What does the Louisville game mean to Mark Pope? One story sums it up for the UK coach.
Nearly four months ago, Mark Pope and Pat Kelsey — both still new on the job — shared a stage in Louisville and looked ahead at the future of their respective basketball programs.
The setting was the Leadership Louisville Center’s annual luncheon, and the topic was leadership, in general. There was a little basketball talk, but most of this friendly conversation between coaches was centered on bigger-picture ideas related to guiding others.
Of course, the UK-U of L rivalry did come up. And while neither Kelsey nor Pope had yet to coach a game in their new positions, the contrast in familiarity with “Cats vs. Cards” was clear.
Kelsey grew up in Cincinnati — about as close as you can get to Kentucky without actually being inside the commonwealth — and he spent years in the city as a high school and college assistant before becoming a head coach elsewhere.
Pope grew up on the other side of the country — graduating from high school in Seattle and beginning his college basketball career there — before transferring to UK as a 20-year-old and spending three years on campus, leaving for the NBA with a love of Lexington in his heart.
Kelsey spoke of his first few weeks in the Louisville job and how he had to get adjusted to just how seriously people take basketball around here. Pope learned all about that 30 years ago.
“Coach Pope said it — like, this is home to him,” Kelsey said at one point. “Now, I’m from 75 miles up the road over the Ohio River, so I was close enough to feel — in the state of Kentucky — how big basketball is, but I am new here. … I knew it was important. But I didn’t realize it totally, right?”
To realize it totally, as Kelsey put it, you’ve got to live it first. And when it comes to the rivalry game itself, no one who will be out on the Rupp Arena court Saturday knows what it means nearly as well as Pope.
After UK’s victory over Colgate on Wednesday night, Pope was asked if he could properly communicate to his players — all of them new to the Wildcats’ program — how much folks in the commonwealth care about this game. He hesitated for a bit.
“The answer is probably no,” Pope finally said. “You probably have to experience it to do it. But I also am blessed with guys — you know, I have seasoned guys. I have guys that have played in big-time rivalry games. So it’s not like a foreign concept to them. This is just a little level up, right? So it won’t be unfamiliar to our guys. But it’s exciting. And it’s awesome. And we love it and we hate it and we all of the things.”
Pope was then asked if this experience might be “unfamiliar” even to him, since he’d be approaching it from a different angle — as a head coach — 29 years after his last taste of the rivalry.
To that, he gave a little quicker reply.
Pope uttered the word “no” four times, then added with a smile: “I’m well aware of the beauty of this rivalry.”
This particular matchup carries a unique challenge for the Kentucky coach, who often talks about preparing his players for every game as if it’s the “biggest” of their basketball careers, acknowledging that’s a cliché but somehow sounding genuine while he says it.
At the same time, Pope has always taken a wear-your-school-spirit-on-your-sleeve approach to UK basketball — even before he got this job — and that love and understanding of the Wildcats has been apparent from the moment he landed back in Lexington.
Pope knows that this one — to coaches, players and fans — isn’t just another game.
Introduction to UK-Louisville
To illustrate his own understanding of what this game means, Pope has — on multiple occasions since taking the UK coaching position — relayed a story that was told to him by his own college coach, Rick Pitino, who would tell it as the origin of his own introduction to the rivalry.
“Coach Pitino has shared this story many times. And he shared it with me — actually as he was recruiting me — just talking about what Kentucky was,” Pope said on his radio show this week.
The story features longtime UK equipment manager Bill Keightley, a familiar, beloved figure in the program’s history who died in 2008 and has a banner with his name hanging in Rupp Arena.
“One of one. The best ever,” Pope interrupts his own retelling to say of the man known as Mr. Wildcat. “He welcomed Coach Pitino here and was kind of one of Coach P’s trusted allies from day one.”
As Pope tells the story, UK had a routine where Pitino would send the players from the locker room to the court for the last time before tipoff, and then Keightly would come in, make sure Pitino had everything he needed, and when Pitino was ready the duo would walk out onto the floor together. This was how things went for the first nine games of Pitino’s first season.
Game 10 was against Louisville, and Mr. Wildcat was nowhere to be found.
“And so Coach P sends the team out, and he’s like, ‘There’s no Bill Keightley. Where is Bill Keightley?’” Pope says. “And so Coach is walking around the locker room, and he’s like, ‘Man, we gotta go.’ He looks out in the hall. He finally goes back in the showers, sees the great Mr. Wildcat Bill just sitting on the floor. He’s dressed in his suit. He’s sitting on the floor, tears streaming down his face, with an open bottle of bourbon in his arms. Just feeling the stress and the pressure of this Kentucky-Louisville game. And that’s when Coach Pitino was like, ‘OK, this is different.’ Like, ‘This just means more.’
“And I wasn’t there for that. But hearing Coach talk about it and then getting to know and love Mr. Keightley so much, I can totally picture it. And it’s one of the ways that I appreciate this rivalry.”
New players in the rivalry
Pope joined the Wildcats as a transfer from Washington, but he had to sit out the 1993-94 season as a redshirt — No. 2-ranked UK beat No. 7 U of L that year in Rupp Arena — and was on the wrong end of the game in which Cardinals big man Samaki Walker tallied a triple-double on the Cats in Freedom Hall the following season.
On Dec. 23, 1995, Pope and the Wildcats beat Louisville 89-66 in Rupp on their way to the 1996 national title, sending the UK captain out a winner in his final taste of the rivalry as a player.
And while none of the current Cats have experienced what’s coming Saturday night firsthand, they’re not complete strangers to this series. Trent Noah and Travis Perry — both freshmen — are Kentucky natives, and they grew up watching the Cats and Cards go at it on the court.
Beyond that, most of the team was in attendance for an odd chapter in the rivalry over the summer.
Before he even had his roster assembled, Pope knew he’d be coaching a team filled with strangers and wanted them to look for as many ways possible to bond off the court. One of those summer activities was attending TBT games in Rupp Arena featuring former UK stars from the John Calipari era competing in a $1 million elimination tournament.
The new Cats showed up to cheer on the old Cats in those games — even practicing alongside them a couple of times to help them prepare for the tournament — and the current team ended up traveling to Louisville’s Freedom Hall when the UK squad advanced to the TBT quarterfinals. On that night, the new guys got a taste of what this thing was all about.
The Kentucky team beat a squad filled with former U of L stars, emotions running high throughout the game and finally spilling over once it was decided, a full-on brawl nearly erupting on the court with uniformed security guards having to step in to separate the two sides.
Pope’s players learned a lot that night.
“That was a great experience, just seeing how even the older guys — they’re not even playing at these universities anymore — but they still got that same hate,” said UK guard Koby Brea. “So it was really cool to just go out there and see them compete. Just seeing how the energy changed from that game compared to all the games that they played before that — it was a lot different. And that’s something that I took notice of. And I’m just super excited, man.”
UK forward Andrew Carr was also among the Wildcats in attendance that night.
“The TBT game was kind of a great way for us to kind of get the first feel of the rivalry,” he said. “Of course, a lot of us — being in college basketball — have been part of other rivalry games before, but there’s nothing quite like the Louisville-Kentucky rivalry game. And we saw that even in a bunch of older guys trying to go at it. So, it’s going to be a super special game on Saturday. We’re super excited. And to really get the first feel, in person — us actually being able to play in that game — will be awesome.”
This veteran group of Wildcats also knows they can’t get too amped for this one, and they don’t seem to think that will be a problem.
Since this UK roster has no returning scholarship players, there won’t be any bad blood boiling over from previous rivalry games. And with no young, impressionable freshmen in major roles, a repeat of the 2010 edition — when Eric Bledsoe was benched eight seconds in and DeMarcus Cousins was nearly ejected before either team took a shot — seems unlikely.
These Cats can appreciate the gravity of the situation without getting caught up in the hoopla surrounding it, they say.
“It’s all about the start of the game, being able to punch first and stuff like that,” Brea said. “But at the end of the day, we stay true to ourselves. And I feel like, if we do that, then we’ll be totally fine. We know that throughout the game, there’s gonna be ups and downs, like every other game. They’re gonna have their runs. We’re gonna have ours. But at the end of the day, we just gotta stay together and stay tough. And that’s what it’s all going to be about.”
Pope meets Louisville, again
As Kentucky’s coach sat down for his weekly press conference Friday afternoon, he made a promise.
“Fire away, guys,” Pope said. “I’m gonna give you good stuff today. I don’t know what it is, but it’s gonna be something spicy.”
He was enlightening on several topics, as usual, but he never fully took the bait regarding his feelings on the rivalry with Louisville.
Asked for his favorite memory from one of those games, he gave a one-word reply.
“Winning,” Pope said with a smile.
Asked specifically what this game means to him, the 52-year-old coach bunched it into a conversation regarding all in-state opponents, noting such games are always special and that his Wildcats had already played two — Kentucky Wesleyan in the exhibition opener and Western Kentucky in Rupp Arena — this season.
“It’s like going in the backyard with your brother and playing one on one,” Pope said. “And the rules go out the window. And all the stats and all the analytics and all the things go out the window. And it’s just different. These in-state games, they never amount to the trends of the season. We might as well take all of our analytics and just throw them out the window, because what we know is the game is not going to look anything like all the other games look like.
“And it’s just a brawl. And the games are so fun, and they’re so intense, and they mean so much. And so it’s really special that way.”
Pope then returned to his line that the Cats will prepare for this game with the same intensity as they did with all the ones that came before and all the ones that will follow.
He praised Louisville guard Chucky Hepburn, one of the best defensive players in the country. He lauded Kelsey as a coach and a person — “He is going to crush it there,” Pope said — and he made clear he thinks the Cardinals have a bright future ahead of them.
Two of Pope’s former BYU players — Noah Waterman, a regular starter for the Cards, and Aly Khalifa, who’s sitting out the season as a medical redshirt — will be on the U of L sideline Saturday.
“These are two young men that I love. Like, they’re special,” Pope said. “So, it’s our job to really, really just hate Louisville. But that’s hard to do, and certainly in terms of those two guys.”
Pope kept things civil in his pregame comments, but — however he prepares his players — anyone paying attention knows he’ll feel at least a little bit differently walking onto the Rupp Arena court before this game than he did leading up to the others this season.
After UK defeated Western Kentucky last month, Pope praised the Hilltoppers’ program and their rich basketball history.
“I love everything about the team,” he said, setting up the dig at that other in-state school with a deadpan delivery. “Except for that red color just drives me crazy.”
Asked Friday if he recalled how he felt when Pitino, his mentor, took the Louisville job, Pope smiled.
“Yeah, I couldn’t believe it,” he said. “I mean, I just couldn’t believe it. But that’s Coach P, man. I’ve spent a lot of my lifetime being like, ‘I can’t believe that. I can’t believe it.’ Right? He’s just unbelievable. But I get it, you know? I think …”
Pope trailed off, before adding with a grin: “Yeah, I still shake my head at that one.”
Another attempt to get Pope to dive deeper into the rivalry — specifically, how he would try and explain its importance to his players — ended like the rest. The coach acknowledged it was an “unsatisfying answer” before reiterating that he and his Cats “bring it” at “100%” for every single game, no matter the opponent.
“I actually don’t know how to live any different,” he said. “And so I know that the fans will feel a little bit different going to this game, but for us, I mean, when you sell out 100% on a game — like, I don’t know how to sell out more on the next one or more on the one after that, right?”
But Pope referenced that Bill Keightley story again Friday, and what he said after bringing it up drives home what he really thinks about the Cats vs. the Cards.
“I heard the story before I ever got here. And then — of everything I experienced in this rivalry, in these games, and from our fans and personally — there’s never been an experience or a story that’s captured exactly what this is, in my heart, better …”
The image of a grown man, slumped down in the shower, tears streaming down his face and a bottle of bourbon in his arms. All over a basketball game.
“And it’s a great thing,” Pope finished. “And we’re really blessed to be a part of it. And it matters. It matters.”
This story was originally published December 13, 2024 at 2:21 PM.
