LEXINGTON, Ky. — This began with a threat. Not a thinly veiled threat. No. This was about as direct as it gets.
Mark Pope, all 6 feet and 10 inches of him, stood tall, pushing his shoulders back. Considering his size, his shaved head, and his background — a decade spent banging around the paint as a journeyman NBA center back in the late ’90s and early 2000s, when freedom of movement was a foreign concept and survival required withstanding elbows in the chest — he should be an imposing figure. Except Pope has this way of being impossibly likable. He looks and sounds like a human exclamation point. He
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