PROVO, Utah — Mark Pope likes to say he was the worst NBA player ever, but his career (153 games across six seasons) produced some memorable moments. Many of those came during his rookie year with the Indiana Pacers, whose head coach, Larry Bird, was Pope’s childhood hero. Bird does not let a lot of people inside his circle of trust, but he made room for Pope, shooting with him before and after practice, talking with him about life and basketball, and providing whatever guidance and encouragement he could.
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Four games into Pope’s second season, however, Bird called Pope into his office and informed him the Pacers were waiving him. Bird had tears in his eyes as he delivered the news, and it was all Pope could do to hold it together. He wanted to wait until he left Bird’s office to start bawling, but when he entered the locker room, Reggie Miller and some other players were in there. Pope was left to keep his devastation bottled up for a while longer.
Pope calls that conversation “one of the worst moments of my whole life,” yet in the next breath he adds, “Man, I treasure it.” It might seem odd that a man would treasure such a painful experience, but Pope has always defied convention. For him, basketball isn’t about winning and competing so much as it is about feeling. That day revealed to Pope just how deeply invested he was. The ending was so painful because the experience was so meaningful.
“Moments like that are when you really feel something, because you give your whole heart to it,” he says. “This game takes you and it rips you open. If you do it right, if you give it everything you have, it completely exposes your insides to yourself and to your team, and in some cases to the world. And that’s when you have a chance to grow more than you ever do as a human being.”
Pope has been chasing that feeling ever since he was young boy growing up in Bellevue, Wash., as the fourth of six children. The chase took him to the University of Washington, where he felt the devastation of seeing his coach get fired, and then to Kentucky, where he experienced the elation of winning an NCAA championship in 1996. Pope’s inauspicious pro career included stints with four NBA teams, plus one in the CBA and another in Turkey. He never describes those unpleasant endings by saying he was waived, cut or released. He always says he was fired. “There’s no reason to water that down,” he says. “If you do, you’re also watering down the best parts.”
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Pope made a rather unconventional move in 2009, when he dropped out during his fourth year of medical school at Columbia to take a job as an assistant director of basketball operations at Georgia. That set Pope on a path that has brought him to BYU, where on April 10 he was tapped to replace Dave Rose, who retired after 14 years as head coach. Pope, 46, had worked for four years as an assistant under Rose before taking over in 2015 at Utah Valley, which is located in nearby Orem and where he compiled a 77-56 record in four seasons.
Pope’s wife, Lee Anne, is a BYU grad, and they have lived in Orem with their four daughters since he first went to work for the Cougars in 2011. As a man raised in a Mormon family, Pope should feel like he has come home again, but that is not how he is wired. He knows better than most just how passionate Cougar Nation is, and he has no delusions about the pitfalls that come with such high expectations. For a man who says he loves “chasing discomfort,” the job would not be worth taking if there weren’t a chance he could get fired – again. “I wouldn’t really call myself an adrenaline junkie, but I do like it when someone tells me that we can’t do something,” he says. “Then get to that place where you think, man, this is really scary. Don’t know if we can make it. And you get to jump in and see if you can do it. That is a super happy place.”
There were days during Pope’s three years at Kentucky when the stress got to be a little too much. In those moments, he would retreat to his room at Wildcat Lodge and lose himself in books. It wasn’t light reading, either. Pope liked to delve into the works of pre-20th-century essayists such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and John Milton. Alongside that profundity, Pope could be plenty goofy, with a sarcastic streak that was abetted by a sharp tongue. When the players were asked in a survey for UK’s media guide what they would do if they won $1 million, Pope answered, “I’ll buy some new socks.”
In the classroom, Pope was a high achiever who was nominated as a Rhodes Scholar candidate during his senior year. On the court, he was a borderline starter whose coach, Rick Pitino, called one of the hardest workers he ever had. “He showed up from Washington with his hat on backwards, flip flops and a Cannondale bicycle he rode all around campus,” recalls Jeff Sheppard, his former roommate at UK. “I don’t know that I’ve ever been around a harder worker in basketball and in school, but Mark always showed his confidence through his humility. He was very comfortable being different.”
Though he was the star of the basketball team at Newport High in Bellevue, Pope also played piano and crooned an off-key ballad for the school talent show. He was a straight A student, but his bedroom was a pigsty. “I’m not sure where his inhibitions begin because I’ve never seen them,” his brother, James, says. “Mark has always been goofy but very driven. When he gets his mind set on something, he takes it all the way.”
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When Pope was as a freshman at Washington, one of the assistant coaches suggested he would benefit from a little more time on the exercise bike. So Pope assigned himself regular rides to Bellevue and back, a 20-mile round trip. When the head coach, Lynn Nance, was fired after Pope’s sophomore season, he was crushed. “It was the hardest year in basketball I’ve ever had,” he says. “We just couldn’t do it, man. It wasn’t for a lack of trying.”
Upon declaring his intentions to transfer, Pope had plenty of suitors. He opted for Kentucky because, he says, “I wanted to see if I could play with the very best.” That meant playing for Pitino, who could be an unforgiving taskmaster and a merciless scold. Pope still winces as he recalls the way Pitino excoriated the team following its loss to North Carolina in the 1995 Elite Eight. The coach made the players watch the game twice that evening, and the next day he called them in for one-on-one meetings to shred them some more. It stung at the time, but it paid off the following year when the Wildcats went 34-2 and won the NCAA title. Pope averaged 7.6 points and 5.2 rebounds in 20.3 minutes off the bench that season. “There were times I hated Coach more than any human being on the planet,” he says. “I can see after the fact how things worked and why they worked. Through sheer force of will, he molded us into something that was really extraordinary.”
Following Pope’s graduation, the Pacers selected him with the 52nd pick in the NBA Draft. Thus began a long stretch of chronic discomfort. Each day Pope came home from work thinking it might be his last. That fear motivated him to begin preparing for life after basketball. He took the LSATs, believing he might want to go to law school, but he decided to shoot for medical school instead. Since he majored in English at Kentucky, he had to accrue the requisite credits at universities in cities wherever he played. When he was with the Milwaukee Bucks, he took classes at Marquette. When he spent a season with the New York Knicks on injured reserve, he studied at Columbia and NYU. When he was with the Nuggets, he attended Colorado. It’s fair to say Pope was the only NBA player who spent his time between practices and games by reading chemistry books cover to cover.
It all ended in the summer of 2005, when Pope was 32 and the Nuggets declined to extend his contract. The following year, he enrolled in Columbia’s Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons. By that time, he had married Lee Anne Archibald, whose father, Lynn, was once the basketball coach at Utah and had also been an assistant at BYU. Pope attacked med school the way he had attacked everything in his life, yet from the start he questioned whether it was the right path. The misgivings got especially pronounced during the month of March.
Pope had never thought about coaching while he played, but when he realized it was his only avenue back to the game he loved, he started thinking about it seriously. “We talked hours upon hours,” Lee Anne says. “It wasn’t that he hated medicine. He was just never sure it was something he wanted to do for the next 25 years. He used to say to me, ‘These other kids feel about medicine the way I used to feel about basketball.’ ”
He finally pulled the trigger in the spring of 2009, when Mark Fox, who had coached Pope as a graduate assistant at Washington, offered him a low-level position at Georgia. Pope broke the news to a shocked associate dean of student affairs, climbed into his car and drove to Athens, where was one of his first duties was folding shirts and towels for Fox’s camp. The tasks were menial, but for the first time in a long time, he was able to give his whole heart to his work. Says Pope, “The second we set foot on the court and Coach Fox started cussing me out because I wasn’t doing things right, it felt like heaven.”
After one season at Georgia and another as an assistant at Wake Forest, Pope came to BYU in 2011 to work for Rose. Even during the dog days of July, when coaches across the country were slogging through long days, late nights and early flights, Pope would call home and tell Lee Anne, “Thanks for letting me do this.”
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In 2015, Pope was contacted by the president of Utah Valley in hopes he would consider filling the school’s head coaching vacancy. At first, he had no interest in coming to a school that had been in Division I for only seven years, but he changed his mind when the president likened the position to being the CEO of a start-up company. He promised Pope he would have total freedom to build the program however he wanted, make his own mistakes and self-correct along the way. It was an irresistible pitch for a man who loves chasing discomfort.
When Pope took over, he proclaimed that his goal was to change the power structure in the state of Utah, rendering UVU ahead of Utah and BYU. “Which is so ridiculously asinine, OK?” he says. “But I believe you can speak things into existing.” He hit the ground running, but the pace could be overwhelming. Pope learned in those early days to set aside time just to sit and think, sometimes brooding alone in his car.
It wasn’t easy to recruit talented high school players to Utah Valley, so Pope built his roster with transfers. He did this out of necessity, but he quickly found himself drawn to the prospect of working with players who had failed at their previous stops. He loved entering the lives of young men right when they were at the point where they could either quit or fight like mad. “I love redemption stories,” he says. “That’s the best part of sports to me.”
Pope, who often says “I eat hard conversations for breakfast,” utilized a mental health expert to facilitate communication between him and his players. Over time, he helped many of his guys find their redemption. Chief among them was Akolda Manyang, a 7-foot center who had been dismissed from Oklahoma after being arrested on charges of aggravated robbery. Pope also helped engineer a turnaround for Brandon Randolph, a 6-3 guard who transferred from Xavier. Randolph had a lot of anger issues stemming from a difficult childhood in Inglewood, Calif. He and Pope clashed repeatedly, until one day Randolph poured his heart out in a hotel conference room in Chicago. “His insides spewed out all over the table,” Pope says. As seniors in 2017-18, Manyang and Randolph were cornerstone starters who helped the Wolverines to a 23-11 record.
Pope’s favorite redemption story was that of 6-11 forward Isaac Neilson, whom Pope had originally recruited to BYU when he was an assistant there. Neilson grew up in California dreaming of being a Cougar, but after his freshman year, Rose told him his scholarship wasn’t going to be renewed because he wasn’t good enough. Neilson called Pope in tears, and it took Pope a while to persuade Neilson to play for him at Utah Valley because Neilson felt so humiliated. Neilson sat out his redshirt year, and in the fourth game the following season, he had 26 points and nine rebounds in a 114-101 win at BYU. Pope hung in his office at UVU a picture of Neilson being surrounded by media after that game, where it served as testimony to the power of speaking things into existence.
Turns out Pope’s proclamation wasn’t so asinine after all. Last season the Wolverines won a school-record 25 games, finished second in the WAC with a 10-4 record and were 15 spots ahead of Utah and only five behind BYU in the NCAA’s NET rankings. That made Pope quite the hot property on the coaching circuit. He was being considered for two other jobs when Rose called to inform Pope he was retiring. As soon as Rose’s news conference was over, BYU athletic director Tom Holmoe called and asked Pope if he would interview for the job. The next day, Holmoe took Pope onto the floor of the Marriott Center, where his name was displayed on the main scoreboard. Pope was surprised at how emotional he felt when he saw that. Two weeks later, he was introduced as Rose’s successor.
Growing up in Washington, Pope attended church every Sunday with his family, but it was more out of obligation than inspiration. He rededicated himself to his Mormon faith when he was at Kentucky. Thus, his ascension to head coach at BYU represents both a full-circle moment and a new beginning. It fills his heart with deep feelings. “I think athletics is faith,” he says. “It’s faith that your work is going to pay off. It’s faith that in the real moment, something that’s not supposed to happen can happen. It’s faith in the guy standing next to you. I think all of that is at the core of what we do in athletics.”
“Embrace the pain!” is another one of Pope’s pet phrases. “He usually adds a ‘Woooo!’ at the end,” his oldest daughter, Ella, says. Pope recently shouted that phrase after he returned home from a sleepless four-day recruiting junket that included a 27-hour round trip to Africa to meet with the parents of Mady Sissoko, a 6-9 forward and four-star high school junior who plays in Mount Pleasant, Utah. Pope has also been working the transfer market, landing his best player at Utah Valley, Jake Toolson, a graduate transfer who was named the WAC player of the year after leading the Wolverines in scoring this season at 15.7 points per game.
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Pope’s grit will serve him well in his new job, but he was hired largely because of his communication skills. “I noticed on his teams that his guys really related to him,” Holmoe says. “If he can do that with transfers, imagine what he can do in a program where you recruit guys for a while and can establish that long-term relationship.”
On a recent morning at the Marriott Center Annex practice facility, Pope conducted back-to-back small-group workouts. It’s a task that many head coaches assign to assistants, but Pope is not much of a delegator. At the end of the second workout, Pope rebounded for 6-foot-7 junior Zac Seljaas during a shooting drill. Pope gave Seljaas a few shooting tips, but the most important message was communicated nonverbally. “It’s important for me to get to know these guys,” Pope said afterward. “I’m going to push them really hard during the season, so this is a great way for me to bond with them in a low-key environment and put some capital in the bank with them. I want these guys to know that no one cares more about their growth than I do.”
BYU may have faltered in recent years, having failed to reach five of the last seven NCAA Tournaments, but it is no one’s idea of a start-up. The program has a rich history stretching back more than a century; two former national players of the year in Danny Ainge and Jimmer Fredette; the backing of an influential church with long international tentacles; and one of the most passionate fan bases in the country. Heck, it even has its own TV channel, BYUtv. Yet the program was in dire need of some fresh energy, and Pope is bringing that in abundance. “I’m not a basketball genius by any means, but we’re going to relentlessly work at this thing every minute of every day,” he says.
Is he afraid? Naturally. Fear has been a powerful force in his life, one that is both humbling and motivating. You’ll never hear him try to water that down. “I believe that every athlete is terrified,” he says. “I mean, I failed more than anybody else has failed in athletics. I got fired seven times as a pro, right?” Yet each time, Pope got right back in the gym. That’s where he finds himself again, ready as always to rip himself open and give his whole heart, knowing full well that it might get broken.
(Photo of Mark Pope: James Snook/USA Today Sports)