Mulkey was expected to preside over a team implosion or perhaps melodrama last week. Instead, she turned the tables around the country and scored a blowout victory over No. 9 Virginia Tech, while becoming the fastest Division I coach, male or female, to reach 700 victories. Championship teams are a measure, among other things, of their internal solidarity. Mulkey had four. And she’s now undoubtedly stalking No. 5, cajoling this talent-laden LSU team with her croaking voice and her stilettos hitting the ground like pistol shots.
“I don’t have a locker room full of kid’s games,” Mulkey remarked during last year’s NCAA Final Four. No, it’s not, and she’s not one of them either. His team’s management over the past few weeks has been like a fire juggler throwing flames, ready to catch fire or let it all burn his hands.
We may never know what happened this war of wills between Mulkey and Final Four MVP Reese, whom Mulkey benched for 4½ games for “locker room issues” and declined to elaborate. It was a brutal manipulation with a star who allegedly commanded $1.7 million in NIL (name, image and likeness) money and who has 2.6 million followers on Instagram. But apparently, Mulkey decided she’d better take care of Reese and the rest of her team, right away. And she did.
Instead of divisive or sullen, Mulkey now has a monster team. Reese, in her return to the team against a difficult national backdrop, batted remarkable eyes and had 19 points and nine rebounds while remarkably celebrating the new stars around her, like transfer Aneesah Morrow (the best player on the field). ) and the surprisingly smooth shooter Mikaylah Williams. Virginia Tech was the dismantled team, 82-64. The Tigers were “playing together for the first time in a long time and playing hard,” as Mulkey observed.
“She came back to the Angel that everyone knows,” she later added.
Perhaps the problem was as simple as this: Reese spent the summer doing magazine shoots and lucrative appearances, his reward for an MVP season. But as Mulkey said this preseason, “You’re not entitled to that anymore unless you work.”
Sometimes Mulkey can talk more old school than a one-room school teacher. She is frank, sometimes to the point of ignorance or rudeness. A few weeks ago, she came to a journalist sniffing. “I’m not a sissy. I don’t have any allergies,” Mulkey said. “I have some kind of cold. It may be Covid, but I don’t test. These are the sinuses. I don’t know what you call it: allergies, flu, I don’t know. So if you get the flu, blame me on Thanksgiving.
With her players, she calls herself a “mother hen” and compares them to her own children. It’s language that might not sit well with 21-year-olds feeling their newfound powers as women, as employees, and as influencers. And Mulkey knows it.
“Maybe I’m too old,” she said before the Virginia Tech game. “Maybe I need to get out. (But) you get reality with me.
One way or another – at least so far – Mulkey’s players mostly accept it. For what? How is it that a sawed-off woman who is no taller than 1.70 meters, with hair the color of canned bleach, a mouth halfway between a spoonful of sorghum and a shotgun and clothes like the confetti innards of a piñata, does he wield such authority over such powerful and diversely talented teams, and does he survive controversy after controversy?
Perhaps the answer is that Mulkey engages with his players with far more emotional intelligence than the basketball press or public can imagine. Much of her reputation for hard-heartedness comes from tensions with Brittney Griner, who revealed that she felt pressure to hide his sexuality at Baylor, the Baptist school where Mulkey won three titles. The press picked up on this implication and called Mulkey an uncaring bigot. That amount is overdrawn, and Griner has since admitted as much. In fact, in March 2013, Mulkey gave an interview to OutSports while Griner was still on the team. She noted that Griner had to “endure more than any player I’ve ever had to coach” in terms of ugliness from crowds and claimed she didn’t care at all whether a player was gay and she would never even ask.
“So you don’t care?” » asked the journalist.
Mulkey attended the WNBA draft to watch her star player go No. 1, and at a postseason banquet she spoke about how much she would miss Griner’s “free spirit.” It wasn’t until Griner went public with the idea that Mulkey was choking him that their relationship cooled.
Further alleged proof of Mulkey’s petty indifference was his apparent refusal to comment about Griner’s arrest and imprisonment in Russia for possession of marijuana. In fact, a few months before Mulkey faced widespread criticism for her lack of support for Griner, she had commented, but only to the media of her choice, Tiger Rag’s local podcast. “You just want everyone to come home safe, and I’m praying for Brittney. I want her to come home safe. I think there are a lot of people speaking on her behalf, and those of us who don’t necessarily speak publicly are praying for her,” Mulkey said.
Is Mulkey the cuddliest coach you’ve ever met? Never. Does she have a hot temper and an irrational approach to loyalty that piques her, and does she say rude things? Of course. But she also gave Shanay Washington a spot on the bench for four years as a student assistant after she had to quit due to knee injuries. “We will take care of you, you will travel with us, you will sit on the bench, you are part of this team,” Mulkey said. When her Baylor team suffered a painful loss to Louisville in the 2013 Sweet 16, she told the press: “Put it here on these shoulders. Don’t point the finger at these kids, you’re pointing the finger directly at me. After Sheila Lambert left the Baylor program to enter the draft, Mulkey called her once a month for four straight years, telling her, “You have to come back and you have to finish your degree – that’s the ultimate goal, we let’s get a degree.
To get a real insight into Mulkey’s actual relationships with his players, disciplinary or otherwise, a good source would seem to be last year’s championship point guard, Alexis Morris. Mulkey recruited Morris to Baylor, only to return her for an out-of-court arrest. “I had sleepless nights over it because I loved Alexis.” Mulkey said. “It was for the good of the locker room and to make the difficult decision not to lose your team. Many coaches don’t want to make these decisions. After Morris worked at Rutgers and Texas A&M, she joined Mulkey at LSU. During the Reese controversy, Morris wrote on X: “You can’t pay me to bash Kim. »
Mulkey is not an easy character. His strong emotion makes the other coaches appear to be asleep. During matches, she’s so overworked that sometimes when she rips her collar, you think, “Is this the night she actually rips her blouse?” She is fickle with the media, one day heavily made-up and the next completely without vanity or make-up, pale as an onion in disheveled sweats. One second she is sharp, the next plaintive to understand. In a 2021 ESPN.com profile it is perhaps the only truly penetrating insight into her, she said: “My instinct is what I do. …It may not seem politically correct, but my heart is in the right place. This is sometimes taken the wrong way. And, you know, that’s fair. I don’t want to hurt anyone. We all have our wickedness. But my good, I hope, will always far outweigh my evil.
No college basketball coach can attract more of the strong players she so clearly prefers. It’s time to recognize that beneath the outfits lies a trainer with a remarkably firm yet soft feel.
