“I think they hired me to be a coach. If they wanted me to be an entertainer, they got the wrong person (laughs),” he said at UK Media Day last week.
ks followed that up by unintentionally going viral for his introduction, one that was nothing more than the 55-year-old coach walking from the locker room to the Rupp Arena floor in a Kentucky OVO letterman jacket with Big Dawgs by Hanumankind and Kalmi blasting through the speakers. He gave a little skip at the end to get the crowd on its feet — he did say he “might come out of character a little bit and do something” in the heat of the moment — but for the most part, it was just Kenny Brooks being Kenny Brooks.
With the dust now settled on a night to remember in Lexington, Brooks is pleased with how things turned out and the message he got across.
“Big Blue Madness the other night, I walked out in front of 24,000 people and I don’t think I’ve ever been in front of a crowd that big,” he said. “Crazy for one team. That was a very, very big blessing.”
He had said before the goal was to show BBM is one of a kind and “anything else is just imitation.” Then they backed it up with a state-of-the-art glass floor, something college basketball has never seen — beyond the organic hype celebrating a new era of Kentucky basketball.
“I’ve seen it on TV, but to experience it was totally different. The floor was unbelievable,” Brooks told KSR. “Kudos to our marketing department for going out and making that happen. I need to talk to Mitch (Barnhart) to try to make it full-time in Memorial. That would be sweet. But it was fun, a lot of fun.”
Everything about the night was ‘special,’ down to his daughters and those closest to him picking out his outfit for the introduction.
“As far as the intro, it did go viral. The outfit, I picked it out. Well, I didn’t pick it out, but it was daughter-approved,” he added. “I’m just picking up stuff, and I’m like, ‘Is this OK?’ They were like, ‘That’s fire.’ I guess that was OK. It worked out pretty well. A lot of people are trying to ask me where we got that from, but it wasn’t a whole lot of thought that went into it. The people around me made it happen, made it special.”
Among those who shared input on the UK jacket? None other than All-American guard Georgia Amoore, who has been “joined at the hip” with Brooks as his “quarterback” over the last four years, he says.
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“I had a little FaceTime, I was in bed about to fall asleep,” she said. “They were picking out their outfits, he was there with Gabby (Brooks). She was picking out her outfit too, he was flexing the jacket. I was like, ‘Yeah, that’s tough. That’s cold. You have to go with that.’”
From the outfit to the walk-out to the song choice to his presence in general, Amoore said what we saw at Big Blue Madness encapsulates Brooks and what he brings to the table as a coach to perfection.
“You know what? That’s just him,” she told KSR. “He has the aura, the slow walk. Just the calm, cool and collected swagger about him. That’s what you see.”
Brooks stole the show, but what about Kentucky’s star guard in her first Madness as a Wildcat? It exceeded every expectation she had coming in. She knew it’d be big, but not that big.
“It was unreal. They tried to get us ready for it, but I had no idea what it was going to be like,” Amoore said. “I was kind of underplaying it. They were telling me how many people would be there and I was like, ‘Yeah, I’ve played in front of that (at the Final Four).’ But no, it was different.
“To have all of those people on your side, just a sea of blue. It was big for Kentucky men’s and women’s basketball because it was a conjoined event. That’s monumental.
Join the conversation and talk about this article and all things Kentucky Sports in the new KSR Message Board.
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