"My life was grunt work. In that sense, it was pretty humbling," said Pope, 44. "If I didn't love it so much, there would have been moments like, 'Really? I left medical school for this?' "

The career alteration was agonizing, because of everything Pope invested to reach that stage. He took pre-med courses at schools in NBA cities, excelled on the medical school entrance exam, received his choice of top-ranked programs and showed signs of thriving in the profession. Yet he couldn't picture himself being fully satisfied with the job for 20 or 30 years just because practicing medicine couldn't duplicate coaching basketball, in his mind.

"I wish I was wired that way," he said, "because it's a much more normal job."

Mark Fox, who hired Pope as Georgia's director of basketball operations, good-naturedly deflects the suggestion that he may have cost the world an outstanding physician. "He would disagree with that," Fox said.

That's all part of Pope's humble approach that plays well in interviews and speeches as he discusses his career arc. His go-to lines include how he would rather have the Columbia med students he associated with being the doctors treating his four daughters of ages 8 to 16, and how "I would have killed more patients than I saved."

"The truth is," said his wife, Lee Anne, "Mark would have been a great doctor."

She's the daughter of the late Lynn Archibald, who was fired as the basketball coach at Idaho State and Utah in the 1980s. Her two brothers also have had adventurous coaching careers. "She knows the pain and uncertainty that come with coaching," Pope said. "We really, really knew what we were getting into."

Her mother, Anne, figured she would have a doctor for a son-in-law until Pope went into coaching, after all. "I get it," she told her daughter, upon receiving that news.

Pope's pursuit of medicine began early in his NBA career, once he realized he was unlikely to stay in the league forever. As a second-round draft choice of Indiana in 1996, the 6-foot-10 forward from the University of Kentucky played in 153 games for three NBA teams over seven seasons. He scored a total of 285 points during a career he frames as "every day, hanging on by your fingernails."

He later would consider operating Subway franchises, owing to his love of turkey sandwiches and being around people. Pope also was fascinated by science and eager to learn, so he enrolled in a chemistry class at Marquette University while playing for the Milwaukee Bucks and continued his pre-med studies in New York and Denver.

Pope filled the downtime of the NBA schedule in ways that few, if any, players ever have done. He claims to be "the first student in the history of the world to read a chemistry book cover to cover, every single word on the page."

And by the time Denver cut him in training camp in 2005, ending his NBA career, he was qualified for medical school. He chose Columbia, a highly ranked program with about a 5-percent acceptance rate. The school is so prestigious that even fictional physicians chose it Patrick Dempsey's character and other "Grey's Anatomy" doctors were Columbia alumni.

The real-life figures were "an unbelievably beautiful group of students and instructors," Pope said.

He thrived in two years of classroom work and moved into rotations. Doctors marveled about his demeanor with children in the pediatric ER, telling him, "This is in your blood."

The moment that may have soured him, though, came during his psychiatric rotation in the famed 9 Garden North ward. He walked down the hallway, greeting patients and high-fiving them, only to have a supervisor tell him that was unacceptable behavior, perhaps adversely affecting their minds. "That part was really sobering," he said, making him wonder if he could remain professionally detached from patients.

During an agonizing month as Pope and his wife weighed their options, he dealt with what he labeled "the stigma of quitting Popes don't do that." That's when Fox re-entered the picture. Their ties stemmed from the University of Washington, where Pope was a hometown player (before transferring to Kentucky) and Fox was a graduate assistant. Fox eventually became Nevada's head coach, and Pope had kept in touch with him, expressing interest in coaching someday. "You need to go to medical school," Fox would tell him.

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First Jobs: UVU's Mark Pope forsakes medical school for folding towels and counting T-shirts - Salt Lake Tribune