‘Good things happen to good people’ like Zach Tow

Zach Tow, right, can always say now that he has played in a Kentucky basketball game. (Vicky Graff Photo)

Perhaps the most talked about part of Kentucky’s 95-64 Senior Night win over LSU Tuesday involved less than one second of the game.

Kentucky had its traditional emotional pregame ceremony and had numerous players play well in the game. But Kentucky fans I have been in contact with since the game ended can’t stop talking about walk-on Zach Tow of Madisonville.

Kentucky coach Mark Pope put him into the game with less than a second to play. That might not seem like a big deal, but it was for Tow.

“My brother grew up the biggest Kentucky basketball fan ever,” Kaylee Tow, Zach’s sister and a former all-American softball player at Alabama, posted on social media after the game. “Tonight, he checked in the game as a Wildcat for the first time. He’s proof that good things happen to good people.”

So how did this happen? Let Kentucky coach Mark Pope explain.

“A name that most people don’t know is Zach Tow.  Zach Tow actually came to walk on tryouts and we randomly held walk on tryouts and he showed up and he fought through 60 guys in a bunch of workouts and then earned the right to come to practice and be on a one-day contract throughout the entire course of the season,” Pope said after the win.

“He came and battled every single day. Never said a word, never missed a rep, never missed a practice, never was an issue, never asked for anything.  Just came and fought every single day.”

The coach said senior point guard Lamont Butler, who hit a game-winning shot at the 2023 Final Four, came to him about a month ago and told him Tow “deserves a jersey” rather than sitting on the bench during games in street clothes.

“Lamont had the pregame speech before the game today and he presented Zach with a jersey. The guys lost their mind.  Zach was in stunned wonderment,” Pope said.

Pope thought that story and reaction players and family had to Tow getting into the game illustrates perfectly what Kentucky basketball is different.

“If you spend one day in this jersey and BBN embraces you for life. And that’s really cool.  It’s like nowhere else,” Pope said. “This basketball community of BBN is like nothing else.

“It was fun to hear our guys talk about our seniors, our extinguished eligibility guys talk about it because they got a huge dose of it in just a short time.”