The dad of the LSU Tigers’ head coach still sneaks into her games

Kim Mulkey hasn't spoken to her father for 37 years: Why?

Many fathers and daughters experience an extremely close bond that remains for the duration of their lives, but that’s not the case for Kim Mulkey and her dad as the LSU Tigers’ head coach hasn’t spoken with him for almost 40 years, but what is the reason for this?

To be precise, they haven’t talked for 37 years and the reason for that is that her dad, Les, cheated on their mother throughout her childhood before he left her for a younger woman. That is something that Mulkey has never forgotten.

Kim Mulkey’s stern words for her team after 24 turnovers against the Rice Owls in March MadnessYouTube

Even at her own wedding in 1987, she permitted her paternal parent to attend with his new wife but forced them to sit at the back of the ceremony away from the rest of the family. Mulkey walked down the aisle on her own.

But he still attended her NCAA games in order to watch her privately, slipping into the back of the Pete Maravich Assembly Center in Baton Rouge to see his kid coach the next generation of basketballers, although she may never have known that until the article by the Washington Post was published.

The 86-year-old is still hoping she will speak to him again and he feels as though he understands where he went wrong and the errors he made, as he painted a bleak picture of the end of his life.

“He has dozens of pictures, newspaper cutouts, mementos from Kim’s basketball career,” Kent Babb wrote in the article. “It’s all he has left of her, and with many of Les’s friends dying recently, he thinks about what’s next.

“He was cocky, he says. Stubborn. A little too proud, he says, so when his time comes, Les figures it’ll be when he’s alone, surrounded by achievements but not people, wasting away like the things he once built.”

Why doesn’t Mulkey talk to her sister?

Mulkey also doesn’t have contact with her sister, Tammy, following a disagreement around 2018-2019 although Tammy will not say what happened between them.

She also hopes that they will repair their relationship and she has faith that it might happen, a contrasting situation to their father, who lives in a trailer in the middle of nowhere.