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TICKFAW, La. — In the two sisters’ minds, the old house remains as it was: a one-story brick ranch a hundred yards off the road, white fence under two ancient oaks, tin roof long before it all caved in.

Their father built on the farmland he had inherited. Dug a swimming pool, poured the concrete for a basketball court, carved two softball fields into pasture. His two girls, born less than a year apart, would grow up running and hiding and disappearing among the pines.

“I just miss the memories,” Tammy, the 60-year-old younger sister, says.

They’re in the backyard in her favorite, shooting baskets with Daddy by starlight. It feels so real, she says. So precious and warm.

“I wish I could have it all back,” she says.

FIFTY MILES SOUTH AND WEST, a massive crowd is here to watch the older sister, to wear sequins like her, to cheer on her team. Five decades have passed since Kim Mulkey’s father first bounced a basketball to his daughters, explaining the keys to victory.

The game itself hasn’t changed much, but everything else around Mulkey has. It’s a Sunday in early March, the same day <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2024/03/03/caitlin-clark-iowa-senior-day/" target=_blank>Pete Maravich’s 54-year-old career scoring record</a> will fall. More than 13,000 people are packed into the LSU arena named for Maravich, and Tigers alumnus and former NBA superstar Shaquille O’Neal is in the tunnel. He’s wearing a T-shirt with a picture of star LSU forward Angel Reese on the front and her nickname, “Bayou Barbie,” in hot pink letters on the back.

Reese strolls onto the floor. Fans chant “One more year!” pleading with her to stay in college. And because the value of her name, image and likeness (NIL) rights is estimated to be worth multiples more than the $240,000 WNBA maximum salary, she just might.

“Times are different,” Mulkey will say in a news conference following the game. “You can be beautiful. You can be talented. You can be tough. You can be you.”

Few live that last part more than Mulkey, who wears feathers almost as dramatically as she ruffles them. Her outfits during games are legendary, and <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2023/04/02/kim-mulkey-lsu-national-championship/" target=_blank>during last year’s NCAA tournament</a>, fans wanted to see Reese and her teammates tear through the bracket, sure. But they also wanted to see what their coach might wear, say or do next.

She explodes at officials and is suspicious of reporters. Mulkey declined repeated interview requests for this story, and after LSU received an email from The Washington Post seeking comment on various elements of this story, she used two NCAA tournament news conferences to <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/colleges/2024/03/23/lsu-kim-mulkey-washington-post/e5e391d4-e95a-11ee-9eba-1558f848ec25_story.html" target=_blank>take aim at The Post’s reporting</a>, threatening legal action in the event of “a false story.” LSU declined to comment.

“Not many people are in a position to hold these kinds of journalists accountable,” she said. “But I am, and I’ll do it.”

It’s by no means her first or most high-profile controversy. In 2013, the <a href="https://eu.usatoday.com/story/sports/ncaaw/2013/07/02/baylor-coach-kim-mulkey-suspended-ncaa-officiating-criticism/2482393/" target="_blank">NCAA suspended Mulkey for a tournament game</a> after she criticized referees. She later publicly defended Baylor, her former employer, amid a sexual assault scandal in its football program. In November, she told reporters after a road game that they could blame her if they were sick at Thanksgiving.

“I ain’t a sissy,”<a href="https://www.theadvertiser.com/story/sports/college/lsu/2023/11/18/lsu-kim-mulkey-covid-testing-news-conference-flu-tigers/71635632007/" target="_blank"> she said</a>, holding a tissue and choking back sniffles. “I’ve got some kind of cold. It might be covid, but I ain’t testing.”

Eakin Howard

She is also known to hold grudges and clash with players, including about their appearances and displays of their sexuality, according to interviews with former players <a href="https://www.espn.com/wnba/story/_/id/9289080/brittney-griner-says-baylor-coach-kim-mulkey-told-players-keep-quiet-sexuality" target=_blank>and news reports</a>. Mulkey and Brittney Griner, the coach’s biggest star at Baylor, have feuded for more than a decade. And while Griner’s 294-day detainment in a Russian prison eventually required White House intervention, it wasn’t enough to ease tension long after Griner first said Mulkey encouraged gay players to hide 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 played for Mulkey from 2007 to 2010. But, Griffin says, “She made my life hell” by drawing attention to Griffin’s clothes and issuing a suspension that ultimately ended the player’s career. And she believes it started after Mulkey found out she was gay.

Mulkey’s attorneys, in letters to The Post, denied that Mulkey treated gay players “more harshly or differently.” They provided an affidavit from former Baylor player Morghan Medlock, who said that she was in a relationship with Griffin and that she never witnessed Mulkey mistreat Griffin or other gay athletes. Former Baylor and LSU player Alexis Morris <a href="https://www.espn.com/womens-college-basketball/story/_/id/32762198/kim-mulkey-crossroads-baylor-lsu-present-why-not-apologizing-it" target="_blank">put it more bluntly</a> to ESPN: “Coach Mulkey is not homophobic.”

Mulkey, in <a href="https://www.outsports.com/2013/3/23/4133554/baylor-coach-kim-mulkey-doesnt-care-about-athletes-sexual-orientation/" target=_blank>a 2013 interview with OutSports</a>, insisted that she didn’t care about players’ sexuality and wouldn’t ask them about it.

“I don’t think it’s anybody’s business,” she said then. “Whoever you are. I don’t care to know that.”

Her conflicts with star players are over other issues too, though, and they have continued at LSU, even as players’ leverage and celebrity swell. She <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2023/11/29/angel-reese-lsu-kim-mulkey-return/" target=_blank>benched Reese</a> for four games this season for reasons the coach refused to explain, weeks after appearing to call out Reese for a poor shooting performance. (Reese did not respond to messages from The Post seeking comment.) Mulkey told a supporter last year that Reese had been left off an awards list because of her GPA, according to email obtained via public records request by The Post. In another email, Mulkey complained that Reese was one of several players who “stay on that social media crap.”

Mulkey is many things, among them a 5-foot-4 hoops whisperer, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2023/12/03/kim-mulkey-angel-reese-lsu/" target=_blank>an exceptional teacher</a>, a coach willing to dive deeply into players’ emotions to push them past their preconceived limits. She is also one of college basketball’s most colorful personalities, viewed by some as an almost cartoonishly ornery supervillain. Regardless, as the women’s game finally takes center stage, she is an essential part of the show. In last year’s national championship game, she wore a sequined, technicolor ensemble and unfurled the best game plan of her life.

LSU forced Iowa star Caitlin Clark to battle for every shot, every touch, every step. The Tigers shut off access to the lane, allowing Clark to be predictably lethal from long range but otherwise 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 player or coach, and even in victory she was sarcastic and prickly.

“Coaches are hollering, ‘Get off the court,’ ” Mulkey snapped after winning the 2023 tournament, 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 games, reach five Final Fours and hang around this long by being cuddly. Mulkey isn’t your grandmother or your mascot, and while everyone else is fighting for women’s basketball, she’s fighting against something because it’s the fight that drives her. Even if you played for her, won for her, loved her.

“I’ll just say she doesn’t care about winning the popularity contest among coaches,” longtime Texas A&amp;M coach Gary Blair says. “She wouldn’t want to.”

So, yes, all of this — the sold-out arenas, television ratings, attention — is well and good. A fire is finally rising in the women’s game.

Because Mulkey is the fire, and she has been burning for 40 years, too busy laying waste to everything and everyone in her path to be impressed by Clark, Shaq or anyone else trying to soak in this storybook moment.

Doug Pizac

BACK WHEN THE FOOTAGE was grainy, if it existed at all, she was poetry in pigtails: whirling passes behind her back, between her legs, past opponents. Sonja Hogg knew Louisiana Tech would be getting speed and grit when she recruited Mulkey, but was it too much to hope for more?

“I thought maybe she’d grow a little bit,” Hogg says now.

No such luck, but in the early 1980s, women’s basketball teams took what they could get. There was no money for private jets or elaborate team dinners, so the Lady Techsters dined on fast food on bus rides to Texas and Oklahoma. And not even the nice bus. That one was reserved for the men’s team, leaving only the “Blue Goose,” such a rattletrap that the travel itinerary built in extra time for breakdowns.

Home games were social affairs, and everyone wanted to see the newest member of Hogg’s quintet. A point guard raining down 30 shots per game, as Clark sometimes does, would have been unseemly anywhere in 1982. But at Louisiana Tech, coaches just wouldn’t have allowed it. Mulkey’s job was to run the offense, distribute the ball, do things precisely Hogg’s way.

Hogg (rhymes with “rogue”) was the visionary, the strategist, the program’s good cop. Assistant coach Leon Barmore was the hard-ass. Fit in, do right or go see the enforcer for a profanity-laced rant or a date with the arena stairs.

“Back in the day,” former Louisiana Tech player Mickie DeMoss says, “they didn’t have to explain why. You get there, or you’re going to run.”

Courtesy of Louisiana Tech

Louisianans drove hours to watch the Lady Techsters, so named because the men’s mascot was the Bulldogs and, as Hogg once pointed out, “a lady dog is a bitch.” Hogg required her players to be ladylike, and little girls wore their hair braided like Mulkey’s as they squeezed into Memorial Gym. The arena could fit 5,200, but Hogg says if she greased the Ruston fire marshal with tickets, he would allow 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 occasionally wore a skirt. Hogg drove a white Cadillac, wore beaver 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.”

<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/interactive/2022/first-womens-ncaa-tournament/" target=_blank>Louisiana Tech smoked Tennessee in the 1982 Final Four</a>, stirring whispers that Summitt was a fine coach but a choker in big games, and met Cheyney in the final. Hogg directed traffic in a dusty rose and light pink blouse, shell necklace and wool crepe pants as Stringer’s press initially put Louisiana Tech in a sleeper hold.

But Mulkey had the speed to break the press, crash the lane, lay it in. The smarts to recognize when a defender dropped into a zone before pulling up to drain one from deep. Hogg and Barmore freed Mulkey up to riff because she had the conditioning to let her ignore fatigue and continue punishing her opponents, choking them out, stomping the court and beaming as time expired. Tech won by 14, and Mulkey got hooked on winning NCAA championships after one taste.

“She looked like a cheerleader jumping,” Hogg recalls of Mulkey, who went 130-6 as a college player and reached the Final Four every year. “She wants perfection. That’s what she was always seeking.”

Kent Babb

AS SOON AS LES MULKEY got out of the Marine Corps in 1963, he started clearing: strawberry vines, bushes, weeds and juvenile pines, even dairy cows from the playing surfaces he had been imagining for six years.

His father had given his two sons 25 acres to share off a highway in Tangipahoa Parish. Les’s younger brother planned to raise horses on his half. Les liked competition, one way to channel his overflowing energy, and if all went right, he would soon be hosting weekend softball tournaments and pickup basketball games.

Les signed Kim up to play youth baseball, then took the league to court when it refused to admit a girl, she later wrote. She made all-stars the next year. He took his daughters with him to play weeknight hoops, and if his team was a man down, he would draft Kim.

“Her?” an opponent once asked.

A lifelong LSU fan, he hoped Kim would play college basketball for the Ben-Gals, as they were initially known. But when she picked Tech, he made the four-hour trip to Ruston for home games, slipping into the gym and fading into the crowd to watch his little girl.

“He was so proud of me,” Kim wrote, “and I was so proud that he was my dad.”

Some nights, though, there were no games. Les and Dru, Kim’s mom, went dancing sometimes. Other nights he would go drinking as he used to in the Corps, he says, ending up in another woman’s bed. With his daughters in college, Les left Dru and married another woman. She wasn’t much older than Tammy and Kim.

In 1987, the WNBA was a decade away. After playing at Tech, Mulkey moved down the bench as an assistant coach. And a few years after that, she wrote, her boyfriend and a colleague in the athletic department, Randy Robertson, presented her a jack-in-the-box with an engagement ring inside. He was popular and gregarious. She hated parties and crowds, had never taken a sip of alcohol. She said yes anyway, planning to toast with 7 Up at the wedding.

Les packed his tuxedo and made the familiar drive to Ruston. His new wife could attend, Kim advised, but only if she sat in the rear, away from the family. The way Kim saw it, sister Tammy says, her dad hadn’t just walked out on his family. He had quit on the people who depended on him, the worst thing a person can do.

Through her attorneys, Mulkey derided The Post for contacting family members, saying they did not “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 person, Kim would come to her senses. But she wouldn’t budge. Neither would Les. His daughter walked down the aisle alone.

CAN YOU IMAGINE KIM MULKEY begging? For anything? She says it happened in 2000, when she dropped to her knees before Louisiana Tech President Daniel Reneau.

Hogg was gone, but Barmore and Mulkey kept the Techsters machine humming: seven more Final Fours and the 1988 championship. Barmore was an unrelenting competitor, and by the end of the 1999-2000 season, he and Mulkey were butting heads more often. After he called her out in front of the team, she later wrote, Mulkey reached a breaking point. She requested a transfer to a different department as she searched for a new coaching job, and Barmore apologized and stepped down. He lobbied for Mulkey to get a shot.

Reneau was willing to consider it, but he offered only a three-year contract. Mulkey, then 37, wanted five. When they met in the president’s office, 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 did not return calls and messages seeking comment.)

Few things are more important to Mulkey than loyalty, codified during the 1984 <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/olympics" target="_blank" class="contextual_link">Olympics</a>. Mulkey had broken her foot and expected to be sent home, but Summitt, the Tennessee legend, declared that Mulkey had earned her spot. Team USA won the gold medal, and Mulkey forever saw Summitt as a mentor and friend.

“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, replacing Hogg, of all people. Mulkey said later that she never spoke to Reneau again.

Doug Pensinger

AT BAYLOR’S FIRST CONDITIONING SESSION under its new coach, in the spring of 2000, forward Danielle Crockrom says, Mulkey approached and collected a fistful of the exhausted player’s jersey.

“Push past this point,” she says Mulkey told her, “and you’ll be an all-American.”

But team captain? Not now, maybe not ever, Crockrom recalls being told. Because, according to Crockrom’s telling, Mulkey knew the player had gotten burned out the previous season and stepped away for two weeks. She had quit. On her teammates, her coaches, herself. Then she had gone to Baylor’s athletic director to complain about Hogg and the team’s direction, Crockrom says now, leading to the staff shake-up.

Mulkey blew the whistle, ordering more sprints, reminding everyone, Crockrom says, that she had set the wheels of agony in motion by complaining.

“Be careful what you ask for,” Crockrom says. She wouldn’t fully understand the purpose until 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 won 21 games and reached the NCAA tournament for the first time. Crockrom was indeed named an all-American. The Bears lost in the first round, though, and Mulkey told players this was only the beginning. “We might have raised the bar too early,” Mulkey said with a chuckle after the loss.

There was more work to do, even if that meant Mulkey’s process wasn’t for everyone.

“The weeding-out process,” Crockrom says.

Mulkey handed out playbooks, Crockrom says, then yanked them away. She made the team run her plays again and again until calls resulted in a Pavlovian, muscle-memory response. Crockrom says Mulkey made post players keep pace with guards, using structured failure to push beyond physical and emotional barriers. She scheduled more and more conditioning sessions, one starting earlier than the last.

Because know who else was up and grinding? VanDerveer at Stanford. Geno Auriemma at Connecticut. Summitt at Tennessee. All were building perennial championship contenders as the women’s game competed for eyeballs on the increasingly crowded sports landscape. Lisa Leslie could dunk; Candace Parker could throw down against boys; Sue Bird and Diana Taurasi anchored a U-Conn. team that couldn’t lose.

Mulkey paid special attention to Summitt, whom coaching peers praised not just for doing things the proverbial right way but her way, establishing a standard and a recruiting pipeline and a juggernaut, all while raising a son.

Back when she was still an assistant, Mulkey had leaned on Summitt when she and Randy learned, in 1991, they were expecting a baby girl. She was running Louisiana Tech’s summer camp at the time, plus overseeing academics and acting as recruiting coordinator. She was “in a depression,” she would<a href="https://www.dallasnews.com/sports/baylor-bears/2012/03/10/baylor-s-kim-mulkey-is-fierce-loving-and-loyal-but-dont-get-on-her-bad-side/" target="_blank"> tell the Dallas Morning News in 2012</a>, and thought it would be impossible to add a daughter to the mix, especially when —

You can, she told her. It’s possible to be a great coach and a great mother.

Mulkey believed Summitt, always her North Star, and took Makenzie on a recruiting trip when she was two weeks old. She breastfed Kramer, the couple’s infant son, before and after practices and games. Mulkey wrote that, by the time they moved to Waco, the kids had learned to give their mom space, especially after losses, and stop asking why she cussed so much.

John Raoux

Andy Lyons

She leaned into the things that made her at Louisiana Tech because those things won. Only she sometimes played the roles of Hogg and Barmore: approachable emissary while handing out stuffed bears at Waco bingo halls and nursing homes, a former Baylor colleague says, and ruthless taskmaster who, according to multiple former players, might single out anyone who seemed distracted or was having a tough 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 player who joined the team in 2003. “Because there’s no holding back.”

Niemann’s vertical jump was a mere 13 inches, and she says Mulkey brought it up constantly, instructing the team not to throw Niemann a lob pass because she wouldn’t catch it. Sometimes Mulkey’s comments felt like a joke, Niemann says; other times she felt humiliated.

In the 2004 NCAA tournament, fourth-seeded Baylor ran into Tennessee in the Sweet 16. The teams were tied as time expired, but officials huddled and determined that Baylor’s Jessika Stratton had fouled Tasha Butts. After Butts made two free throws, Summitt’s team advanced.

Mulkey never mentioned the loss again. The team nonetheless remembered, and the next season, Baylor crushed NCAA tournament opponents by an average of 15 points. Niemann made five 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.

The Best American Sports Writing: 2013, 2018, 2021. The Year's Best Sports Writing: 2021.

Associated Press Sports Editors, First place in Feature Writing, 2005, 2010 and 2019

PEN/ESPN Award for Literary Sports Writing, 2016 finalist

Not A Game: The Incredible Rise and Unthinkable Fall of Allen Iverson

Across the River: Life, Death, and Football in an American City

University of South Carolina, BA in journalism

Kent Babb is a sports features writer for The Washington Post who is currently assigned to its Sports and Society enterprise team. His work often focuses on the intersections of sports with social, cultural and political issues, with additional specialties as an NFL and college football reporter. He joined The Post in 2012. 

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The Kim Mulkey way

The LSU coach holds grudges, battles everyone — and keeps winning. But at what cost?