LEXINGTON, Ky. — In the hours before taking the floor inside Kentucky’s Rupp Arena to face the top-ranked team in the country, Evansville’s coaching staff gathered the Aces to show them a clip from the movie “The Pursuit of Happyness” for inspiration.
Evansville was a 25-point underdog entering a raucous atmosphere where its head coach Walter McCarty once played. No one on the outside expected the Aces to win.
McCarty believed.
“Don’t ever let somebody tell you, you can’t do something. Not even me,” Will Smith’s character told his real-life son Jaden Smith as they stood alongside a basketball court.