It’s Full-Court Pressure at Kentucky

Here is a theory: UCLA’s is not the toughest coaching job in college basketball after all.

Never mind that the last three coaches have been fired -- Steve Lavin, Jim Harrick and Walt Hazzard -- and others buckled under the pressure and left.

Forget that not only Lavin, but his father as well, were sent death threats.

File all that stuff about living up to John Wooden’s legacy as ancient history, over and done.

It says here that the toughest job is not at UCLA, not at Indiana, not at North Carolina and not at Kansas.

It’s at Kentucky.

Rick Pitino, wildly successful as Kentucky’s coach and now the coach at Louisville, says the highest-pressure jobs in college sports are coaching Notre Dame football and Kentucky basketball.

Even Jim Harrick, fired for lying about a false expense report only 19 months after winning the 1995 NCAA title at UCLA, doesn’t think the toughest job is in Westwood.

“I think it’s Kentucky,” he said. “I didn’t realize it until I went to Georgia. It’s a smaller town, but there are no pro sports in the whole state. There are other Division I programs, but they’re all UK fans first except for Louisville. But Louisville is basically just Louisville. Kentucky is the whole state.

“In Los Angeles, you’re under a small microscope, but there are pro teams, it’s a movie town. In Kentucky, they’re not just under a microscope, it’s like they’re under the Mt. Wilson Observatory.

“Here, I could go to restaurants around town, and if I didn’t wear anything that said UCLA, nobody would recognize me.”

Ben Howland might not even be recognized in Westwood after eight months on the job.

Tubby Smith -- who brings the ninth-ranked Wildcats to Anaheim to play UCLA in the Wooden Classic on Saturday at the Arrowhead Pond -- can’t go anywhere in the state of Kentucky without causing a buzz, not that he’s complaining.

“They’re all tough jobs. I’m not special,” he said. “UCLA, Kentucky, Kansas, they have the resources and the ability to compete, so what you do is never enough, but it’s never enough for the coaches either. Most of the pressure is your own.”

The differences between UCLA and Kentucky are the relentlessness and the singular focus.

“Let me ask you this,” said Chuck Culpepper, a sportswriter for Newsday who worked at the old L.A. Herald Examiner and was a columnist at the Lexington Herald-Leader in 1991-2000. “Would you ever get your car out of long-term parking at LAX and your receipt would say, ‘Home of the UCLA Bruins, 1995 NCAA champs?’

“That’s what happened at Bluegrass Field. So it permeates everything.”

In L.A., the Lakers own May and often June, and there are the Dodgers, the Angels, USC football, hockey and everybody else’s NFL teams.

In Kentucky, basketball is a year-round sport.

“I knew it when I first came here,” Smith said. “I was on a radio show July 7 from Oxmoor mall in Louisville, and 5,000 people came. On July 7,” Smith said.

“It’s just like the other night, 400 or 500 fans at $50 apiece came to hear me talk in a restaurant.”

Dueling radio talk shows -- even former Athletic Director C.M. Newton used to have one -- all come back to UK basketball as their main subject.

“In summer in Kentucky, people don’t call to talk about the Reds or whatever else,” said Pat Forde, a columnist for the Louisville Courier-Journal. “They still call in to talk about recruiting. They’re all over Tubby right now because he doesn’t have any All-Americans coming in and Pitino is cleaning up and [Indiana Coach] Mike Davis is doing well too.

“I think Kentucky is the toughest job just because people care so deeply every single day. I haven’t spent a ton of time out there, but I’m not sure Lavin or Ben Howland or whoever the coach may be has so many people who are so deeply concerned about what he is doing every minute of every day.

“Right now, the state is completely up in arms because [the Wildcats] don’t have enough depth and the 7-foot freshmen aren’t coming along. You can write about Kentucky basketball any day of the year here.”

All that passion isn’t a bad thing, and Kentucky is known for fans who follow the Wildcats en masse, wherever they go. (Whoever saw a Bruin bandwagon pull up in Pullman, Wash.?)

“That’s not pressure. That’s the great part. That’s what sets Kentucky apart,” Smith said. “We don’t have fans. We have followers, no matter where we play.”

He won the NCAA championship his first season at the school in 1997-98.

But even that season, a caller to a radio show after one of the team’s four losses informed Smith, “Coach, I just want you to know, I haven’t given up on this team yet.”

More famously, a caller once complained after one of Pitino’s teams had defeated Tennessee by 61 points, “We’re not going very far if we only get 13 points from [Jamal] Mashburn.”

Smith has averaged 27 victories at Kentucky, has never lost more than 10 games in any season, and is 17-5 in NCAA games with the Wildcats, having taken them to five Sweet 16s and three Elite Eights in six seasons.

There have been regular-season upsets by Louisville and Western Kentucky.

But Smith has never lost a first-round NCAA game, and has never had a monumental collapse anything such as Lavin’s last season or Matt Doherty’s at North Carolina two years ago.

And yet his job periodically seemed to dangle by a thread until last April.

That’s when Kentucky, suddenly fearing it would lose him to the Philadelphia 76ers after a 32-4 season that ended with a 26-game winning streak before a loss to Marquette in the Midwest Regional final with star Keith Bogans hobbled, gave Smith an astonishing eight-year, $20.25-million contract.

If Kentucky fires him, it will owe Smith $1 million for every year left on the contract. But if he chooses to leave, there will be no buyout payment to the university.

Contrast Smith’s average salary of $2.5 million with Howland’s $900,000 -- a big bump from Lavin’s $578,000 -- and it brings to mind one of Smith’s favorite sayings, “Much is given, but much is expected.”

Smith had some of his bumpiest times during the two seasons his son Saul was the Wildcats’ starting point guard.

Saul was sometimes booed even by the home crowd, and his father was skewered for starting him.

“I don’t know about how hard it was for me. It was harder for my wife, the talk shows, people saying things,” Smith said. “Saul was doing what he loved doing. People don’t understand that.”

There was a spate of player misconduct that bred dissatisfaction as well.

“Hopefully you get the right people on your bus,” Smith said. “If you have the wrong people on your bus, the key is getting them off and getting the right people on.”

And then in 2001, in what might have been a turning point for Smith, Pitino returned to the state of Kentucky -- to coach Louisville.

Love turned to spite, with taunts of “Traitor Rick” and “Benedict Pitino.”

When Pitino returned to Rupp Arena for the first time as Louisville’s coach, the radio and newspaper coverage and atmosphere made the game seem bigger than the three Final Fours Pitino took the Wildcats to as coach.

“Rick coming back the first time after taking the job down the road, it was a sensitive issue,” Smith said. Then Kentucky won by 20, and Smith, finally, was embraced.

In the stands that day, a fan held up a sign directed at Pitino’s wife: “We never liked you either, Joanne.”

The not-so-subtle undercurrent with Smith has been race.

Pitino is from New York, but he was embraced in Kentucky more warmly than any Yankee carpetbagger before him.

Smith, one of 17 children, has the gentle accent of his birthplace in rural southern Maryland. He went to High Point College in North Carolina, and has a Southerner’s manners, greeting each person at the scorer’s table and inquiring why if someone had been absent the game before.

Still, he was the first black coach at a school known for the legacy of Adolph Rupp.

“I was well prepared,” he said. “I had been at Kentucky before [as an assistant.] I had been the head coach at Georgia.”

He is Kentucky’s coach now, considering that contract.

“I never really felt insecure. I might have felt, ‘Boy, this is tough,’ but I never felt like I couldn’t do my job,” Smith said.

“Growing up in a family of 17, things weren’t given to you. You earned everything you got.”

Whether his job is truly the toughest is still open for argument.

Howland, told that North Carolina wasn’t in the running, had a quick answer:

“You’d better ask Matt Doherty about that.”

Doherty, a teammate of Michael Jordan’s on the 1981-82 championship team, was national coach of the year his first season, 8-20 his second and fired after his third.

“I’d say there’s pressure, yeah, but there are a lot of supportive people there too,” Doherty said. “We were 8-20 and averaged about 19,000 a game.

“There’s pressure, Internet gossip. But I would say UCLA, with all the media in L.A., is probably a little tougher.

“It’s all in how you view it. Other coaches would say that’s not pressure, pressure is trying to recruit on a shoestring budget.

“Tubby and I could probably put a pro-and-con list together. They’re great jobs too. No one held a gun to our heads and said, ‘Take this job’....

“We’re talking relative in terms of pressure, though. Pressure is being in Afghanistan. Pressure is being a fireman in the World Trade Center. We’re talking basketball.”