Coach Gillispie’s first year at Kentucky

For the new occupant of one of college basketball coaching’s most prestigious seats, it was turning into the honeymoon from hell.

As he went down the bus steps, Todd reached over to give the coach a “hang-in-there” pat on the knee.

As the UK president recalls it, Gillispie raised his head and said, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” The new coach looked, Todd says, “like a whipped kid.”

Rumors galore

At the news conference in which he was introduced as Tubby Smith’s successor, Gillispie publicly acknowledged that he had had a pair of alcohol-related traffic arrests in the seven years before his hiring at UK (one was pleaded down to a lesser charge, and the other was dismissed for lack of evidence).

The 48-year-old coach is divorced.

Those two factors seemed to make speculating on the new coach’s personal life a statewide obsession. A Herald-Leader article about Gillispie’s purchase of a $1.45 million, six-bedroom home in Jessamine County was the most viewed story on Kentucky.com in 2007.

Gillispie had not been on the job two weeks when the first rumor about him Ð that former Kentucky basketball player Derrick Hord had felt compelled to take the keys away from the coach at a UK-sponsored meet-and-greet Ð made its way around town.

By December, when Gillispie’s first UK team was struggling mightily and the mood surrounding the program was surly, rumors about the coach were rampant. Callers to Lexington sports talk radio shows were mentioning them without challenge. The talk was pervasive all around the state.

All of which is unfortunate, since there appears to be no evidence that any of the most widely circulated rumors were true.

Hord, the 1980s-era Kentucky forward, says he never attended a UK reception with Gillispie, much less one where he asked for the coach’s keys. He laughed when asked about the story.

By late last summer, it was being frequently rumored that Gillispie was behaving raucously at Sal’s Chophouse and Malone’s.

Bruce Drake, one of the owners of both establishments, says those stories “aren’t true. I’ve heard tons of rumors about Coach and our places, and none of them were true, not one of them.”

Drake notes that his restaurants subsequently started using Gillispie in TV ads, “and we obviously would not have done that if he’d been behaving badly in our place.”

Last autumn, the hot Gillispie rumor was that the coach had been involved in a verbal confrontation with former Lexington police chief Anthany Beatty in the bar at the downtown Lexington eatery DeSha’s.

There was even dialogue associated with that tale, with Gillispie supposedly asking Beatty if he knew who he was, and the police chief replying, “Do you know who I am?”

It was all complete fiction.

Misty Carlisle, general manager at DeSha’s, says, “I can promise you that story is absolutely untrue. Yet I have customers come in here arguing with me, that they know it’s true. Coach has only been here two or three times, and he’s never had a drink in his hand and never been in any confrontation.”

Beatty Ð who now works for UK Ð says he never had any interaction at all with Gillispie until meeting him at a memorial service for UK equipment manager Bill Keightley in April.

Another rumor that was widely spread was that university officials had ordered their coach to hire a driver. Both Gillispie and UK officials, however, say the coach does not have a driver.

Perhaps the most widely circulated Gillispie tale involved rumors that the coach had gone swimming with a pair of waitresses (in some versions of the story, the pair were topless) in a pool at The Merrick Inn, a restaurant that is part of a Lexington apartment complex.

Libby Murray, owner of The Merrick Inn restaurant, says “Good Lord, no, Coach has never been in the swimming pool here. It is absolutely beyond me how all that got going. It was all just conversation. Never happened.”

When asked about the Merrick Inn story, Gillispie laughs. “Anybody can say anything about you that they want,” he says.

UK Athletics Director Mitch Barnhart says that, early on, the university was hearing the same talk about its new coach as everyone else and was “concerned.” But no one ever provided the university with any credible report that Gillispie had actually behaved poorly in public, Barnhart said.

Says Todd: “One thing Mitch said to me when some of this discussion was going on, with everyone walking around with a cell phone with a camera in their pocket, if this stuff was going on, it would be on YouTube or whatever. And it never was.”

One has to think that coming into a new job in a new community where one isn’t well known and being the subject of so much gossip would be hurtful.

“You can control your character,” Gillispie said. “What you can’t control is what anyone might say about you. I did hear some things that were brought to me, but it’s not something I do worry about at all. I’m very proud of the way things have gone for me here.”

Gillispie says his close friend, Kansas Coach Bill Self, often repeats a story to illustrate what life is like in an Internet age in the fishbowl of big-time college coaching.

“Coach Self said if you were driving down the road and you were talking on your cell phone and you made a mistake and pulled in front of somebody and you cut them off a little bit, then it is probably going to be reported that you have a bad problem with road rage,” said Gillispie.

Luther Deaton, the Lexington banker who has become a Gillispie friend, says he sees some signs that the rumor-mongering has made the coach a little cautious in his public dealings with people.

“Sometimes when people approach him for pictures, I see him sort of hesitate,” Deaton says. “I think that comes from having to think, ‘How will this be used?’”

Nicholas DiFonzo, a professor at the Rochester Institute of Technology and a rumor expert, says Gillispie’s two prior alcohol-related arrests “likely served as a ‘plausibility threshold’ that helped these rumors spread, in the same way that the fact that Barack Obama’s middle name is Hussein made the [false] rumors that he is a Muslim plausible.”

In explaining the wide spread of rumors that appear to be untrue, “it’s possible that they might be traced back to a faction that opposes Billy Gillispie,” DiFonzo said, “or it may have just been really entertaining stories involving someone of great public interest in Kentucky.”

By the first week of March, when UK had turned Gillispie’s first season around on the court by going 12-4 in the SEC, the off-court chatter about the coach had died down dramatically.

“I hope it didn’t calm down just because we started winning ballgames,” says Todd. “But there seemed to be a correlation there.”

The Lexington Herald leader finally takes a time out from their negativity marathon. This article sets out to debunk myths, humanize Gillispie. It portrays him as a very like-able figure. I was certain such was the case all along.

The rumors were unfortunate to say the least. No doubt in my mind who was responsible for the rumors. Any time things became heated on the internet, the primary culprit was some die hard Tubby Smith fan. The Tubby click. They know who they are. People who loved Tubby Smith. People who started to hate UK fans who they believe ran their beloved Tubby off.  These folks are more fan of Smith than they are fans of the program. Sick folks who would spread rumors in such a manner.  Attempting to destroy a man.  Where is the class in that.  I’m sure Smith was proud of them.  Their finest hour to be sure.  They’re still there.  Waiting.   Anytime something happens, they’ll be there to trump up any challenge to the program into catastrophic disaster. You see them on websites such as WildCatNation, KSR and A Sea of Blue. Always defending Tubby against all slights percieved and imagined.

At any rate, we can tell that this piece was not written by Jerry Tipton. That moron couldn’t write a positive column about Jesus Christ, Gandhi and the Buddha achieving World Peace. He’d find some negative spin on it.

Kudos to the Herald Leader for finally acting like a home town newspaper.