Road to UK started in town too small for football

By Mark Story - HERALD-LEADER SPORTS COLUMNIST

Winifred “Wimpy” Gillispie realized early on that her only son, Billy Clyde, was not going to be a normal Texan.

“When he was little, he always chose tennis shoes over boots,” Wimpy Gillispie said Friday of the middle of her five children. “That boy always loved basketball.”

Texas might be the capital of Planet Pigskin, but Billy Gillispie — who Friday inherited, arguably, the most prestigious coaching job in college basketball — grew up in a very atypical Lone Star town.

With a population of some 578, Graford, Texas, was too small to field much of a football team. So it didn’t try.

“They didn’t have enough money at the high school there to buy helmets, so (football) went out the door,” Billy Gillispie recalled Friday. “They’ve never played there and I don’t know if they ever will.”

The little town some 65 miles west of Fort Worth might as well have been in Kentucky. Its heart beat to the bounce, bounce, bounce of the basketball.

“Kids there aren’t very well-rounded,” Gillispie says. “They don’t learn how to play soccer. They don’t learn how to play tic-tac-toe or anything else. They learn how to play basketball.”

In five short years, Billy Gillispie has gone from first-year college head coach with a 6-24 team at Texas-El Paso (UTEP) to standing in the shoes of Rupp, Hall, Pitino and Smith as head coach at the University of Kentucky.

To understand the unquenchable passion for basketball and the toil-around-the-clock work ethic that allowed the 47-year-old divorced coach to pull it off, you have to start with the lessons of Graford.

Always a worker

Clyde Gillispie drove a cattle truck and, later, worked in the oil fields. Working hard was a way of life in the Gillispie home.

Even now, at age 74, Wimpy Gillispie still works full-time in the Morrow Grocery in Graford.

Asked Friday what the reaction had been in the little town to their native son landing the Kentucky job, Wimpy said “I don’t know. I’ve been working.”

Pause.

“Which is what I need to be doing right now,” she said, ending a phone interview.

At about age 7, Billy Gillispie says he knew he wanted to be a basketball coach. However, by the time he was in college, he wasn’t a good enough player to enter coaching off his reputation.

So to help his son out, Clyde Gillispie called on the solitary connection he had in college basketball. Bob Derryberry was a Graford man who had gone to high school with Clyde.

He was also head coach at Sam Houston State.

“Billy’s dad called me — this was 1980 — and Clyde said ‘I’m sending my boy down to Sam Houston to help you,’” Derryberry said Friday. “Clyde was always a bit of a character. So I said, ‘Good, send him right on.’ And the first time I met Billy was when he showed up.”

Billy Gillispie spent a year as team manager for Derryberry at Sam Houston. The coach then moved to Southwest Texas State (now Texas State). Gillispie went with him and spent three years (1982-85) as a graduate assistant.

The hyper-intense coach and brash public personality of the Billy Gillispie of today were not on display then, Derryberry says. “The thing I remember about him, whatever his job was, he got it done. I never had to tell him twice.

“But he was real reserved. Not nearly as forceful as the guy you see now. But, getting into coaching, it tends to change everyone.”

It was in a health class while Derryberry and Gillispie were still at Sam Houston that Gillispie met a cheerleader named Misty Maulding. In 1985, they married.

In the folksy, self-deprecating way he has perfected, Gillispie likes to joke that Misty was the reason he became a head coach.

In 1987, Billy was an assistant basketball coach at Killeen High School. Misty was a teacher and drill-team instructor at Copperas Cove High.

When Copperas Cove had an opening for a head coach, that school’s athletics director, Hal Mumme (yes, that Hal Mumme) hired Gillispie.

“My ex-wife was such a good drill-team coach, they didn’t want to lose her, so they had to hire me,” Gillispie jokes. “That’s why Hal made me a head coach.”