau was a talented high school player, on his way to a scholarship at Washington State. Life was good.

So you understand why Lynn Archibald didn’t tell them, why he made his wife promise to keep the secret. Prostate cancer wasn’t going to define his final years. He didn’t want the kids to make their life decisions based on him being sick. He didn’t want anyone feeling sorry for him. So he wouldn’t tell them until he absolutely had to.

Archibald died in May 1997. Only 52. Lee Anne and her brothers were there for the final weeks. Looking back, she says now that, had she known about her father’s diagnosis two years earlier, she likely wouldn’t have lived in New York, or started her career — exactly all the things her dad didn’t want her to give up. She wonders where life would’ve taken her.

Because Lynn Archibald gave his kids the freedom to keep on living in his final years, a perfect series of dominoes all fell in order. In 1998, Damon Archibald met Mark Pope at the Pete Newell Basketball Camp. Immediately, he was floored to come across what he would describe as, essentially, the male version of his sister. Damon, who had never previously set up his sister with anyone, let alone another basketball player, wrote down Lee Anne’s phone number and gave it to Mark.

Mark, a member of the Indiana Pacers, called Lee Anne during the 1998 NBA player lockout. The two did what people did back then — phone calls on landlines and email exchanges. Around that time, Letterman told Lee Anne he needed help setting up a charity. It would be based in his home state. To get it off the ground, she’d need to take regular trips to Indianapolis.

They met later in 1998; married in 1999. Then came the girls — Ella in winter 2001, when Pope was the starting center for the Milwaukee Bucks; then Avery, during Pope’s brief stint with the Knicks; then Layla, when he was with the Denver Nuggets, then Shay in 2009, when Pope was out of the league, in medical school.

As it turns out, in another life, Pope might have ended up as a 6-foot-10 emergency room physician. Except, one day, not long after Shay was born, while studying orthopedic surgery at Columbia, Mark came home one day to tell Lee Anne that the younger students around him felt about medicine the way he felt about basketball. Lee Anne, with blind certainty, responded that there was only one option.

“Burn the ships,” she says, 15 years later.

So at 37, with four kids, Pope dropped out of med school and took a job on Mark Fox’s coaching staff at the University of Georgia. Title: Assistant to the director of operations. Salary: $24,000 for the year.

Lee Anne understood the ride ahead. That her family was about to subscribe to wins and losses, and to sharing their dad’s time with waves upon waves of young men, and to job changes beyond their control — from Georgia, to Wake Forest, to an assistant gig at BYU in 2011, to Utah Valley in 2015, and back to BYU. She was now a coach’s wife. And she was more equipped to do that than anyone imaginable.

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That joke? The one you might be thinking of? Something like, “Oh, you think coaching Kentucky is hard? Trying raising four girls.” Yeah, Pope has heard it before.

It usually plays out something like this. The family is packed in an elevator, or standing together in an airport, or waiting in line at a coffee shop, minding their own business, when the old trope comes up. Some guy sees Pope, sees the wife, sees the four daughters, and quips, “Sheesh, sorry, man,” or, “Man, got your hands full,” or whatever other empty-headed zinger seems like a good idea.

But Pope doesn’t do tropes. Instead, things get very uncomfortable, very quickly. Pope has, according to Lee Anne, never laughed, never played along. Not once. Not ever. Instead, he clenches his jaw, narrows his eyes and spits back. “Are you kidding me, man? This is the best. Do you know how lucky I am?”

It’s in that moment that old jokes go to die and the Pope girls are reminded who their father is. Understanding the coach requires understanding the father, and Pope is equipped with the emotional maturity that comes with balanced realities.

“All these years, he’d be with his boys all day, then home to his girls, who all adore him,” Lee Anne Pope says. “But the thing is, he’s the same guy in both settings. It’s not like he hangs it up at the door.”

They all have their stories. They usually come with tears. The Pope family isn’t one to hide emotions.

Ella, for instance. Sitting on a couch in her dad’s office, arms wrapped around a pillow, she remembers a ride to school one day in grade school. She had created a video that was to air throughout the school that day. Opening her laptop, watching it one last time on the drive, she was hit with a wave of nerves. She closed the laptop, turning ghost-white. Pope, realizing what was happening, slowed down to a stop, pointed to Ella’s stomach, all twisted in knots, and said, “That’s it. That’s the feeling. That’s when you know you care and when you know you’ve worked at something. That’s the best.” She’s never forgotten it, never forgotten that passion is worth pursuing, worth manifesting, worth feeling. She remembered it when she was the only Pope girl to pursue basketball, earning a scholarship to Ohio University.

Avery thinks of her dad’s ability to be there, right where she could see him. Those tennis matches in the deep heat of California or Arizona, the sun rippling off the court. Other parents parked as close as possible and sat in air-conditioned cars. But Mr. Pope? He watched out in the sun because Avery was out in the sun. He didn’t sit because she didn’t sit. He wouldn’t yell or make a scene or even stand out. He would instead intently watch each point, Avery says, “living and dying for every moment.” He’s always had that way of appearing from out of nowhere. Earlier this year, soon after Pope was named Kentucky head coach, she was scheduled to give a farewell talk to her LDS Church ward in Provo in preparation for her upcoming two-year mission in El Salvador. She was scheduled to speak for, at most, 15 minutes.

“He had a million things going on, and it made no sense for him to fly across the country, but there he was,” she says. “I’ve always felt like, in my life, there have been so many different times where it would be OK if he wasn’t there. But then he’s there. And it just happens over and over and over again.”

Layla remembers coming home upset one day in the sixth grade, telling her parents a boy in school called her “the B-word.” The following morning, a surprise guest speaker was scheduled. The class door swung up at 1 p.m. and in came coach Mark Pope and six members of the Utah Valley State basketball team. “Today we’re going to talk about respecting women,” Pope said to a room of wide eyes and deep silence. They spoke to the class for nearly an hour. On the way out, Pope introduced himself to the boy who had insulted his daughter. He shook his hand, maybe offering an extra squeeze.

“I mean, we were in sixth grade!” Layla says now, laughing hard. “It was incredible. I was like, oh my goodness, this is the greatest day of my whole life. But that’s my dad. He’s, like, the most protective, loving person ever. And the only time you’ll ever really see him truly mad is if you did anything to hurt me or my sisters or my mom.”

Shay loves to tell the story of the cash advance. Back in Utah, she had the idea to order DoorDash to school, then upsell the food in the cafeteria. She called her old man. “Dad, I have this idea, but I don’t have any money.” Pope, without hesitation, responded. “Love it. You’re a genius. I’ll give you a hundred dollars to get started.” The money came via Venmo and Shay started moving product. Capitalism in action. “It worked perfectly,” she says. That is, until Lee Anne’s phone rang, with a school official saying her daughter was essentially operating a racketeering outfit in the caf.

“Apparently,” the official said to Lee Anne, “one of Shay’s parents was involved in funding this.”

“He’s just the best,” says Layla, now a 16-year-old sophomore.

The stories go on and on. The Pope women speak of their father like an amusement ride. He has a way of mastering moments, the few that he gets, to make the most of them. He’s an experience, one that blocks out all the other noise.

“Even if we have a million eyes on us,” Ella says, “my dad makes it feel like it’s just us.”

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Over the summer, Pope met with local Lexington media for an offseason news conference. He leaned into the most relatable version of himself. The ex-NBA player who says he wasn’t much of a basketball player. The Rhodes scholar who says he isn’t very bright. In that news conference, he pressed play on the role he’s presented for as long as he can remember.

“A bit casual, maybe a little self-deprecating,” he now says. “That’s my armor.”

The media session wrapped up and, on the way out, Pope asked longtime Kentucky basketball media relations director Deb Moore for feedback. “How’d that go?” Moore told Pope that he was good, then paused, and added one passing thought. “But at some point, in this job, you’re going to have to take yourself a little more seriously,” she said.

The point — Kentucky, for as incredible and passionate and dedicated as it is, can also be ruthless. It’s a place where a vulnerable disposition is ripe to be weaponized. It’s a place where, once the wins and losses start coming, the coach with the clipboard is no longer seen as a person. He’s a target.

Pope was furious. “Deb, you don’t know me yet …” he popped back.

The two didn’t speak for the next three days. Pope continued to bake and Moore wondered if she’d gone a step too far. But then came Sunday, a trip to church, and some time for Pope to think.

“It had sat with me and sat with me and sat with me,” he says. “I finally came to realize, this matters to people in a different way. Like, this job is bigger than me. This job is more important than me. Really, there’s a little reverence to it. But that’s a new role for me. I’ve always eschewed that a little bit. Because I just want to be reachable and connect with people. Now I need to find a balance.”

In reality, Pope understands all this more than anyone Kentucky could’ve hired. The few times Big Blue lost during his time as a player, Pope retreated to the Cat Lodge, the team’s housing facility, and cried alone. It was the pressure of being captain. It was the pressure of answering to Pitino. It was the pressure of being 2,400 miles from home, in a place so hard-wired to every bounce, every play, and every breath of Kentucky basketball.

He gets it. And he welcomes it.

“I think he will handle it better than all of us,” Pitino says of himself and other former Kentucky coaches. “Because he’s so grounded and he’s such a spiritual person. I think he’s going to handle it beautifully. He knows it so well.”

The faithful are giving Pope a chance. His return to Lexington last spring was greeted with a raucous introduction that filled Rupp Arena — all 23,500 seats — to the brim. He is, after all, one of them.

But Lee Anne knows there are still doubts. And she knows the honeymoon will only last so long. And she knows her family is in a spotlight so big that not even an amusement ride can block it out. This, though, she says, is what they’re all built for. It’s why they all said yes on that family call. It’s why they believe in the coach.

“You know, somebody said to me, he’s goofy,” Lee Anne says, a little defense in her voice. “But no. He’s not goofy. He’s just — in a world where everyone is cool, he is not too cool. And there’s a big difference. He’s brilliant. He’s authentic. And he’s going to outwork everyone. I know it.”

The office door is closed and Pope makes one last thing clear. He didn’t make his family. His family made him. The biggest job in college basketball doesn’t change that. The heat that’s coming — playing Duke, traveling to his hometown to play Gonzaga in Seattle, battles in the SEC, the second-guessing, the fans swarming to social media, the exposure — will only be granted pieces of him. Never the whole.

“Being the coach at Kentucky,” he says, “if it’s everything you are, you won’t be any good at it.”

(Illustration: Meech Robinson / The Athletic; photos: Andy Lyons / Getty Images)