Perhaps it’s my age. Perhaps it’s because I just thought of Tubby Smith as a basketball coach and nice guy without even thinking about his skin color. Whatever the reason, I had kind of forgot — and I blame no one but myself for that — with the significance of Smith’s hiring as Kentucky’s head basketball coach in 1997 after Rick Pitino left for the Boston Celtics.
Smith became the first African-American men’s head basketball coach at Kentucky and had the challenge of following Pitino, who had won the 1996 national title and lost to Arizona in the 1997 national title game.
The “Out of the Blue” documentary on UK’s 1997-98 national championship season that aired on WKYT-TV Monday gave some of the players a chance to share their memories of Smith’s hiring.
“With him (Smith) being from the (Rick Pitino coaching)tree, I don’t think any of us thought anything about it,” Scott Padgett said about Smith’s historical hiring.
“It really didn’t dawn on me this (hiring Smith) was something historic until I started reading about it,” former UK point guard Wayne Turner said during the documentary.
“I remember thinking this is pretty huge. Now we have an African-American coach at Kentucky. That’s pretty huge,” Heshimu Evans recalled.
Smith said being black was never something that UK athletics director C.M. Newton brought up when he was trying to convince him to return to Kentucky as head coach. Smith was head coach at Georgia at the time.
Smith had mixed reactions to Newton’s offer.
“I went back and started to think about it. I don’t know if there is pressure, but how do you come in behind a guy like Rick Pitino. How do you replace him? He’s a legend,” Smith said on the documentary.
Smith remembers getting a call from Pitino urging hm to take the UK said.
“He said, ‘Tubby are you crazy. Are you out of your mind.’ He said they will forget me. He really said that. He said that’s how fans are,” Smith said.
Smith said he was told that UK fans didn’t see black and white. Instead, they see wins and losses.
Smith had been on Pitino’s staff at UK but he was a lot different than Pitino.
Evans said he was more of a “dad” figure.
“He got to know us,” 1998 Final Four MVP Jeff Sheppard said. “We were not used to that. We were used to coach Pitino being the dictator.”
“I remember coach Smith saying if you buy in to what I am teaching you, it will work,” Turner said. “We were so stuck on what coach Pitino had taught us, we were stubborn.”
The Cats did buy in, though, and got hot at the right time in mid-February and from out of the blue, won a national championship that his new documentary portrays so well that UK fans of all ages should want to get a copy of the DVD to watch over and over.
