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It was the winter of 1987, and Hal Mumme was in a bind.
Mumme, then the head football coach and athletics director at Copperas Cove (Texas) High School — and still 10 years from becoming Kentucky’s head football coach — needed a basketball coach.
“Football season was over, and I was ready to kind of relax,” Mumme recalled Friday.
“But my boss’s son was an ex-basketball star at the school, and he came into my office and said, ‘We need to do something about the basketball program, and you’re the A.D.’” The Copperas Cove administration wanted to hire a big name from one of the Class 4A or 5A programs. Mumme tried, but was turned down several times.
Mumme then had a conversation with Misty Gillispie, who was the drill-team instructor at Copperas Cove and at the time was the wife of Billy Gillispie, a junior-varsity coach at rival school Killeen. Mumme made the 6-mile drive to Killeen to check out Gillispie, brought him in for an interview and hired him on the spot.
“He was in my office five minutes and I knew he was the guy,” Mumme said. “He’s got this incredible magnetism about anything he does. It’s not a showy magnetism. It’s a real humble magnetism.”
Gillispie took over a moribund Copperas Cove program and won 20 games in his first season before moving on to Canyon High School in New Braunfels, Texas.
Mumme, who left UK after the 2001 season, is now head coach at New Mexico State. He said he stayed in touch with Gillispie over the years and was “really pleased” that he got the Kentucky job.
“I was really good friends with Tubby (Smith), but if it was time for a change, Kentucky couldn’t have hired a better person,” he said.
