It’s hard to argue that someone who wears boa-feathered cuffs and spangles like smelted doubloons is mis-portrayed. And yet there Kim Mulkey is, her LSU team reconstituted as a serious contender, getting lingering hugs from the benched Angel Reese and looking so much smarter than her mockers and critics, who would have you think she’s an empty pile of garish laundry as opposed to the most rivetingly complex and finessing coach in women’s basketball.
Mulkey was expected to preside over a team implosion or maybe a melodrama this past week. Instead, she turned the tables on the whole country and got a whale of a victory over No. 9 Virginia Tech while becoming the fastest Division I coach, man or woman, to reach 700 wins. Championship teams are a measure, among other things, of their inner solidarity. Mulkey has had four of them. And she is unmistakably now stalking No. 5, coaxing along this heavy-with-talent LSU team with her cawing voice and stiletto heels striking the floor like pistol shots.
“I don’t have a locker room full of pushovers,” Mulkey remarked at last season’s Final Four. No, she doesn’t, and she isn’t one either. Her management of her team in the past weeks resembled a fire juggler tossing flames, willing to either catch the fire or let it all burn her hands.
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We might never know what was up with that war of wills between Mulkey and Reese, the Final Four’s most outstanding player, whom Mulkey benched for 4½ games over “locker room issues,” declining to elaborate. It was rough handling of a star who is said to command $1.7 million in NIL (name, image and likeness) money and has 2.6 million Instagram followers. But apparently Mulkey decided she better get Reese and the rest of her team right, right now. And she did.
Instead of dissension or sullenness, Mulkey now has a monster of a team. Reese, in her return to the team under difficult national exposure, batted her remarkable eyes and went for 19 points and nine rebounds while serving as a conspicuous celebrator of the new stars around her, such as transfer Aneesah Morrow (the best player on the floor) and startlingly 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 their hearts out,” as Mulkey observed.
“She’s back to the Angel everybody knows,” she added later.
Perhaps the issue was as simple as this: Reese spent the summer doing magazine shoots and lucrative appearances, her reward for an MVP season. But as Mulkey said in this preseason, “You’re not entitled to that again unless you work.”
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Sometimes Mulkey can talk more old school than a one-room schoolmarm. She’s country blunt, occasionally to the point of ignorance or rudeness. A couple of weeks ago she came to a presser sniffling. “I ain’t a sissy. I don’t have allergies,” Mulkey said. “I’ve got some kind of cold. It might be covid, but I ain’t testing. It’s sinuses. I don’t know what you call it — allergies, flu, I don’t know. So, if y’all get the flu, blame me during Thanksgiving.”
With her players, she calls herself a “mother hen” and likens them to her own children. It’s language that might not land well with 21-year-olds feeling their new powers as women, as earners 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 realness with me.”
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Somehow — at least so far — Mulkey’s players mostly accept it from her. Why? How is it that a sawed-off woman who stands no bigger than 5-foot-4, with hair the color of boxed bleach, a mouth that’s a cross between a sorghum spoon and a shotgun and clothes like the confetti innards of a piñata, commands such authority over such powerful teams of blended talents and survives controversy after controversy?
Perhaps the answer is that Mulkey engages with her players with far more emotional intelligence than the press or basketball audience may imagine. Much of her reputation for hardheartedness stems from tension with Brittney Griner, who revealed she felt pressure to closet her sexuality at Baylor, the Baptist school where Mulkey won three titles. The press ran with the implication and etched Mulkey as an uncaring bigot. This is overdrawn, and Griner has since acknowledged it. In fact, in March 2013 Mulkey gave an interview to OutSports while Griner was still on the team. She remarked that Griner had had “to endure more than any player I’ve ever had to coach” in the way of ugliness from crowds and asserted that she cared not at all if a player was gay and would never even ask the question.
“So it doesn’t matter to you?” the reporter asked.
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“No,” Mulkey said.
Mulkey attended the WNBA draft to see her star player go No. 1 and at a postseason banquet waxed about how she would miss Griner’s “free spirit.” Only when Griner went public with suggestions that Mulkey stifled her did their relationship cool.
Further purported evidence of Mulkey’s petty unfeelingness was her apparent refusal to comment about Griner’s arrest and imprisonment in Russia for marijuana possession. In fact, months before Mulkey faced widespread criticism for a perceived lack of support for Griner, she had commented, but only to the media outlet of her choice, the local Tiger Rag podcast. “You just want everybody to come home safely, and I pray for Brittney. I want her home safely. I think there are lots of people speaking out 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 ever met? By no means. Does she have a too-hot temper and an unreasoning approach to loyalty that stings her, and does she say coarse things? Sure. But she also gave Shanay Washington a place on the bench for four years as a student assistant after she had to quit with knee injuries. “We’ll take care of you. You’ll travel with us; you’ll sit on the bench; you’re a part of this team,” Mulkey said. When her Baylor team suffered a painful upset to Louisville in the 2013 Sweet 16, she told the press: “Put it right here on these shoulders. Don’t you point one finger on those kids, you put it right on 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 need to come back, and you need to finish school — that is the ultimate goal. We are going to get you a degree.”
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For some real insight into Mulkey’s actual dealings with her players, disciplinary and otherwise, a good source would seem to be last year’s championship point guard, Alexis Morris. Mulkey recruited Morris at Baylor, only to dismiss her for an off-court arrest. “I had sleepless nights over it because I loved Alexis,” Mulkey said. “It was for the sake of the locker room and the sake of making a tough decision to not lose your team. Those decisions, a lot of coaches don’t want to make.” After Morris did stints at Rutgers and Texas A&M, she rejoined Mulkey at LSU. During the Reese controversy, Morris wrote on X, “You can’t pay me to bash Kim.”
Mulkey is not an easy figure. Her high emoting makes other coaches look asleep. During games she’s so overwrought that sometimes when she tears at her collar you think, “Is this the night she actually rips her bodice?” She is inconstant with the media, one day heavily made up in finery and the next utterly without vanity or makeup, pale as an onion in disheveled sweats. One second she is snappish, the next plaintive for understanding. In a 2021 ESPN profile that is perhaps the only really penetrating insight into her, she said: “My gut is what I go by. … It may not come across as politically correct, but my heart is in the right place. It’s sometimes taken the wrong way. And, you know, that’s fair. I don’t want to hurt anybody. We all have our badness. But my good, I hope, will always far outweigh my bad.”
No coach in college basketball can beckon more from the strong-headed players she so clearly prefers. It’s time to recognize that beneath the get-ups is a coach with a remarkably firm and yet soft touch.
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