Cats' Pause Exclusive: One-on-One with Lee Anne Pope (2024)

The Cats' Pause spent 90 minutes with Lee Anne Pope, wife of new Kentucky coach Mark Pope, covering everything from being a coach's kid to losing her dad far too soon to working for David Letterman to courtship and marriage to thoughts about that April day at Rupp Arena when Mark was introduced to Big Blue Nation.

Darrell Bird

Lynn Archibald, coach and dad

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Lee Anne Archibald knew something was off.

"My dad and I would run together every Saturday and we'd always sprint the last part, like run to the light pole," said Lee Anne, who was 21 at the time. "We'd sprint and I could never beat him and one day I did. I'm kind of like, 'Is dad just getting old? I haven't gotten faster.'

"There was another time my brother and my dad started wrestling, which was so normal, and my mom came into the room and lost her mind, yelling 'Stop!' We're all just like, 'Mom, chill.'"

Another time, she returned home to Provo, Utah, from her job in New York.

"There were just these little things that were happening," she recalled. "My dad came home early on game day and took a nap. 'That's so weird. He never comes home and takes a nap, right?' Again, maybe he's getting older?"

Lynn Archibald, assistant coach at Brigham Young, wasn't getting old. At age 52, he was dying from cancer.

"I ran into their bathroom to get something and there were a lot of pill bottles and I was like, 'That's weird? Who's taking all these pills?'" she said. "I went downstairs and I talked to my mom and I said, 'If something was wrong with dad, you'd tell me, right?' She just said, 'You need to go talk to your dad.'

It was a simple conversation no 21-year-old should need to have with a parent.

"I went upstairs and said. 'What's going on?' And then he just said, 'I'm really sick.' I'm like, 'How sick?' And he said, 'Real sick.'

That was October, 1996. He died May 28, 1997.

"He was super healthy, ran five miles a day," Lee Anne said. "He had no business having terminal prostate cancer."

What Lee Anne learned as she dug deeper cemented this story as the single greatest act of selflessness and love she has ever witnessed.

"He gets to BYU and very soon after taking the job they find out he has cancer," Lee Anne said. "But my dad was like, 'We're not telling the kids because I will be damned if they're going to make decisions about their lives based on me being sick.' So they kept it between them for two years until they absolutely had to tell us."

During that time Damon, the oldest, left to coach with Jerry Tarkanian at Fresno State in California. Lee Anne took a job in New York as a personal assistant to David Letterman on "The Late Show." Beau left to play basketball at Washington State.

"Think about the unselfishness of that," Lee Anne said. "We all left. Everybody left the state. Had we known, we all would have stayed and my dad knew that. But he was not going to let that happen. He made my mom promise.

"I spent those next few days processing how much my mom and dad managed that on their own," she said. "My mom kept that promise for him. She learned how to give all the medications so he didn't have to go to the doctors."

Suddenly, puzzle pieces began to fall into place.

Mom halting a wresting match. "He had just had a radiation treatment that day."

Losing a sprint. Taking a nap. "He wasn't old, he was fighting cancer."

Remarkably, the couple kept up the ruse for two long, lonely years.

"They gave him a drug early on and it was working. It stopped the progression of the cancer, which had already left the prostate when they found it," Lee Anne said. "But later on he had a surgery where they did something they thought would clean it out. But instead of cleaning out, it accelerated the cancer. So when they got the scan later he was lit up like a Christmas tree, as my dad would say. That's when they knew they had to tell us."

Lynn stopped his every day tasks at BYU so he could travel to Pullman to watch Beau play his freshman season at Washington State. David Letterman personally gave Lee Anne three-day weekends through the duration and one time, in the heat of that day's show preparation when Lee Anne received a troubling phone call, he sent her to the airport.

"I flew home every weekend," Lee Anne said. "David was unbelievably kind through the whole time my dad was sick. He was so good to me and to my family."

It was only seven precious months from the time Lee Anne learned of her father's dire situation until the day he died.

"There was nothing to be said between us," she said. "There was nothing that needed to be fixed. You just get to really appreciate it all and I think I did."

Time has softened the pain, but a twinge of melancholy remains.

"At the time I thought I was so old and I was so glad that I had my dad when I was growing up," Lee Anne said. "But he missed a lot. He'd be going crazy about all of this right now."

Life With Dad

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Those months were too short, perhaps, to prepare, but plenty long enough to revisit a lifetime of memories, etching them in the mind's scrapbook, this time with indelible ink. And oh, so many memories – some precious, many outrageous, but all pure Lynn Archibald.

"My dad was my hero and he made being his only girl the greatest thing on the planet," Lee Anne said. "But adjectives don't work, stories are probably a better way to talk about my dad."

With sparkling jewelry, long flowing locks and bright, ever-present smile, it might be easy to picture Lee Anne's childhood filled with tea parties, Rub A Dub Dolly and an Easy Bake Oven.

In reality, it was more GI Joe than Barbie.

"A lot of black eyes, stitches multiple times," Lee Anne says with a laugh. "I was the only girl so I was trying to keep up with the boys. If they were hiking, I was hiking. If they were going to play dirt bikes, I was going to go do that, too. I mean, I did not know I was a girl.

"It always seemed liked there were a pack of boys at our house, whether it was players, whether it was their buddies and their teams," she said. "So although I only have two biological brothers, I felt like I was raised in a locker room. … I had a great upbringing."

Perhaps it was because of the "locker room" that Lynn Archibald watched over his baby girl like a hawk.

"I was invited to my first boy-girl party," Lee Anne said. "My mom was out of town, which was not good timing because I had to ask my dad. Well, my dad called every parent and asked them about it because we were going to this park to watch an outdoor movie.

"So we're at this park in Bountiful, Utah, a bunch of 14- and 15-year-olds and then someone's like, 'Hey Lee Anne, is that your dad?' He was in his car circling the park! We lost count how many times, but it got to be, 'Wait, he's coming around again.' There was my dad, just driving and circling. I think he even waved one time."

Another time, Scott Hadley became the first boy to show up at the Archibald's front door. The kid rang the doorbell and Lynn, who was about to leave for the airport, answered.

Hadley would later share the story at the dinner ahead of Mark and Lee Anne Pope's wedding in 1999.

"He's kind of like, 'Is Lee Anne here?' And my dad said, 'Yeah. One second, buddy.'"

Instead of fetching his daughter, he retrieved the family's German Shepherd named Tark.

"He went and got Tark, he riled him up, opened the door and he said, 'Get him, Tark' and then he shut the door. I just sat there and watched the whole thing. My dad was happy as a clown."

When she was in seventh grade, her dad, who was head coach at Utah, enrolled her middle school basketball team in a camp with much older kids.

"We shouldn't have been there, we were too young. By my dad was like, 'It'll be good for you,'" Lee Anne said. "So you have these six or seven 13-year-olds playing with 16-year-olds."

Compounding the situation is that the team wore Utah jerseys and were coached by Archibald's players, Mitch Smith and Chris Fulton.

"We had full university jerseys, like we walked in and we were the best dressed team and we had these two basketball stars as our coaches," Lee Anne said with a laugh. "We were so little and we were crying and crying. The guys were like, 'Why are you crying?' Because we're getting killed. That whole thing is still legendary and probably traumatic for Mitch and Chris."

It's unclear if the camp experience played a role, but one year later Lee Anne's middle school team found itself in the region championship.

"There's a sweet story from when I was in eighth grade," she said. "We were playing in our little regional championship and it was at 3 o'clock so I knew my dad wasn't going to be there. He had practice. But as I was warming up, he walked through the door and kind of winked at me. After the game, I was like, 'I thought you had practice?' And he says, 'Turns out I'm the head coach. I changed practice. There's no way I was going to miss this.'"

Coaching Family

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Basketball, specifically coaching, pulses through the Archibald veins.

Lynn, a high school math teacher, got his start when he attended several clinics hosted by Jerry Tarkanian at Long Beach State in California. After one clinic, Tarkanian offered him a job on his staff.

After two seasons at Long Beach, Archibald took an assistant job at Cal Poly, four hours north in San Luis Obispo, but was there just one season when Tarkanian called his old friend once again, asking him to join him at a new job –Nevada-Las Vegas.

After two seasons at UNLV, Archibald moved to Southern Cal for one year before finally landing his first job as a head coach at Idaho State in 1978. His old friend Tarkanian had his own quirky way of sending congratulations.

"My dad got a call from the airport in Pocatello, Idaho, and they said, 'Who doesn't like you in Las Vegas?'" Lee Anne said. "He goes out there and the package is a yelping German Shepherd puppy that Jerry had sent us without talking to my parents. Jerry and Lois always had German Shepherds and he said every kid should have a dog. So we brought the puppy home and named him Tark."

Yes, the same Tark that chased a teen-aged suitor from the Archibald's front stoop years later.

After five seasons at Idaho State, Archibald was fired in 1982 following a 65-66 record, including 35-35 in the Big Sky Conference.

Archibald then moved back to his home state as an assistant coach to Jerry Pimm at Utah. But when Pimm left the following year for UC-Santa Barbara, Archibald was promoted to head coach.

He served as Utah head coach for eight years. His best season was a 20-10 mark in 1986, earning his only NCAA Tournament trip where the Utes lost in the opening round to North Carolina.

Archibald was fired in 1989 and replaced by Rick Majerus. He then served as an assistant coach to Bill Frieder at Arizona State through 1994 where he recruited a kid from Bellevue, Washington, named Mark Pope.

"We have recruiting letters from my dad, he had very distinctive hand writing," Lee Anne said. "One of them is framed in our home."

Archibald's final stop was as an assistant to Roger Reid at BYU until 1996. His total head coaching record was 163-152.

Damon, the oldest son, played at Boise State and is a new assistant coach on Doug Gottlieb's staff at Wisconsin-Green Bay. Youngest brother Beau played at Washington State and UConn and is coaching overseas. Lee Anne married Pope and they've been together through his playing days at Indiana, Milwaukee, New York and Denver and in coaching stops at Georgia, Wake Forest and BYU before head coaching stints at Utah Valley, BYU and now Kentucky.

"My dad being a coach was a huge part of us growing up," Lee Anne said. "We didn't have quantity, but it was quality time. He was gone a lot and back then the rules were different. There was no off switch. You were just grinding all the time. I remember our summer vacations, we'd go to the beach with my mom's family and he'd hop in for a day or two.

"We just made it work," she said. "I did not feel slighted for one second. I felt like I was really lucky the way I got to grow up."

Archibald made it a point to spend individual time with his children, too.

"He did make a concentrated effort to bring us into it with him, to be a part of it with him," she said. "We were all very invested. We did it together."

Archibald took the boys on at least one road trip each season. Lee Anne tagged along to camps for recruiting.

"I grew up going to the gym with him and we'd always go on a recruiting trip. A lot of times it was in Las Vegas and we stayed at Tark's house," she said. "I would sit in the gym with him and he would talk about this kid and why he was great. And look at the way he walks into the gym. You can just tell he's got hops."

After Lee Anne's high school team won the state volleyball championship, she joined her father at the Maui Invitational. She also accompanied him to the Final Four when she turned 16 and was a regular at the March Madness finale after that.

"He talked to me and taught me," Lee Anne said. "It was something that he made me a part of and I loved it. To this day, I could sit and listen to a group of coaches talk. Back then I quickly learned that if I didn't say anything, they would keep talking."

Lois & Super'Anne'

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Lynn Archibald, however, wasn't the only talker in the family. His wife, Anne, made her voice be known from the bleachers.

"My mom is super independent, strong and tough," Lee Anne said. "She would yell at those refs. You can't yell the stuff that she yelled back then. None of it was PC."

It was the only downside to Tarkanian offering Archibald his first job.

"Lois Tarkanian and my mom are thick as thieves," Lee Anne said. "My dad would say, 'Anne was so quiet until she met Lois and that's when she found her voice.'"

Despite it all, Lynn never turned to muzzle Anne during a game.

"Dad never shushed her. He never looked back at her that I ever remember," Lee Anne said. "He knew better."

Jimmy Clark, a Colorado native who spent more than 20 years officiating NBA games, got his start in college out west.

"My mom would yell at those refs and she knew all their names," Lee Anne said. "She would yell, 'Jimmy, Jimmy, Jimmy, that was a foul!' So years later we're at an NBA game in Milwaukee and Jimmy comes to the family lounge afterwards and says, 'All right, where is Anne Archibald?'"

Damon, Lee Anne and Beau also had to learn about being the coach's kid.

"Going to school after a loss sucks," Lee Anne said. "Kids aren't always nice. Teachers sometimes say things they shouldn't say. But that's OK. You figure it out. It makes you tough."

So does the vagabond lifestyle. Over her father's two-decade career, the family lived in California, Nevada, back to California, Idaho, Utah, Arizona and back to Utah.

"The world needs the new kids," Lee Anne said of changing schools every few years. "When you've been the new kid over and over and over again, you learn a skill set. You have the ability to adapt. You have the ability to reach out. Army brats and coaches' kids."

It also taught Lee Anne the perseverance she would need later in life as a coach's wife. The old adage that all coaches know upon hiring that they will eventually be fired rang true in this family.

"Idaho State was my dad's first head coaching gig. We were there for five years. We got fired," Lee Anne said. "Then we went to Utah and were there for eight seasons and we got fired."

We got fired?

"Oh, totally," she said. "We were all in this together."

But the harshness of losing a job is trumped by the benefits of having walked that path.

"One of the blessings of my dad being a college coach is that I see how this ends," she said. "At the end of a career, it's about these boys and it's about the journey that our family took together.

"My dad passed away really young and his players flew in from all over the country to come see him and be with him," she said. "He had a couple of guys that were local that came every week or twice a week. One of his players spoke at his funeral. His players were honorary pallbearers. To this day, they still check on my mom, some will check in on me. Those boys will always be heroes to me."

Landing in Mecca

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It's no surprise her upbringing led Lee Anne to a career in sports. She majored in journalism at Brigham Young.

"I didn't go into coaching, but I always thought I would do something in athletics," she said. "Sports journalism is was what I thought I would do, kind of merge those worlds. It's my interest in journalism and telling stories and, as a coach's kid, you're on the other side of it and you know there is more to the story. Get to know these personal stories. I think journalism is storytelling."

Following that career path, Lee Anne received a college internship at ESPN.

"I felt like I had landed in Mecca," she said. "I would go watch SportsCenter live every night. They had this little loft and I was the only one up there. I couldn't believe it wasn't packed. But I would finish work and then go watch SportsCenter, sit up there by myself. It kind of felt like this was where I was supposed to be."

Doors, however, unexpectedly opened elsewhere.

The previous summer Lee Anne and her best friend and fellow BYU student, Heather Peterson, both received internships in New York City. Lee Anne was at Reader's Digest while Heather was hired at Mademoiselle magazine. "But Heather's got canceled when the magazine was sold," Lee Anne said. "But she had already applied to be a Letterman intern all on her own and she got it. Eleven thousand applicants, they pick 11 and she got it."

One year later, Heather returned to New York full time as a personal assistant to David Letterman while Lee Anne got the gig at ESPN.

"I was in Bristol, Connecticut," she said, "and I had gotten an internship through the graphics department at ESPN that very quickly evolved into a real opportunity."

The show was Scholastic Sports America, which highlighted high school athletes. "Like a gold medalist or the Heisman Trophy winner, but it highlighted them when they were in high school," she said.

Meanwhile in New York, one of Letterman's personal assistants left to write for the "Rosie O'Donnell Show," creating a full-time opening. Heather called, asking her friend to apply for the job.

Torn by the decision, Lee Anne turned to her father.

"My dad actually said, 'Go interview, it will be a good experience.' So I went and it was electric."

Letterman didn't sit in on the interview, but did sign off on the hire.

"It was unbelievable," she said of the four-year run. "You went to work at 8 in the morning and left at 9 at night. We grinded, but we also had dark weeks. You might work for six weeks and then have a week off. It was a joy to work for him."

You've Got Mail

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It was during this time in New York that Lee Anne Archibald was introduced to Mark Pope. Appropriately, it was a family connection with an uncanny twist of fate guiding the future couple.

"My brother Damon set us up," Lee Anne said. "It was the one and only time he ever tried to set me up because my brothers were always so protective and never liked anybody I dated."

It was at the Pete Newell Camp. Damon was coaching, Mark was a participant.

"Damon and I were meeting up in San Francisco, just coincidentally, and he's like, 'I just met the male version of you. You, but he's a dude,'" Lee Anne said. "I just took that as you guys would be great together. I didn't really think that much of it at the time. It was more my brother saying to Mark, 'You need to meet my sister.' And then he gave Mark my phone number."

With Lee Anne in New York and Mark with the Pacers in Indianapolis, the relationship began over the telephone during the NBA lockout season. She will never forget the day – Nov. 1, 1998 – not because of Mark, but because she had just returned home from running the New York City Marathon.

"We were having a party and I was in an ice bath," Lee Anne said. "Then my roommate and co-worker, Heather Peterson, says, 'Hey, there's a Mark Pope on the phone.' And I'm like, 'I'll call him back.'"

She did call back that night leading to an awkward first conversation between a former college basketball national champion and the daughter of a college coach.

"I was talking about my brother, Beau, and I said, 'He's grayshirting.' Then Mark says, 'You mean he's redshirting?' And I was like, 'No, he's a gray shirt.' And Mark says, 'There's no such thing as a gray shirt.' And I was like, 'Oh, yes there is such thing as grayshirting. You take under 12 hours until your classes start. Yeah, he's gray shirting.'"

They agreed to disagree and Mark remained confident she was mistaken until, of course, he researched it after the phone call.

Incredibly, there was a second phone call and a third and a fourth and daily correspondence via this new medium called electronic mail on the world wide web.

"He was the only person I was emailing, that's how new email was in 1998," Lee Anne said. "I had to keep getting the tech guy at work to come reboot my AOL or whatever it was. But he was, literally, the only person in my inbox."

She remembers the very first transmission sent to her office at "The Late Show."

"The first email he's like, 'How do you spell your name? Is this right? Did I spell your name right?"

Romantic devil. But true to his playing days at Kentucky, Pope proved to be a grinder.

"I would go to work every morning really early and there would be an email waiting for me," Lee Anne said. "Then I'd write him back and Heather, my best friend, would help me. Sometimes it was a group effort, like, 'Should I say this?'"

The relationship blossomed.

"I got an email every morning and we talked every night," Lee Anne said. "We talked for hours on the telephone."

This went on for six solid weeks as the couple got to know one another without the pressure and awkwardness of an in-person blind date.

Twenty-five years of marriage prove it was a very good formula to build a lasting foundation. But why?

"He's a great writer," Lee Anne gushed, breathlessly exaggerating the adjective. "He is a beautiful writer."

So good, in fact, that Lee Anne kept all the emails, even printing her favorites to build a collage one Valentine's Day.

Fate then intervened to make sure this relationship would move to the next step all because of a decision by none other than David Letterman, her boss.

"Dave is from Indiana and out of the blue one day he says, 'I want you to go to Indianapolis,'" Lee Anne said. "He had this idea for some philanthropic deal and he wanted me to go see if I could start it. It was crazy because he first approached me within a week of when Mark and I started talking and connecting."

Having blown the first telephone conversation in what is known in the annals of love stories as "The Great Red-Gray Debate of '98," Pope had new life with an actual date in Indianapolis. He pulled up to Lee Anne's hotel for the very first physical meeting between the two and she opened the door only to find a newborn baby in a car seat.

"Mark is just like, 'This is my niece," Lee Anne said with a laugh. "Our first date and we're dropping his niece off at someone's house to babysit."

By another coincidence, Mark's brother was also in Indianapolis from Seattle after having won a dinner at an auction. He went to the Pacers event and Mark drove his niece to the bishop's house.

"We went to dinner and then to a Christmas show," Lee Anne said. "By the end of the night I knew I would be coming back once a month. Now, I didn't tell him that until later."

Pope had rallied from a late second-half deficit.

"I knew really early on that he was like nobody else I had ever met," Lee Anne said. "His intelligence, not in an arrogant way but the way he understands complex issues and can break them down and his ability to communicate.

"He makes me laugh, he's just funny," she continued. "He's not goofy, but he is not too cool. In a world where everyone is trying to be, he's not too cool. He does not take himself seriously.

"We had so many things in common, so many interests," she said. "Then I learned very quickly how hard he worked, that he was grinder. He will never be outworked. That's in him as a player, as a coach, as a person."

The couple were married within a year of the first telephone call.

"We have so much fun together," she said. "I'm crazy about him. I just love him."

On cue, Kentucky's new basketball coach entered the conference room at the Craft Center with a declaration.

"I would have gone to four years of journalism school and worked for 20 years as a beat writer just to sit down with you," Pope told his bride.

"See what I mean?" she simply said.

Paging Doctor Pope

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The newlyweds jumped head first into life without knowing a true destination given Mark's status as an NBA player. By 2000, he was playing in Turkey for one year before moving to Milwaukee with the Bucks, the New York Knicks and then to Denver with the Nuggets.

All the while, Pope is planning for a future outside of basketball.

"When we got married, we really jumped into it," Lee Anne said. "He was a Rhodes Scholar candidate so one summer he studied for the GMAT. One summer he studied for the LSAT. We were like, 'Are we going to business school? Are we going to do something else?' The whole time he almost had his Master's from Kentucky as an English major. When we first met he said, 'I think I'd like to teach in academia after I'm done playing.'"

The journey was relentless.

"He would literally get up and shoot. Come home and study. Have an afternoon workout. Study. Have a nighttime workout," Lee Anne said. "The entire time that he played in the NBA, he's taking the sciences. So his transcripts were from Marquette when we were with the Bucks, Columbia and NYU when we were playing for the Knicks, and then he finished up at Colorado when we were with the Nuggets."

The basketball stopped bouncing for Pope after the 2005 season. Decision time.

After considering teaching, business and law school, Pope reversed field completely with an eye on becoming a doctor. Not surprisingly, he interviewed with the 10 top schools in the nation.

"We were deciding between Yale and Columbia or staying in Colorado. He had just been with the Nuggets. We had a home there. We loved it in Colorado," she said.

Ultimately, Columbia Medical School won out.

"We both love New York," she said. "He lived there as a kid. I was there, obviously, before we met. We had two of our daughters there with the Knicks. I mean, we just love that city."

So began the journey that would lead to Dr. Mark Pope.

"Mark would have been an unbelievable doctor," Lee Anne gushed. "He is so smart."

One year into the grueling process, however, some red flags began to rise.

"After year one Mark was like, 'I don't know if I want to do this,'" Lee Anne said. "Actually, the first thing he said was, 'These kids love this like I love basketball and they are going to change the world.'"

Year two didn't alleviate any of his fears.

"It was in year two," Lee Anne recalled, "when Mark said, 'I don't know if I want to do this for the next 25 years.'"

Unlike many medical school students, Pope was older and with an NBA income so he and Lee Anne had built a nest egg together to help foot the sizable expense.

"We were super blessed that our first career afforded us the opportunity to choose to get in and to choose to get out," Lee Anne said. "Normally, when you start that path you've got to finish because of the freaking students loans. But because we were smart with our money, we had the luxury of choosing. That is a really important part of all this."

Year three saw the tide turn toward coaching.

"When we made that decision, it was one of the hardest decisions we've ever made," Lee Anne said. "But we talked about it for three years. We had a list, this is why we're doing this. I know what it's like to be hired. I know what it's like to be fired. I know all of those things. So we went into this with eyes wide open."

Along the way, Pope also sought advice from his former coaches, starting with Mark Fox, who had coached Pope when he was a freshman at Washington, and his Kentucky coach, Rick Pitino.

"We had talked to Coach Fox the whole time," Lee Anne said. "He called Coach P. He called out all the coaches, all of his mentors."

There was one dissenting vote.

"Of course, my mom's like, 'Don't you dare. 'My son-in-law's gonna be a doctor,'" Lee Anne crowed in her best theatrical voice. "A lot of foul words came out of her mouth."

Others questioned the insanity of it all, including Dr. Lisa Mellman, dean at Columbia Medical School.

"She is a wonderful person," Lee Anne said. "But I think she was like, 'You've lost your dang mind. You're leaving one of the top medical schools in the world to go do what?'

"It was not a common thing. Once you're in, you're in."

The Popes held steadfast.

"We're not idiots, we understand all that we had invested. He had spent so much time studying and we were on this great path," Lee Anne said. "But we did not make the decision lightly. We talked about it. We were prayerful about it and when it came down to it, it didn't feel like we were taking this huge risk."

With that, Mark Pope left Columbia Medical School one year shy of becoming a doctor to take a job with Fox, who was now head coach at Georgia.

"$24,000 a year," Pope exclaimed.

"It didn't scare me. It wasn't like we were jumping off a cliff. It wasn't like 'We've got three kids so let's go take this terrible job and walk away from medical school," Lee Anne said. "I was like, 'OK, let's go. Let's do this.' I would follow that man to the moon."

The job that would change Pope's life trajectory was an assistant to the director of basketball personnel at the University of Georgia.

"Mark did laundry, walked the guys to class, set up the tailgate tent," Lee Anne said. "He did whatever they wanted."

It was a far fall from the rarified air of medical school. Surely there was regret, perhaps even panic?

"No, not one time," Lee Anne demanded. "Not one time have we had a conversation about maybe we should never have left."

It was, in fact, quite the opposite feeling when Pope first walked into Stegeman Coliseum. "He came down to work a camp for Coach Fox," Lee Anne said, "and when he walked in the gym he instantly knew."

Pope spent the 2010 season at Georgia and 2011 as an assistant at Wake Forest before his career began to take off when he served four years under Brigham Young head coach Dave Rose.

He got his first head coaching gig at Utah Valley from 2012-2015 before moving back to BYU to replace the veteran Rose as head coach. Pope was at BYU for five years before Mitch Barnhart hired him away last spring to become Kentucky's new basketball coach.

Revival at Rupp Arena

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It was a moment in time the Pope family will never forget, especially April 14 when fans packed Rupp Arena to bursting to welcome their favorite son and 1996 national champion back home to Lexington.

"How magical was that?" Lee Anne said. "It was so special that we all got to experience that together. In the moment, I was experiencing this as Mark's wife and with my girls and we're just taking it all in.

"I've never seen anything like it. No one has ever seen anything like that," she said. "I cried four or five times during the press conference, just out the kindness and the emotion and the feeling. I understand why Mark has loved Kentucky for 25 years."

It was a truth she learned the hard way only weeks into married life after the couple had moved to Turkey.

"I made the mistake of saying KU one time, it just kind of slipped out," Lee Anne said. "And Mark's like, 'I'm sorry. What did you say? It's UK.' I only did that once."

Lee Anne Pope steers clear of social media – "I'm very disciplined about it. I know myself and I don't want to kill anybody."– but her daughter, Ella, couldn't resist sharing a post following the April 14 introductory press conference.

"Ella is our press secretary and she'll send me stuff like, 'Mom, this was so funny or this was so sweet.' And there was a gentleman who said, 'We just got back from the CAThedral where we had a Pope revival.' I loved that."

With the passion, of course, can come criticism as coach Pope eventually moves beyond this honeymoon stage of the coach-fan relationship.

"He's got big shoulders. He's made for this. But don't yell at the boys, that will get me going," Lee Anne warned. "I know they're superstars, I know they're heroes. But they're boys. So if I were to hear somebody yell at one of our boys, I would be like, 'Let's talk about your son. Let's talk about the boy sitting next to you.'"

Obviously, feistiness is one apple that didn't fall far from the Anne Archibald tree.

"I am a little bit more controlled than my mom," Lee Anne said with a laugh. "I'm more like if the foul count is off I will let them know every time they come down the court. When the foul count is 9 to 1, you're gonna hear me say, 'Now it's 9 to 2. Now, it's 9 to 3.'

"It's not subjective, it's concrete," she said. "Just keep it fair. It's not that hard."

Bottom line, the coach's wife relishes the Big Blue passion that awaits.

"Do you know how many coaches are trying to get people to care about their program, or the stuff we did at our first gig trying to get people to come to the stands?" she said. "The people that we have at Kentucky, there is a sincere goodness and they care. And the fact that we're all going to do this together, that's a blessing and a privilege."

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Cats' Pause Exclusive: One-on-One with Lee Anne Pope (2024)
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