“I am an old man,” Givens, the 1978 Final Four MVP on UK’s national championship team, said. “Mark talks to them about my career and me being the third all-time leading scorer at UK, won a championship and had 41 points against Duke (in the national title game). Now they did perk up when they heard that.”
The next time Givens was at practice, point guard Lamont Butler came up to him.
“He knows every stat and every game. He knew everything about me that you could possibly know,” Givens said. “For a guy who didn’t know anything about me to put that much time into learning about me, that meant a lot and says a lot about the kind of player that Mark Pope recruited.”
Givens said Butler “obviously became a real favorite” of his and he asked Butler how he was doing before the Blue-White Game.
“I walked up and he gave me some love. ‘Goose, I am playing at the University of Kentucky. How could it be any better?’ That is the way all these guys are and it is because of Mark,” Givens said. “He makes sure each player knows and understands the responsibility he has to the Big Blue Nation and all these guys are eating that up.”
