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SEC Tournament: UK radio announcer shares his insights, Part I of III

March 13, 2008|LARRY VAUGHT

ATLANTA - Former Kentucky All-American Mike Pratt, who is now part of the UK Radio Network, is in Atlanta for the Southeastern Conference Tournament. He shared his insights into the UK season today in the first of this three-part series for www.amnews.com.

Question: What have you learned about Kentucky coach Billy Gillispie this season?

Pratt: "Personally, he is a nice fellow. He is very much all business. I think what he has done in January and February is terrific. I think somehow he got himself, Joe (Crawford) and Ramel (Bradley) together and they hashed it all out. Maybe the early season losses meant a lot to him and he got those guys together.

"Sometimes it is not a matter of who wins out and you will never know who won, if anybody won if that is the right word. I learned this from my experience in the NBA - it is not important who got their way. It's important what came about. These two seniors and Billy have done a terrific job of coming together and putting their personal differences aside for the sake of winning. I think the three of them deserve an awful lot of credit."

Question: As a former player, are you proud of what this team did in Southeastern Conference play, or do you wish they had never been a position where they had to rally like this?

Pratt:"For the sake of the players, Billy and his staff, I wish they had not been in that situation. But you have to love the way they came back. You have to really love their resiliency, the mental toughness and the leadership of Bradley and Crawford. With a young, inexperienced team, what those two guys did is terrific and I respect that. I think they ought to be congratulated and remembered for that."

Question: Which player on this team has surprised you the most this year?

Pratt: "I would say Perry Stevenson. I didn't know if it would be this year or next year, but the last six weeks it has been this year. I knew what Ramel was - good player, big heart. You knew what Joe was and he could score and now he's even more of a well-rounded player. I knew what (Derrick) Jasper was, I just didn't know if he would be healthy. We knew about all those guys. But the guy who has come the fastest lately is Stevenson.

"Instead of standing around and doing what we used to call Kodak-ing - taking pictures and watching the game - he has now become involved. He is catching passes, getting putbacks, rolling to the basket. How he plays the game has been a total turnaround and that has been a key for Kentucky's play."

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