Hippies had Woodstock, Kentucky basketball gets ‘Popestock.’
Fans of a certain age will remember Woodstock, the iconic 1969 music festival.
Organizers were hoping 50,000 fans would make the trek to see such headliners as Credence Clearwater Revival, Janis Joplin and the Grateful Dead. Instead, 460,000 people engulfed the dairy farm in rural New York for “3 Days of Peace & Music.”
The event forever changed the direction of Rock ‘n Roll, but it was so much more than music as a generation used the platform to make its profound statement about counterculture and the Vietnam War.
Sunday in Lexington, Kentucky basketball fans were treated to ‘Popestock.’
Likewise, organizers hoped 8,000 to perhaps 10,000 fans would show up to see headliner Mark Pope, who was being introduced as UK’s new basketball coach. It was reasonable, if not optimistic, given that it was a simple press conference with only 48 hours advance notice and being held on an unseasonably warm, sunny day on Masters Sunday.
Instead, a crowd nearly triple that size swelled Rupp Arena to bursting while leaving thousands more stranded outside the gates. Though not hitchhiking or packed into a VW Beetle, they journeyed from all corners of the Commonwealth, the western wetlands to the eastern mountains and all the small towns and big cities in between.
