Editor’s note: This is the second in a series of stories from Kentucky Today sports editor Keith Taylor’s exclusive interview with Kentucky men’s basketball coach Mark Pope.
By Keith Taylor
Kentucky Today
To Mark Pope, there’s no place like the Bluegrass State.
Set to embark on his first season as coach of the Kentucky Wildcats, Pope still hasn’t forgotten the welcome he received during his introductory press conference at Rupp Arena last spring. It’s a moment he continues to be proud of nearly six months into his tenure at Kentucky.
“Unless you’re here, you just can’t understand it,” Pope said earlier this week. “It’s why the press conference has been so helpful to me because I show that video and talk about that all the time. Because when I say there’s a difference between Kentucky — there’s a separation between Kentucky and all the other great programs. People don’t understand. They don’t. They will say UConn just won two national championships or Michael Jordan went to North Carolina …”
Pope added Duke, North Carolina, UConn and UCLA are “incredible” and great “programs,” but he said a press conference that brought a sellout crowd to Rupp Arena that day is what separates Kentucky from the rest of the elite programs in college basketball.
“People are crying and cheering and everything in the stands and you get to see the product of how Kentucky is just different,” he said. “What happened there has never happened in any sport at any level ever before — it’s a press conference. It’s a 15-minute speech.
“It’s just different. And that’s not taking away anything from those great programs. It’s just this place is built different.”
Pope admitted he had “no idea” what to expect when he arrived that Sunday afternoon, but was no longer surprised once he stepped off the bus that brought him back to Rupp Arena similar to the team’s arrival at Rupp to celebrate the 1996 national championship.
“When I walked out of the bus, I was like, ‘Of course, this is how it is, this is BBN,’” he recalled. “There’s nowhere like it and it’s kind of like so much that even when you’re in it, you don’t actually believe it, you actually forget and it just seems beyond comprehension. This is BBN and it’s built into us, Man is part of who we are and it’s part of our identity, in a way that is just different than anywhere else.”
Pope also spoke of the unity between the fan base and the program, which “brings us together.”
“What was really special at the press conference, what’s really special about the games and what’s really special about Big Blue Madness (is the fact that people in) the stands are looking down at our guys on the court and building that relationship,” he said. “What makes the relationships really special is the people understand and realize that they have this person sitting right next to them, whether it’s their grandfather or whether it’s their child or whether it’s their wife.
“They met it at the University of Kentucky and had their wedding at halftime of an NCAA Tournament game. They watch every game in their Kentucky room at the house that’s devoted just to Kentucky games or they remember, they’re there and they have the memories of their grandpa who’s no longer living but used to drive them up on to the hilltop in Eastern Kentucky, so they listen to Cawood Ledford do the game in the cold or whatever it is …
“Maybe people in the world don’t get it, but we get it and it’s that community. It’s the community around Kentucky basketball that really makes it different than everywhere else.”