Against Billy Gillispie

Today, I was in Lexington for a celebration brunch for a nephew who was graduating from the University of Kentucky when the name of Coach Billy Gillispie came up.

I should have blogged on this before, but I'm so disturbed by Gillispie that I've switched my local basketball allegiance from the University of Kentucky to the University of Louisville. I still have loyalties to Syracuse and Penn State (the local powers where I grew up), North Carolina (from grad school), Michigan (post-doc), Penn (dissertation research), and the University of California from my time in Oakland. So, I'm always going to be interested in a lot of teams. But I've supported UK basketball and football ever since I moved to Morehead in 1990.

However, Billy Gillispie gives off such a general aura of creepiness that I can't root for Kentucky basketball anymore. The fanatic way he drives his players, the super-high level of piety about himself, and the fact that he has no life outside basketball are bad enough. But I remember a John Clay article for the Lexington Herald-Leader claiming that Gillispie took the same approach to college basketball as the most fanatical kinds of fans. That's the last thing that any sport needs--coaches modeling themselves on the most obsessive and twisted fans.

Somebody at the brunch chimed in that Gillispie was also an alcoholic who wasn't trusted even to drive his own car. I'm not sure about the drinking, but I readily believe that Gillispie doesn't have a basic skill like driving. He probably doesn't have a lot of other basic skills either.

Given that Gillespie seems like a time bomb waiting to go off, even a driven, Type A, domineering guy like Rick Pitino seems like a regular person in comparison. At least Pitino has a wife, kids, friends he pals, and some business interests on the side. All Gillispie has is the next game or the next recruit.

Anyway, I always liked cardinals. I'm rooting for Louisville.