Editor’s note: This article was originally published on Feb. 23, 2020. With the news of Kim Mulkey becoming a Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame inductee for the class of 2020, we’re bringing it back.

The best college coach in the glorious history of the state of Texas comes from a place called Tickfaw, La., stands just 5-foot-4 and never wanted to be a coach in the first place. Figured on a career as a CEO. But here Kim Mulkey is, fastest D1 basketball coach to 600 wins, man or woman. Imagine where she’d rank if she’d shown up at Baylor sooner.

Think what she’d have done anywhere.

And not just with a basketball, either.

The notion that Mulkey could win at any sport isn’t all that novel. Grant Teaff, the Baylor icon, has said on several occasions that Mulkey’s skill set is so impressive, she could coach football. She considers it “one of the highest compliments” ever paid her, which tells you something about someone who’s now a two-time finalist for the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame. By the Hall’s standards, she should have been a shoe-in as a player, much less as a coach. Then again she holds herself to a different set of standards, and not any defined by gender.

For instance, her name comes up occasionally in rumors about going back home to coach the men’s team in Baton Rouge.

“Do I think I could coach men’s basketball?” she asked over the phone Friday. “Absolutely. There are many women who know the game well enough, but only a handful could do it.

“You’ve gotta know what you’re doing.”

No one would ever accuse Mulkey of being unsure of herself, particularly when it comes to basketball. Terrific recruiter and keen judge of talent. But she’s a teacher first, as Teaff says. Which might be easy to overlook, what with everything else going on.

Watch Mulkey at work -- crouched like a leopard ready to pounce – and you could get the wrong idea.

“Mean, crazy, white woman,” is one perception. Or at least that’s what a friend told Mulkey.

Mulkey is many things but a winner above all else. Won four state titles as the point guard for Hammond High, down the road from tiny Tickfaw.

“And let’s don’t forget that when I was in the eighth grade,” she said, “we went undefeated.”

From Hammond, she moved four hours northwest to Louisiana Tech. By the time she left four years later, she’d scored more points than any D1 player in NCAA history, woman or man. She’d also won a pair of NCAA championships and followed those up with a gold medal at the ’84 Olympics.

Seemed like a good time to put up her sneakers and head off for graduate school, she figured, only LA Tech officials had other ideas. Talked her into taking a job as Leon Barmore’s assistant. She said she’d give it a year; she stayed 15.

LA Tech won two national titles while she was an assistant, and once you add the three championships she’s copped at Baylor in 2005, 2012 and 2019, you’ve got the only person in NCAA history to win national championships as a player, assistant and head coach.

“That’s what I read,” she said.

You may have read a lot about Mulkey over the years. She has a way of ending up the center of attention. In the wake of the Baylor sexual assault scandal, she apologized for emotional remarks defending the school’s reputation. When Mulkey was 12, she was news when officials of the Dixie Youth Baseball All-Star Tournament kicked her out of the dugout because she was a girl. Her father hired a lawyer and got a temporary restraining order. They eventually dropped the case, and her team won without its star second baseman. As Mulkey stood crying outside the chain-link fence, one by one her teammates tipped their caps.

Mulkey considers it one of the formative events of her life, which she volunteered in no particular order: the decision of her parents when she was in second grade to keep her in public schools once they were integrated, calling it “the greatest decision my parents ever made”; her divorce after 20 years of marriage; a stillborn grandchild; and LA Tech’s refusal to give her a five-year deal as head coach when Barmore retired.

Had LA Tech officials simply given her the standard terms for a head coach, she’d have never left Louisiana for Baylor. The fact that she hadn’t left already was mystery enough. She’d turned down offers from Power 5 schools.

“I just couldn’t pull the trigger,” she said. “I don’t know if it was out of fear that I wasn’t ready or I’m a Louisiana girl and I’m supposed to take over for Leon when he retired.”

Had Mulkey left five years sooner, at the rate she’s winning now, she’d be closing in on 750 wins. Good enough for top 20 all-time among women’s coaches. Of the D1 coaches in front of her now, only UConn’s Geno Auriemma has a higher winning percentage (.886 to .857), and only Auriemma and Tennessee’s Pat Summitt have won more national championships.

Among basketball coaches in the state of Texas, Mulkey has as many national titles as UTEP’s Don Haskins, Texas’ Jody Conradt and Texas Tech’s Marsha Sharp put together. Darrell Royal posted as many flags, but his resources at Texas were better in the ‘60s, before scholarship limits. Harley Redin’s fabulous Flying Queens won 131 straight games at Wayland Baptist, but the competition wasn’t as good as it is these days.

The best case for a rival to Mulkey’s supremacy: Texas’ swimming coach, Eddie Reese, with an incredible 14 national titles.

But could Eddie draw up a sweet back screen post?

Mulkey can do it all, and it’s Baylor’s great fortune that she’s happy to remain in Waco, where she took over a team that went 7-20 the year before and went to the NCAAs for the first time in school history. They’ve been 18 times and counting. They will continue to win because it’s what Mulkey does.

When I asked her, in fact, if there’s anything she didn’t win at, she said marriage and horseback riding.

“Got on a horse one time and it ran away with me and I got knocked off by a clothesline,” she said.

“Scared me so much that I have never been on a horse again.”

Here’s betting that if she’d gotten back on that horse, she’d have been the world’s best barrel racer. Or bareback rider.

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