On Valentine's Day, 1998, Mississippi point guard Michael White had 16 points and six assists in Rupp Arena to spark Ole Miss to a 73-64 upset of the Kentucky Wildcats.
It turned out to be the final defeat of the 1997-98 season for Tubby Smith's Cats, who won their final 13 games and the NCAA championship. White and Ole Miss also had a date with March Madness destiny, winding up on the wrong side of Bryce Drew's famous buzzer beater for Valparaiso.
On Saturday, White, 39, will be back in Rupp looking to make another lifetime memory. The second-year Florida head coach will lead the Gators (23-5, 13-2 SEC) against John Calipari and Kentucky (23-5, 13-2) in a game that will likely decide the SEC regular-season championship and the No. 1 seed in the league tournament.
UK will also be seeking to avenge an embarrassing 88-66 beatdown White and the Gators applied to the Cats on Feb. 4 in Gainesville.
In a big-picture sense, White is seeking to do something no other men's hoops coach in SEC history has ever done. That is inherit a program that the prior coach _ in his case Billy Donovan _ had made into the biggest threat to Kentucky's league supremacy and successfully maintain it as UK's main league nemesis.
To understand what White is up against, it is instructive to look at what happened with the successors of previous coaches who threatened Kentucky's SEC superiority.
