‘It got so out of control’: Shawn Kemp’s Kentucky career ended before it began
Ask almost any Kentucky basketball fan who is old enough to remember Shawn Kemp’s brief stop in Lexington and he or she will probably recite the same two thoughts: Stole some jewelry, right? But just imagine if he’d stayed.
For more than three decades, that has been the widely accepted narrative and tantalizing what-if about Kemp. He arrived in the summer of 1988 as one of the most heralded high school prospects in America but had to sit out that season as an academic non-qualifier. During his first semester, the story goes, he swiped and pawned two gold chains that belonged to teammate Sean Sutton, the coach’s son. Branded a thief, Kemp left school that November, transferred to a junior college for which he never played, and then entered the NBA Draft, a none-and-done who quickly became one of the most exciting basketball players on the planet.
Kemp was reborn as the reigning man for the Seattle SuperSonics, maybe the most ferocious dunker who ever lived, a six-time All-Star who played in an NBA Finals. But before any of that, he desperately wanted to be a Kentucky Wildcat, to wear the blue and white, to delight a packed house at Rupp Arena, and to win a national title. Even a quarter century later, when Reebok released a UK-themed “Letter of Intent” version of his signature Kamikaze sneaker in 2013, Kemp said that signing with the Wildcats was “one of the greatest things I have ever accomplished.” And in case you were wondering, “I still love the University of Kentucky.”
Now for the twist: What if he didn’t do the thing that led to his leaving in the first place?
“I’ve never talked about this,” Sean Sutton told The Athletic recently. “In the past, I just said, ‘That’s not something I care to revisit.’ But I think everybody probably deserves to know the real truth. I want Kentucky fans to realize that Shawn Kemp was a good guy. It got so out of control and became such a big story, and it’s really, really unfortunate how it all played out. He was gone before any of us really understood what was happening. If I could go back 32 years, I’d probably do things differently.
Rex Chapman still daydreams about what it would’ve been like to play with Kemp. During his All-America sophomore season at Kentucky in 1987–88, Chapman hosted Kemp on a recruiting visit. Asked what the two got into together that weekend, Chapman tells the story with a devilish laugh.
“Went to a couple parties, looked at girls. Uh, the usual,” he says between cackles. “But I didn’t have to sell him on the place. I knew Shawn was coming the second he stepped on campus. This was where he wanted to be. He was excited that we were going to play together, and I was equally excited. I’d never seen anything like him: 6-11, could handle it, get it off the board, go coast-to-coast, jumped like he was 6-1, was long and lanky, athletic and aggressive. Fearless too. And wild. On and off the court.”
