Kyle Tucker is back (welcome back Kyle!) and he has a great article today about Rick Pitino calling Mark Pope earlier this season when Kentucky was on the ropes.
“I said stop being — I didn’t say a baby — I said, ‘Stop worrying about your problems to the media. Get tough,'” Pitino said. “I told him to stop whining in the media, stop being soft with the media. You just face them and say, ‘We’re gonna win. We’re gonna be tough. We’re Kentucky.’ That’s it, Mark. Nothing else.”
Soon after that call, Kentucky started winning games.
Here is an excerpt from Tucker’s article at 247 Sports:
Pope believes any snapshot of a season, until it’s over, can be misleading. No matter how beautiful or bleak any single moment is, that’s all it is. Just a glimpse, not the complete picture. Like a postcard from one stop on a much longer journey. Which is why no one should’ve ever been worried about him, the way he sees it.
Was Pope coming unglued a month ago? Has he put it all together now? Maybe it’s neither. Or maybe it’s both.
“When you take snapshots of the story, it’s not the whole story,” Pope told 247Sports. “Even now, there’s no ‘figured it out’ for us. That’s actually just another snapshot. But there is not a minute that goes by where I don’t count myself the luckiest person, the most blessed person in the sport, to be the head coach at Kentucky.
“There are really hard times, for sure, but I love the hard times. I live for them. If you don’t have hard times, you don’t have a story.”
Complete Article (Highly recommended reading)
