TICKFAW, La. — In the 2 sisters’ minds, the previous home stays because it was: a one-story brick ranch a hundred yards off the street, white fence below two historical oaks, tin roof long earlier than all of it caved in.Their father constructed on the farmland he had inherited. Dug a swimming pool, poured the concrete for a basketball courtroom, carved two softball fields into pasture. His two ladies, born much less than a yr aside, would grow up working and hiding and disappearing among the many pines.“I just miss the memories,” Tammy, the 60-year-old youthful sister, says.They’re within the yard in her favourite, taking pictures baskets with Daddy by starlight. It feels so actual, she says. So valuable and heat.“I wish I could have it all back,” she says.FIFTY MILES SOUTH AND WEST, a large crowd is right here to watch the older sister, to put on sequins like her, to cheer on her group. Five many years have handed since Kim Mulkey’s father first bounced a basketball to his daughters, explaining the keys to victory.The game itself hasn’t modified a lot, however every part else round Mulkey has. It’s a Sunday in early March, the identical day Pete Maravich’s 54-year-old career scoring record will fall. More than 13,000 people are packed into the LSU area named for Maravich, and Tigers alumnus and former NBA famous person Shaquille O’Neal is within the tunnel. He’s carrying a T-shirt with a image of star LSU ahead Angel Reese on the entrance and her nickname, “Bayou Barbie,” in scorching pink letters on the back.Reese strolls onto the ground. Fans chant “One more year!” pleading together with her to remain in school. And as a result of the worth of her identify, picture and likeness (NIL) rights is estimated to be price multiples more than the $240,000 WNBA most wage, she simply would possibly.“Times are different,” Mulkey will say in a information convention following the game. “You can be beautiful. You can be talented. You can be tough. You can be you.”Few dwell that final half more than Mulkey, who wears feathers nearly as dramatically as she ruffles them. Her outfits during video games are legendary, and during last year’s NCAA tournament, followers wished to see Reese and her teammates tear by way of the bracket, sure. But additionally they wished to see what their coach would possibly put on, say or do subsequent.She explodes at officers and is suspicious of reporters. Mulkey declined repeated interview requests for this story, and after LSU obtained an electronic mail from The Washington Post searching for touch upon numerous components of this story, she used two NCAA match information conferences to take aim at The Post’s reporting, threatening legal action within the occasion of “a false story.” LSU declined to remark.“Not many people are in a position to hold these kinds of journalists accountable,” she mentioned. “But I am, and I’ll do it.”It’s by no means her first or most high-profile controversy. In 2013, the NCAA suspended Mulkey for a tournament game after she criticized referees. She later publicly defended Baylor, her former employer, amid a sexual assault scandal in its football program. In November, she advised reporters after a street game that they may blame her in the event that they had been sick at Thanksgiving.“I ain’t a sissy,” she said, holding a tissue and choking back sniffles. “I’ve got some kind of cold. It might be covid, but I ain’t testing.”She can be recognized to carry grudges and conflict with gamers, together with about their appearances and shows of their sexuality, in keeping with interviews with former gamers and news reports. Mulkey and Brittney Griner, the coach’s largest star at Baylor, have feuded for more than a decade. And whereas Griner’s 294-day detainment in a Russian jail finally required White House intervention, it wasn’t enough to ease stress long after Griner first mentioned Mulkey inspired homosexual gamers to cover their sexuality and “keep your business behind closed doors,” Griner wrote in her memoir.“Kim Mulkey is an amazing coach; the reason I went to Baylor is because of her,” says Kelli Griffin, who performed for Mulkey from 2007 to 2010. But, Griffin says, “She made my life hell,” by drawing consideration to Griffin’s garments and issuing a suspension that finally ended the participant’s profession. And she believes it began after Mulkey came upon she was homosexual.Mulkey’s attorneys, in letters to The Post, denied that Mulkey handled homosexual gamers “more harshly or differently.” They supplied an affidavit from former Baylor participant Morghan Medlock, who mentioned that she was in a relationship with Griffin and that she by no means witnessed Mulkey mistreat Griffin or different homosexual athletes. Former Baylor and LSU participant Alexis Morris put it more bluntly to ESPN: “Coach Mulkey is not homophobic.”Mulkey, in a 2013 interview with OutSports, insisted that she didn’t care about gamers’ sexuality and wouldn’t ask them about it.“I don’t think it’s anybody’s business,” she mentioned then. “Whoever you are. I don’t care to know that.”Her conflicts with star gamers are over different points too, although, and they’ve continued at LSU, at the same time as gamers’ leverage and superstar swell. She benched Reese for 4 video games this season for causes the coach refused to clarify, weeks after showing to call out Reese for a poor taking pictures efficiency. (Reese didn’t reply to messages from The Post searching for remark.) Mulkey advised a supporter final yr that Reese had been left off an awards listing as a result of of her GPA, in keeping with electronic mail obtained through public information request by The Post. In one other electronic mail, Mulkey complained that Reese was one of a number of gamers who “stay on that social media crap.”Mulkey is many issues, amongst them a 5-foot-4 hoops whisperer, an exceptional teacher, a coach keen to dive deeply into gamers’ feelings to push them previous their preconceived limits. She can be one of school basketball’s most colourful personalities, considered by some as an nearly cartoonishly ornery supervillain. Regardless, as the ladies’s game lastly takes middle stage, she is an important half of the show. In final yr’s national championship game, she wore a sequined, technicolor ensemble and unfurled the very best game plan of her life.LSU compelled Iowa star Caitlin Clark to battle for each shot, each contact, each step. The Tigers shut off entry to the lane, permitting Clark to be predictably deadly from long vary however in any other case one-dimensional, enough for LSU’s blowout win and one achievement that eluded even Shaq and “Pistol Pete”: a national title.It was Mulkey’s seventh as a participant or coach, and even in victory she was sarcastic and prickly.“Coaches are hollering, ‘Get off the court,’ ” Mulkey snapped after successful the 2023 match, her fourth title as a head coach. “And I said: ‘Don’t tell me what to do; I’m fixing to win another championship.’ ”Coaches don’t win 723 video games, attain 5 Final Fours and cling round this long by being cuddly. Mulkey isn’t your grandmother or your mascot, and whereas everyone else is combating for ladies’s basketball, she’s combating in opposition to one thing as a result of it’s the fight that drives her. Even should you performed for her, received for her, liked her.“I’ll just say she doesn’t care about winning the popularity contest among coaches,” longtime Texas A&M coach Gary Blair says. “She wouldn’t want to.”So, yes, all of this — the sold-out arenas, tv rankings, consideration — is nicely and good. A fireplace is lastly rising within the girls’s game.Because Mulkey is the fireplace, and she has been burning for 40 years, too busy laying waste to every part and everyone in her path to be impressed by Clark, Shaq or anybody else attempting to soak on this storybook second.BACK WHEN THE FOOTAGE was grainy, if it existed at all, she was poetry in pigtails: whirling passes behind her back, between her legs, previous opponents. Sonja Hogg knew Louisiana Tech could be getting pace and grit when she recruited Mulkey, however was it an excessive amount of to hope for more?“I thought maybe she’d grow a little bit,” Hogg says now.No such luck, however within the early Nineteen Eighties, girls’s basketball groups took what they may get. There was no money for personal jets or elaborate group dinners, so the Lady Techsters dined on quick meals on bus rides to Texas and Oklahoma. And not even the great bus. That one was reserved for the lads’s group, leaving solely the “Blue Goose,” such a rattletrap that the journey itinerary inbuilt additional time for breakdowns.Home video games had been social affairs, and everyone wished to see the latest member of Hogg’s quintet. A degree guard raining down 30 photographs per game, as Clark generally does, would have been unseemly wherever in 1982. But at Louisiana Tech, coaches simply wouldn’t have allowed it. Mulkey’s job was to run the offense, distribute the ball, do issues exactly Hogg’s method.Hogg (rhymes with “rogue”) was the visionary, the strategist, this system’s good cop. Assistant coach Leon Barmore was the hard-ass. Fit in, do proper or go see the enforcer for a profanity-laced rant or a date with the sector stairs.“Back in the day,” former Louisiana Tech participant Mickie DeMoss says, “they didn’t have to explain why. You get there, or you’re going to run.”Louisianans drove hours to watch the Lady Techsters, so named as a result of the lads’s mascot was the Bulldogs and, as Hogg as soon as identified, “a lady dog is a bitch.” Hogg required her gamers be ladylike, and little ladies wore their hair braided like Mulkey’s as they squeezed into Memorial Gym. The area may match 5,200, however Hogg says if she greased the Ruston hearth marshal with tickets, he would enable in a thousand more.Because Hogg put on a show. Tennessee’s Pat Summitt wore pantsuits. Ohio State’s Tara VanDerveer donned sweaters. Cheyney’s C. Vivian Stringer often wore a skirt. Hogg drove a white Cadillac, wore beaver pores and skin or mink, styled her platinum hair into a towering meringue.“I couldn’t be dragging around in some sweatsuit,” she says now. “I mean, I wore warmups during practice and tennis shoes and whatever, but gah-lee, you don’t do that on the sideline.”Louisiana Tech smoked Tennessee in the 1982 Final Four, stirring whispers that Summitt was a nice coach however a choker in large video games, and met Cheyney within the remaining. Hogg directed visitors in a dusty rose and mild pink shirt, shell necklace and wool crepe pants as Stringer’s press initially put Louisiana Tech in a sleeper maintain.But Mulkey had the pace to interrupt the press, crash the lane, lay it in. The smarts to acknowledge when a defender dropped into a zone earlier than pulling up to empty one from deep. Hogg and Barmore freed Mulkey up to riff as a result of she had the conditioning to let her ignore fatigue and proceed punishing her opponents, choking them out, stomping the courtroom and beaming as time expired. Tech received by 14, and Mulkey obtained hooked on successful NCAA championships after one style.“She looked like a cheerleader jumping,” Hogg recollects of Mulkey, who went 130-6 as a school participant and reached the Final Four yearly. “She wants perfection. That’s what she was always seeking.”AS SOON AS LES MULKEY obtained out of the Marine Corps in 1963, he began clearing: strawberry vines, bushes, weeds and juvenile pines, even dairy cows from the taking part in surfaces he had been imagining for six years.His father had given his two sons 25 acres to share off a freeway in Tangipahoa Parish. Les’s youthful brother deliberate to raise horses on his half. Les preferred competitors, one technique to channel his overflowing power, and if all went proper, he would quickly be internet hosting weekend softball tournaments and pickup basketball video games.Les signed Kim up to play youth baseball, then took the league to courtroom when it refused to confess a woman, she later wrote. She made all-stars the subsequent yr. He took his daughters with him to play weeknight hoops, and if his group was a man down, he would draft Kim.“Her?” an opponent as soon as requested.“You scared?” Les mentioned.A lifelong LSU fan, he hoped Kim would play school basketball for the Ben-Gals, as they had been initially recognized. But when she picked Tech, he made the four-hour journey to Ruston for home video games, slipping into the health club and fading into the group to watch his little woman.“He was so proud of me,” Kim wrote, “and I was so proud that he was my dad.”Some nights, although, there have been no video games. Les and Dru, Kim’s mother, went dancing generally. Other nights he would go consuming as he used to within the Corps, he says, ending up in one other girl’s mattress. With his daughters in school, Les left Dru and married one other girl. She wasn’t a lot older than Tammy and Kim.In 1987, the WNBA was a decade away. After taking part in at Tech, Mulkey moved down the bench as an assistant coach. And a few years after that, she wrote, her boyfriend and a colleague within the athletic division, Randy Robertson, offered her a jack-in-the-box with an engagement ring inside. He was widespread and gregarious. She hated events and crowds, had by no means taken a sip of alcohol. She mentioned yes anyway, planning to toast with 7 Up at the marriage.Les packed his tuxedo and made the acquainted drive to Ruston. His new spouse may attend, Kim suggested, however provided that she sat within the rear, away from the household. The method Kim noticed it, sister Tammy says, her dad hadn’t simply walked out on his household. He had stop on the people who trusted him, the worst factor a individual can do.Through her attorneys, Mulkey derided The Post for contacting relations, saying they didn’t “relate in any way to her career.” But Mulkey herself wrote about her dad’s infidelity and their estrangement in her 2007 autobiography, “Won’t Back Down.”“His unfaithfulness to my mother devastated our entire family,” she wrote.Still, Les figured, if he talked to her in individual, Kim would come to her senses. But she wouldn’t budge. Neither would Les. His daughter walked down the aisle alone.They haven’t spoken since.CAN YOU IMAGINE KIM MULKEY begging? For something? She says it occurred in 2000, when she dropped to her knees earlier than Louisiana Tech President Daniel Reneau.Hogg was gone, however Barmore and Mulkey stored the Techsters machine buzzing: seven more Final Fours and the 1988 championship. Barmore was an unrelenting competitor, and by the tip of the 1999-2000 season, he and Mulkey had been butting heads more usually. After he referred to as her out in entrance of the group, she later wrote, Mulkey reached a breaking level. She requested a switch to a completely different division as she looked for a new teaching job, and Barmore apologized and stepped down. He lobbied for Mulkey to get a shot.Reneau was keen to think about it, however he supplied solely a three-year contract. Mulkey, then 37, wished 5. When they met within the president’s workplace, Mulkey wrote: “I got out of my chair, onto my knees, and begged that man for a five-year contract. Tears were flying everywhere.” (Reneau didn’t return calls and messages searching for remark.)Few issues are more important to Mulkey than loyalty, codified during the 1984 Olympics. Mulkey had damaged her foot and anticipated to be despatched home, however Summitt, the Tennessee legend, declared that Mulkey had earned her spot. Team USA received the gold medal, and Mulkey ceaselessly noticed Summitt as a mentor and pal.Reneau confirmed no such dedication.“I just wanted Dan Reneau to say, ‘Hey, Kim, you know we’ll take care of you, you’re one of us,’ ” Mulkey wrote. “But the man was so cold.”She took the job at Baylor, changing Hogg, of all people. Mulkey mentioned later that she by no means spoke to Reneau again.AT BAYLOR’S FIRST CONDITIONING SESSION below its new coach, within the spring of 2000, ahead Danielle Crockrom says, Mulkey approached and collected a fistful of the exhausted participant’s jersey.“Push past this point,” she says Mulkey advised her, “and you’ll be an all-American.”But group captain? Not now, possibly not ever, Crockrom recollects being advised. Because, in keeping with Crockrom’s telling, Mulkey knew the participant had gotten burned out the earlier season and stepped away for 2 weeks. She had stop. On her teammates, her coaches, herself. Then she had gone to Baylor’s athletic director to complain about Hogg and the group’s path, Crockrom says now, resulting in the employees shake-up.Mulkey blew the whistle, ordering more sprints, reminding everyone, Crockrom says, that she had set the wheels of agony in movement by complaining.“Be careful what you ask for,” Crockrom says. She wouldn’t absolutely perceive the aim till later. “This is what you need to be disrupted, to pull out the potential in you. I had potential in me that I hadn’t even begun to scratch.”That season, Baylor received 21 video games and reached the NCAA match for the primary time. Crockrom was certainly named an all-American. The Bears misplaced within the first spherical, although, and Mulkey advised gamers this was solely the start. “We might have raised the bar too early,” Mulkey mentioned with a chuckle after the loss.There was more work to do, even when that meant Mulkey’s course of wasn’t for everyone.“The weeding-out process,” Crockrom says.Mulkey handed out playbooks, Crockrom says, then yanked them away. She made the group run her plays again and again till calls resulted in a Pavlovian, muscle-memory response. Crockrom says Mulkey made publish gamers preserve tempo with guards, utilizing structured failure to push past bodily and emotional boundaries. She scheduled more and more conditioning periods, one beginning earlier than the final.Because know who else was up and grinding? VanDerveer at Stanford. Geno Auriemma at Connecticut. Summitt at Tennessee. All had been building perennial championship contenders as the ladies’s game competed for eyeballs on the more and more crowded sports panorama. Lisa Leslie may dunk; Candace Parker may throw down in opposition to boys; Sue Bird and Diana Taurasi anchored a U-Conn. group that couldn’t lose.Mulkey paid particular consideration to Summitt, whom teaching friends praised not only for doing issues the proverbial proper method however her method, establishing a commonplace and a recruiting pipeline and a juggernaut, all whereas raising a son.Back when she was nonetheless an assistant, Mulkey had leaned on Summitt when she and Randy realized, in 1991, they had been anticipating a child woman. She was working Louisiana Tech’s summer season camp at the time, plus overseeing teachers and performing as recruiting coordinator. She was “in a depression,” she would tell the Dallas Morning News in 2012, and thought it will be unimaginable so as to add a daughter to the combination, particularly when —You can, she advised her. It’s potential to be a great coach and a great mom.Mulkey believed Summitt, at all times her North Star, and took Makenzie on a recruiting journey when she was two weeks previous. She breastfed Kramer, the couple’s toddler son, earlier than and after practices and video games. Mulkey wrote that, by the time they moved to Waco, the youngsters had realized to provide their mother space, particularly after losses, and stop asking why she stubborn a lot.She leaned into the issues that made her at Louisiana Tech as a result of these issues received. Only she generally performed the roles of Hogg and Barmore: approachable emissary whereas handing out stuffed bears at Waco bingo halls and nursing houses, a former Baylor colleague says, and ruthless taskmaster who, in keeping with a number of former gamers, would possibly single out anybody who appeared distracted or was having a robust day.“If you’re having a hard time with something or you’re not performing at the level that she would like you to be, then get ready,” says Emily Niemann, a swing participant who joined the group in 2003. “Because there’s no holding back.”Niemann’s vertical soar was a mere 13 inches, and she says Mulkey introduced it up continuously, instructing the group to not throw Niemann a lob cross as a result of she wouldn’t catch it. Sometimes Mulkey’s feedback felt like a joke, Niemann says; different occasions she felt humiliated.In the 2004 NCAA match, fourth-seeded Baylor bumped into Tennessee within the Sweet 16. The groups had been tied as time expired, however officers huddled and decided that Baylor’s Jessika Stratton had fouled Tasha Butts. After Butts made two free throws, Summitt’s group superior.Mulkey by no means talked about the loss again. The group nonetheless remembered, and the subsequent season, Baylor crushed NCAA match opponents by an average of 15 factors. Niemann made 5 three-pointers in a title-game beatdown of Michigan State.“She’s so locked in and intense that it trickles down to everybody,” Niemann says. “And when you have a whole team of people where every loose ball matters, every deflection matters, every block-out, every trip down the floor — everything matters.“It’s emotionally draining. On the other hand, it gets results.”THREE MONTHS LATER, Niemann says, Mulkey summoned her to the coach’s workplace. The participant had been seen round Waco with a girl, and people had begun murmuring about her sexuality.“It’s not a good look,” Niemann says Mulkey advised her. Baylor is the world’s largest Baptist college, and its policy nonetheless prohibits premarital intercourse and defines marriage as between a man and girl. Mulkey suggested Niemann to watch out as a result of this system could be watching.For months, Niemann had struggled with questions on her identification, slowly coming to grips with being queer, she says. The product of a conservative home in Houston, a graduate of a Christian faculty and now a participant at Baylor, she discovered many of her emotions had been in battle together with her environment.“I can’t talk to anyone,” she says now. “I couldn’t find a way to make things feel right.”She was pondering of transferring, Niemann says, and met with Mulkey and her dad and mom about it. Mulkey was flabbergasted, the coach wrote in her memoir, including that amongst Niemann’s causes for wanting to depart Baylor was that Mulkey was generally too exhausting on gamers.“This is how I do what I do,” Niemann recollects the coach saying. “And if you can’t take it, maybe you should leave.”Niemann left. Later, she wrote that she “did not leave Baylor because coach Mulkey is homophobic.” The coach, Niemann wrote, was solely expressing opinions that had been the “dominant belief system” on campus.Mulkey wrote about Niemann in her memoir, suggesting that “unhappiness comes from within one’s soul” and that Niemann’s expertise was an remoted case.Other gamers level out that arduous teaching is a key driver of Mulkey’s success, at the same time as her friends go softer amid the shifting energy dynamics of school sports. For Mulkey, gamers say, that always extends to feedback about gamers’ hairstyles, tattoos and make-up.“She hates my different hair colors,” former Bears guard DiDi Richards says. “ ‘Why is your hair purple?’ ‘Are you going to wear them two ponytails?’ If you would change the color, she’d go, ‘You and these damn colors.’ ” The feedback got here from a place of affection, Richards believes. They may get private, too, although Richards says they show how Mulkey pushes gamers, bodily and emotionally, in pursuit of wins.Mulkey’s attorneys described the feedback as “good-natured banter, as often happens on and around the court.”A number of months after Baylor’s first championship, Mulkey’s husband advised her he felt uncared for. They attended {couples} counseling, Mulkey would write, and she supplied to depart teaching. Robertson nonetheless wished to finish their marriage. “I told Randy … that he better be sure,” Mulkey wrote, “because there was no turning back.” (Robertson didn’t reply to an electronic mail.)By this level, these in Mulkey’s orbit had realized that disloyalty may lead to harsh penalties. Les Mulkey despatched notes to his daughter, pleading for reconciliation, however Mulkey wrote that she returned them unread. After Reneau, the previous Louisiana Tech president, despatched Mulkey a message congratulating her on the national championship, Mulkey would say later, it sat unopened on her desk for years.“Talk to that man?” she advised the Dallas Morning News in 2012. “That’s not who I am.”AT BAYLOR, MULKEY IMPORTED a layer of trust by surrounding herself with previous allies: Barmore, who got here out of retirement to be an assistant coach; a longtime Louisiana Tech booster to supervise Baylor’s finances and journey; and a former Techsters group supervisor to deal with recruiting.Everything Mulkey did, at least because it associated to basketball, labored: two Sweet 16s in 5 years and, in 2010, one other Final Four. Texas youngsters dreamed of carrying the inexperienced and gold, and when Kelli Griffin was in seventh grade, she wrote a paper about sometime leaving Houston to play for Kim Mulkey.Griffin had come out in high faculty, however although she and Mulkey by no means explicitly mentioned her sexuality whereas she was being recruited, Griffin says now that it was “obvious” and that she assumed Mulkey knew. She promised Griffin’s mom, Madine, that Baylor was a “family” and that she would defend Kelli.Not long after Griffin arrived on campus, she says, Mulkey started asking why she dressed like a boy: dishevelled denims, basketball shorts, sweats. A girl, Griffin says the coach advised her, wears a gown. “Okay, this lady might not like gay people,” Griffin recollects pondering.She thought-about transferring, however in 2008, one of Griffin’s pals and former AAU teammates dedicated to Baylor. Brittney Griner was a 6-foot-8 phenom and YouTube dunking sensation who, not long after reporting to campus, grabbed a rebound, glided the size of the courtroom with the ball, then dunked it.“Dang, Kim,” Barmore mentioned in an interview. “I think we’ve got something here.”Griner is homosexual, however she didn’t come out publicly till 2013, after her remaining game at Baylor. Still, each time Mulkey sensed Griner was distracted or pressured, Mulkey blamed “girlfriend problems,” Griner later wrote, even when Griner wasn’t courting anybody. “She sounded like she was speaking a foreign language,” Griner wrote.“Maybe she would have understood me better,” Griner wrote, “if I had shared more with her, but there was always a little bit of a disconnect with us, because I never really knew if Kim fully accepted me for who I am.”Mulkey additionally referred to as out gamers in the event that they gained weight, instructing the group’s energy coach to conduct weigh-ins in entrance of the group, in keeping with Griffin and one other participant. Players weren’t to convey non-basketball issues to Mulkey, they are saying, inspired to open up to assistant coaches as a substitute. And Niemann and a number of different former gamers say disgrace was a frequent instrument in Mulkey’s teaching arsenal, whether or not during apply drills or in addresses to the group. Some of these former gamers spoke on the situation of anonymity as a result of of fears of retaliation within the close-knit girls’s basketball group.Mulkey’s attorneys mentioned the previous gamers’ allegations had been too obscure to answer.Mulkey didn’t like the celebs tattooed on Griner’s shoulders as a result of, the participant later wrote, they despatched the “wrong message.” Griner pacified her coach by carrying a T-shirt below her jersey.“It seemed like all she cared about was the image of the program as seen through the eyes of a very specific segment of the population,” Griner wrote. “Just once, I wanted her to stop worrying about what everyone else thought and stand by my side.”In 2010, Griffin was the second-ranked Bears’ start line guard. One night time, Griffin says, an ex-girlfriend and Bears teammate confirmed up at Griffin’s home, and a fight broke out.Griffin says she referred to as Mulkey to report the incident, and the subsequent morning, Mulkey introduced that Griffin could be suspended indefinitely. The teammate, who Griffin wouldn’t determine to The Post as a result of, she mentioned, the teammate had not come out as homosexual, wasn’t punished, in keeping with Griffin. In a separate interview, Griffin’s mother, Madine, additionally recalled that the opposite participant wasn’t suspended.Griffin says she confronted Mulkey to ask why she was being penalized and that Mulkey advised her she was owed no rationalization.“I thought I did everything I was supposed to,” she says.After The Post requested Mulkey’s representatives about these occasions, they supplied a assertion from the previous participant, Morghan Medlock, who was in a relationship with Griffin at the time. Medlock claimed Griffin was really suspended for utilizing marijuana.In a cellphone interview the subsequent day, Medlock reiterated that Mulkey “never knew” there had been an altercation between Griffin and Medlock. Griffin simply stopped coming to apply, Medlock mentioned. Medlock mentioned she didn’t bear in mind how she had realized the rationale Griffin was suspended.Medlock mentioned she determined to provide the assertion after receiving a call this week from an particular person who falsely claimed Griffin had recognized Medlock to The Post.“If my name never came up, I wouldn’t be on the phone with you right now,” she mentioned. Medlock wouldn’t reveal who had contacted her and refused to say when she had final spoken with Mulkey.“What difference does it make?” she mentioned. “How I got the information, who I got it from, where I got it, that doesn’t matter.”Griffin maintains that she was not suspended for medication and that she didn’t use marijuana in school. The Baylor girls’s basketball spokeswoman from 2010, who’s now retired, advised The Post in a textual content message Wednesday that she was “not privy” to the rationale for Griffin’s suspension. Baylor’s present spokesman declined to touch upon this and different components of this text.Griffin says she advised assistant coach Damion McKinney that she supposed to switch as a result of, Griffin says, “I couldn’t play for Kim anymore.” (McKinney didn’t reply to messages searching for remark.)But transferring wouldn’t be straightforward. Long earlier than the NCAA, in 2021, launched the switch portal, permitting gamers to return and go amongst colleges with out penalty, gamers typically needed to be launched by one faculty earlier than pursuing a switch to a different.Four days after showing in an exhibition game, the Baylor program launched a assertion to the media. It didn’t say Griffin supposed to switch.YEARS PASSED, AND WITH KIM and Tammy grown and gone and their dad beginning over, pine seedlings took root on the softball fields. The partitions of the pool collapsed and obtained stuffed in. The basketball goal was cut down and hauled away. Trash collected on the concrete slab, as soon as the location of late-night competitions; cans rusted; and discarded footwear turned waterlogged, changing into moldy and deformed. Someone spray-painted KEEP OUT on a sheet of corrugated steel that changed a wall, wooden beams rotted, pipes sunk into the earth.The pines matured and swallowed the fields, grass grew and weeds sprouted, flowered and unfold. After practically 4 many years, the overgrowth had narrowed the property’s strolling paths and obscured the driveway.The woods had retaken their land, and any proof that a household had ever been right here was gone.IN SPRING 2016, MULKEY’S SON, who’s now 29, satisfied her it was time to go see Summitt. The legendary Tennessee coach, and maybe Mulkey’s dearest pal in teaching, had been identified with Alzheimer’s illness 5 years earlier.Summitt was in a senior residing facility in Knoxville, and Mulkey knew what visiting her meant. Kim stored saying “I love ya,” she would inform reporters later, and Pat stored saying it back. Four weeks later, Summitt was gone.This was the identical yr that Baylor fired football coach Art Briles after a damning investigation of the football program’s coverup of at least 17 acts of sexual or home assault by 19 gamers. Mulkey went on the assault. She snapped at reporters who introduced up the scandal, saying she was “tired of hearing” about it, then turned a postgame speech after her five hundredth profession win into a pulpit.“If somebody is around you and they ever say, ‘I will never send my daughter to Baylor,’ you knock them right in the face,” she mentioned. Mulkey later apologized.The faculty’s leaders, many of whom had been introduced in to revive the college’s status, discovered themselves coping with new complications involving Mulkey. Even earlier than Baylor introduced plans to interchange the previous Ferrell Center with a new area, Mulkey advised friends that she anticipated the courtroom to be named for her.Baylor declined The Post’s requests to interview Athletic Director Mack Rhoades and faculty president Linda Livingstone.Mulkey distanced herself farther from gamers whose time at Baylor had ended abruptly or unexpectedly. When Niemann returned to campus for a celebration of Baylor’s 2005 championship, it was an important step in her course of of therapeutic, she says.“I wanted to go back to the place,” Niemann says, “and step back into that gym and re-engage with that community and not have my head held down in shame. That’s what I needed to do: This is me; this is who I am. I did some awesome things, I made some poor decisions, and this is still a part of my life.”Niemann discovered Mulkey and approached her. Niemann says she thanked her former coach for the affect she had made on her life and mentioned she was sorry for the way in which issues ended.Niemann mentioned Mulkey mentioned nothing and walked away.“There was just nothing there,” she says. “There was no warmth. There was no nothing.”Three months after Mulkey contracted the coronavirus in 2021, forcing the cancellation of a home game in opposition to U-Conn., she urged the NCAA to “dump” testing for the virus. A number of weeks later, Mulkey approached Baylor directors to allow them to know she had an offer from LSU. She deliberate to simply accept until Baylor gave her a higher deal.In a determination that rocked the industry, the college made no counteroffer.ONE MONDAY MORNING IN 2022, LSU gamers arrived at the basketball facility and had been greeted with an uncommon directive: Turn off your telephones and put them within the different room.Mulkey went ballistic. Days earlier, two LSU gamers had gotten into a fight. Teammates obtained between them, however the two stored at it, with spit flying and glass thrown. The scene had unfolded in entrance of a group of visiting recruits.“My regret in this life,” one of the people current says, “I didn’t record this meeting.”That was unimaginable, although, as a result of at Baylor and now at LSU, former gamers say, staffers generally mitigated the risk of Mulkey’s tirades being recorded by barring telephones from the room. (Mulkey’s attorneys didn’t tackle this incident of their responses to The Post.)It had been a tense yr already. Earlier in 2022, Griner, now starring for the Phoenix Mercury, was detained at an airport in Russia, the place, like many WNBA gamers, she supplemented her earnings by taking part in abroad. Officials claimed she had vape cartridges containing cannabis oil in her baggage.WNBA gamers wore Griner’s No. 42 during the All-Star Game, and Seattle Storm participant Sue Bird pleaded for Griner to be launched. NBA star Stephen Curry spoke out in help of Griner, and President Biden signed an govt order threatening sanctions on any authorities that wrongfully detained Americans.It was as if everyone was discussing Griner’s plight. Everyone, that’s, besides Griner’s school coach.“And you won’t,” Mulkey shot back at a reporter who mentioned he hadn’t seen her touch upon the scenario.Whatever the foundation of their beef, it had intensified enough that Mulkey would not often say Griner’s identify. She made an exception in June 2022, when Mulkey appeared on the “Tiger Rag” radio show.“I pray for Brittney,” Mulkey mentioned. “I want her home safely. I think there’s lots of people speaking out on her behalf, and those of us who don’t necessarily speak publicly about it certainly are praying for her.”Still, former LSU gamers say, these inside the program had realized to keep away from mentioning Griner or interacting with social media posts that supported the detained participant.Even within the tightknit teaching group, a frequent dialogue matter was Mulkey’s unwillingness to look past a grudge.“I really was hoping that Kim would make a statement. Really hoping she would,” says DeMoss, the previous Louisiana Tech participant and longtime coach who provides that she considers Mulkey a pal. “You’ve got a kid that’s stuck in Russia; I mean, that’s bigger than any feud that y’all had. No one knew how long they were going to detain her over there.“We were all hoping [Mulkey] could just rise above it for that moment. Just get her back home. But she didn’t.”Through her attorneys, Mulkey rebutted any suggestion that she didn’t help Griner.In December 2022, after practically a yr in jail, Griner was launched and returned to the United States in a prisoner exchange. The basketball group expressed reduction and pleasure, and reactions — not all supportive, contemplating the exchange freed a infamous Russian arms seller — poured out from each side of the political aisle. Mulkey issued a temporary assertion to ESPN: “God is good. Prayers are powerful. Brittney is on the way home where she belongs. Our prayers remain with her and her family as they recover and heal together.”Three months later, after Mulkey reached her fifth Final Four, a reporter requested whether or not Mulkey had spoken with Griner. She hadn’t. Four days later, Mulkey, in a pink- and gold-sequined jacket, cut down the web and held up a newspaper with Reese pictured and CHAMPS! in large letters.Even amongst some of Mulkey’s ex-players, the keenness was muted.“As a head coach, you’re responsible for so many people; you’re taking on a role that leaves a very lasting impression,” a former Baylor participant says. “You might be able to win us a championship, but are people going to want to come back and see you?”EVERY ONCE IN A WHILE, Les Mulkey climbs into his work truck, drives previous the previous property, makes his method 50 miles south and west to Baton Rouge. He hasn’t spoken together with his older daughter in 37 years, however similar as he used to, he can slip into a health club, fade into the group and watch his little woman.“I love my babies,” he says. “I ain’t ashamed.”Kim has her daddy’s eyes, the identical skeptical eyebrows, the identical pleasure. “They’re just alike,” youthful daughter Tammy says. Tammy mentioned in early March that she doesn’t communicate to her sister, both. There was some disagreement 5 – 6 years in the past, Tammy says, however she received’t say what triggered it. She believes they may reconnect finally. “I’m sure we will,” she says. “One day. I hope.”Les has no such delusions. Isn’t it odd, he says, to like a youngster a lot that you just go away them be? It’s how Kim desires it, he says, however he prays each night time that, tomorrow, she’s going to need one thing new. He is 86 now and lives alone, in a dilapidated trailer method out previous the pines. It’s the place he retreats after his drives to Baton Rouge. He has dozens of photos, newspaper cutouts, mementos from Kim’s basketball profession. Tammy calls it a shrine.It’s all he has left of her, and with many of Les’s pals dying lately, he thinks about what’s subsequent. He was cocky, he says. Stubborn. A little bit too proud, he says, so when his time comes, Les figures it’ll be when he’s alone, surrounded by achievements however not people, losing away just like the issues he as soon as constructed.LONG AFTER ANOTHER LSU WIN, Mulkey takes a photograph with a girl in a wheelchair. Then she factors at a crowd assembled past the tunnel, lamenting that she’s about to stroll into that.“Kim!” a younger fan yells.“You’ve got to say Coach Mulkey,” an grownup corrects.Mulkey heads that method, drawing cheers, and encourages endurance. She will get to everyone, she guarantees. As the sector empties, the coach indicators autographs, raises her eyebrows at the Kim Mulkey bobblehead the college gave out, poses for selfies not removed from the banner LSU hung for final yr’s championship.As afternoon turns to night in Baton Rouge, Mulkey remains to be signing and chatting with followers. She’s an icon and a winner, one of the very best motivators and academics any sport has seen. But Mulkey is true: Times are completely different. Long after Summitt’s Tennessee groups slept on gymnasium flooring as a result of her program couldn’t afford lodge rooms, Mulkey now makes $3.26 million per yr, most within the girls’s game. Meanwhile, Louisiana Tech, as soon as a girls’s basketball dynasty, hasn’t made the NCAA match in a dozen years. Baylor is no longer among the many sport’s higher tier, one other construction deserted and left to wither.Along the LSU baseline, households await Mulkey to succeed in them. When they’ve gotten no matter they’ve been ready for, they head towards the steps and a row of glass doorways. As they stroll, fathers inform their youngsters that was Kim Mulkey they simply met, the coach who received all these championships, advised it like it’s, did all of it her method.Reporters fold their tripods and unplug their microphones from press row. Athletics staffers head towards the Pete Maravich Assembly Center exits. The crowd thins, and staff use a leaf blower to take away trash from empty rows.“Miss Kim!” a voice calls, and it echoes by way of the sector. Mulkey walks throughout the hardwood, sequins glinting and heels clicking, to snap one other image. Then, after they all have what they wished, the final of the buddies, households and teams go away collectively, beneath a banner marking Mulkey’s latest achievement, and the coach heads back towards the tunnel, off into the night alone.Molly Hensley-Clancy in Washington, D.C., contributed to this report.