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Mark Pope liked the intensity of the emergency room, the relationships of family practice and the teamwork of the operating table. So as the time approached for him to pick a medical specialty, he chose basketball coaching.
Pope left Columbia University's renowned College of Physicians and Surgeons in New York after three years, redirecting himself toward his current role as Utah Valley University's head coach. The story of Pope's first job is twofold — how he came close to finishing medical school, only to trade a potential practice for entry-level coaching duties that included folding towels and counting T-shirts in the University of Georgia basketball program in 2009.
"My life was grunt work. In that sense, it was pretty humbling," said Pope, 44. "If I didn't love it so much, there would have been moments like, 'Really? I left medical school for this?' "
The career alteration was agonizing, because of everything Pope invested to reach that stage. He took pre-med courses at schools in NBA cities, excelled on the medical school entrance exam, received his choice of top-ranked programs and showed signs of thriving in the profession. Yet he couldn't picture himself being satisfied with the job for 20 or 30 years — because practicing medicine couldn't duplicate coaching basketball, in his mind.
"I wish I was wired that way," he said, "because it's a much more normal job."
Mark Fox, who hired Pope as Georgia's director of basketball operations, good-naturedly deflects the suggestion that he may have cost the world an outstanding physician: "He would disagree with that," Fox said.
That's all part of Pope's humble approach that plays well in interviews and speeches as he discusses his career arc. His go-to lines include how he would rather have the Columbia med students he associated with being the doctors treating his four daughters of ages 8 to 16, and how "I would have killed more patients than I saved."
"The truth is," said his wife, Lee Anne, "Mark would have been a great doctor."
She's the daughter of the late Lynn Archibald, who was fired as the basketball coach at Idaho State and Utah in the 1980s. Her two brothers also have had adventurous coaching careers. "She knows the pain and uncertainty that come with coaching," Pope said. "We really, really knew what we were getting into."
Her mother, Anne, figured she would have a doctor for a son-in-law — until Pope went into coaching, after all. "I get it," she told her daughter, upon receiving that news.
Pope's pursuit of medicine began early in his NBA career, once he realized he was unlikely to stay in the league forever. As a second-round draft choice of Indiana in 1996, the 6-foot-10 forward from the University of Kentucky played in 153 games for three NBA teams over seven seasons. He scored a total of 285 points during a career he frames as "every day, hanging on by your fingernails."
He later would consider operating Subway franchises, owing to his love of turkey sandwiches and being around people. Pope also was fascinated by science and eager to learn, so he enrolled in a chemistry class at Marquette University while playing for the Milwaukee Bucks and continued his pre-med studies in New York and Denver.
Pope filled the downtime of the NBA schedule in ways that few, if any, players ever have done. He claims to be "the first student in the history of the world to read a chemistry book cover to cover, every single word on the page."
And by the time Denver cut him in training camp in 2005, ending his NBA career, he was qualified for medical school. He chose Columbia, a highly ranked program with about a 5 percent acceptance rate. The school is so prestigious that even fictional physicians chose it — Patrick Dempsey's character and other "Grey's Anatomy" doctors were Columbia alumni.
The real-life figures were "an unbelievably beautiful group of students and instructors," Pope said.
He thrived in two years of classroom work and moved into rotations. Doctors marveled about his demeanor with children in the pediatric ER, telling him, "This is in your blood."
The moment that may have soured him, though, came during his psychiatric rotation in the famed 9 Garden North ward. He walked down the hallway, greeting patients and high-fiving them, only to have a supervisor tell him that was unacceptable behavior, perhaps adversely affecting their minds. "That part was really sobering," he said, making him wonder if he could remain professionally detached from patients.
During an agonizing month as Pope and his wife weighed their options, he dealt with what he labeled "the stigma of quitting … Popes don't do that." That's when Fox re-entered the picture. Their ties stemmed from the University of Washington, where Pope was a hometown player (before transferring to Kentucky) and Fox was a graduate assistant. Fox eventually became Nevada's head coach, and Pope had kept in touch with him, expressing interest in coaching someday. "You need to go to medical school," Fox would tell him.
But in 2009, having taken the Georgia job, Fox relented. Realizing that Pope was serious about leaving Columbia, he invited him to a summer camp in Athens. Pope drove 15 hours from New York, loved the camp environment and later accepted Fox's offer to join the staff.
The job description? Nothing glamorous. "You had to develop an appreciation of counting T-shirts," Fox said. "We had to force him to do some of those things, just so he would have an appreciation of everything. He did all those things and loved it. He did a phenomenal job. ... I had no doubt he would advance quickly."
In Athens, Lee Anne Pope became friends with Barbara Dooley, the wife of longtime Georgia football and athletic director Vince Dooley. After chatting with Mark Pope at a department Christmas party, Barbara Dooley observed with all of her Southern charm, "Look at you, connecting all those big words. I fixed you for a big, old dummy, leaving medical school."
But she understood. Her son Derek had left his law practice to become a football coach. As Lee Anne Pope said, "Our life does not make sense to a lot of people, but [Mark] makes it make sense. ... He's meant to do this."
After one year at Georgia, Pope spent a season at Wake Forest under Jeff Bzdelik (his coach with the Denver Nuggets) and four years as a BYU assistant, before taking over Utah Valley's program in 2015.
The relationships with his UVU players "make it great," and she also enjoys the family bonding that comes through the shared experience of coaching. In his self-effacing way, Pope laughingly labels the coaching profession "essentially meaningless" in comparison to medical practice. He also knows his making an impact with players who spend anywhere from one to five years in his basketball program.
"This job is just so full of life for me," he said
In two seasons in Orem, he has lived through pressurized moments such as UVU's four-overtime loss to Cal State Bakersfield in the semifinals of the Western Athletic Conference tournament last March and enjoyed teamwork with his staff, relationships with his players and rewarding road wins over BYU and New Mexico State. That's where his mind goes when he reflects on medical school and the career path he once embraced, and then forsook.
"In all the specialties I thought about," Pope said, "what I was really trying to get is what I have now."
Twitter: @tribkurt —
Mark Pope timeline
1991-93 • Plays two seasons for the University of Washington, where coach Lynn Nance is fired.
1994-96 • After redshirting, plays two seasons for Kentucky, as the Wildcats win the '96 national championship.
1996-97 • Plays for Efes Pilsen in Turkey.
1997-99 • Plays two seasons for the Indiana Pacers.
1999-2000 • Splits season between La Crosse (Wis.) of the CBA and Ulkerspor in Turkey.
2000-02 • Plays two seasons for the Milwaukee Bucks.
2002-03 • Spends season on New York Knicks' injured list.
2003-05 • Plays two seasons for the Denver Nuggets.
2006 • Enrolls in Columbia University's College of Physicians and Surgeons.
2009 • Leaves medical school to become Georgia's director of basketball operations.
2010-11 • Wake Forest assistant coach.
2011-15 • BYU assistant coach.
2015-present • Utah Valley University's coach with a two-year record of 29-35, including 12-16 in the Western Athletic Conference and 2-1 in the College Basketball Invitational.