NEW YORK — It’s about 26 hours before Kentucky is scheduled to play Ohio State in the CBS Sports Classic on Saturday here inside Madison Square Garden, and I’m sitting at a table on the second floor of a luxury hotel overlooking Central Park, talking to UK coach Mark Pope while a light snow dusts the city.
The subject is … Hamilton.
Eventually, we’ll get to the 10-1 record, the No. 4 ranking, the surprise Pope had when what he calls the best job in the sport opened last April — and the even bigger surprise he experienced when it fell to him. Eventually, we’ll get to the basketball stuff. But, for now, and for several minutes, we’re talking about Hamilton. Because that’s what the Wildcats took in shortly after landing in New York on Thursday, they made the 22-block journey south from their hotel to the Richard Rodgers Theatre on West 46th Street to experience Lin-Manuel Miranda’s award-winning musical that premiered in 2015 and won 11 times at the 70th Tony Awards before also receiving the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Drama.
“It was awesome,” Pope said.
That’s usually the kind of thing folks say after exiting Hamilton — but, understand, Pope had just taken a Division I men’s basketball team to the theater, and, in truth, he knew going in that this is not the type of thing his players would do if it were left up to them.
So Pope didn’t leave it up to them.
“I do leave most of the itinerary decision-making up to the guys — and, on this one, we took a vote a week ago, and the guys were like …” Pope said before making a sound that indicated a lack of enthusiasm for the arts from his players. “And I was like, ‘I’m gonna make you go.'”
So, with a nudge from their coach, Kentucky’s players, some of whom were never going to fit comfortably in the small seats that fill most Broadway theaters, squeezed into their rows. The lights went down. The show started. After about 75 minutes, the lights came back on.
“They get to intermission and the guys are like, ‘OK, it’s over,'” Pope said with a smile. “And then they were like, ‘Wait, what!?!? It’s only halftime!?!?'”
About 90 minutes after that, Hamilton really was over. That’s when Pope decided to conduct a survey.
“Afterward, I told them, I said, ‘OK, guys, on the Misery Index, 10 being the most miserable, one being the least,’ And the highest score I got was a four,” Pope said. “Which is incredible. You never have a group of guys that doesn’t have some haters in it. Ever. But this group doesn’t. It’s just good dudes.”
To be clear, that’s not simply a funny story about basketball players being thrust into a situation where they’re in a small theater standing, in some cases, a foot taller than the curious tourists who can’t take their eyes off of them. I mean, sure, it is that. But it’s also a story that helps provide an understanding for how Pope built a roster from nothing via the transfer portal and created a top-five team that’s performed so well so far that the 1996 Kentucky graduate should be the current leader for National Coach of the Year.
“My staff was really good about putting together ‘A Team,'” Pope explained. “So I think we have the right staff, and our guys are focused on trying to put good people together. … So I think we have the right people in the building — both in the locker room and in the building. And we’re being very intentional about our guys hyper-speed getting to know each other. And we have guys who are willing to do that. And [Thursday] night [at Hamilton] was a great example.”
As I’ve already notes many times this season, what’s happening at Kentucky right now is the most fascinating story in the sport, in part because the be-careful-what-you-wish-for sentiment so many directed at UK fans when they practically begged Calipari to take the Arkansas job last April no longer exists.
Are you sure you want to run a Naismith Memorial Hall of Fame coach with a national title under his belt — plus six trips to the Final Four at three different schools — out of town, especially when he’s still recruiting at the tip-top of the sport? Things might not be going great — but, don’t you realize, they could be worse?
Not all outsiders felt that way, obviously, because, in many ways, the Kentucky-Calipari marriage did feel like it had run its course after 15 years — most of the early ones excellent, too many of the last ones disappointing. So UK fans wishing for change, pretty much any change, was understandable after that stunning loss to Oakland in the first round of the 2024 NCAA Tournament came so soon after that other stunning loss to Saint Peter’s in the first round of the 2022 NCAA Tournament.
Still, there was risk involved.
Remember, Kentucky fans also once begged Tubby Smith to leave following 10 straight trips to the NCAA Tournament only to watch the school replace him with Billy Gillispie, who was fired two years later. No coaching change is fool-proof. So when Kentucky declined to even try to talk Calipari out of leaving for Arkansas, and didn’t replace him with Scott Drew, Dan Hurley, Billy Donovan or some similarly massive name, there were no shortage of people slinging told-you-so comments in Big Blue Nation’s direction.
Then UK hired Pope.
“And all of BBN was like, ‘Noooooo!” Pope said with a laugh.
But now look!
The 51-year-old married father of four won BBN over in what felt like a matter of days, reconnected the program with the fanbase, enrolled nine transfers and is really just a couple of more made shots or stops in a game at Clemson earlier this month from being undefeated and (probably) ranked No. 1 in the Associated Press Top 25 poll. In the span of a year, Kentucky fans have gone from rooting for a team featuring multiple top-10 NBA Draft Picks that didn’t really play or look like a team to rooting for a team with zero projected first-round NBA Draft picks that plays and looks like one of the best teams in the nation.
Needless to say, they’re enjoying it.
Will things always been this good? Definitely not.
I probably don’t have to remind Kentucky fans that Calipari’s run at UK started with 19 straight wins and a No. 1 ranking and ended with consecutive losses to Texas A&M and Oakland. Things rarely stay great forever — and they end well even more infrequently. But if any of that is on Pope’s mind — the pressure of keeping this thing going, the stress that will come when he maybe doesn’t, the criticism that will get loud when he endures his first losing streak — he genuinely does a fabulous job of hiding it.
He knows hard times are likely unavoidable.
But they haven’t come yet.
So why worry about them now?
Yes, the best story in college basketball is the new-look Kentucky Wildcats, who will be inside the world’s most famous arena on Saturday for a game scheduled to tip at 5:30 ET on CBS. Barring an upset, UK will improve to 11-1 and allow the crowd that is expected to largely lean blue to continue to cheer the captain of Kentucky’s team that won the 1996 NCAA Tournament who has returned to his alma mater to try to return his alma mater to its rightful place in the sport, a place where the program annually competes for No. 1 rankings and national titles the way it did early in Calipari’s tenure but not enough late.
Asked how he feels seven weeks into a season that is exceeding all reasonable expectations, Pope swore he feels normal and comfortable even though a lot of what he’s dealing with, especially in terms of the eyeballs on him, is all brand new. Told he seems like he’s living a dream, he quickly flashed a smile.
“Yes, I am,” Pope said. “Yes, I am.”