Mark Pope played a decade of professional basketball, including six seasons in the NBA. When his playing days were over, he went to medical school at Columbia University in New York. He was an elite athlete with an elite mind, moving from one high-paying profession to another.
But even while attending an Ivy League med school, Pope kept picking up his phone in the summer and asking Mark Fox about coaching college basketball. Fox had been an assistant coach at Washington when Pope was there for the first two seasons of his college career, before he transferred to Kentucky and was part of the Wildcats’ 1996 national championship team.