Bob Starkeys long road back home to LSU and the Final 4

DALLAS — For the decade he was away, Bob Starkey never stopped calling LSU home.

Even when he was at UCF and then Texas A&M, even when he showed up at Auburn in 2021 — telling coach Johnnie Harris he’d work for her for three years so they could “turn this sucker around” and then retire at the beach — home was always Baton Rouge for him. He wasn’t born there, hadn’t even grown up there. But by the time he met his wife, Sherie, in the early 1990s and the two settled in for his two-decade tenure as a forever-assistant (his dream), he had become a decided Louisianian, and specifically a lover of Baton Rouge.

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Last year, when LSU hired Kim Mulkey away from Baylor, Starkey told friends and colleagues he believed she’d have the Tigers back in the Final Four within three years. But he never imagined he’d be on the sideline for it.

For LSU’s first five runs to the Final Four, Starkey was a mainstay — the first three under Pokey Chatman, the fourth as an interim head coach and the fifth under Van Chancellor. He could’ve spent his entire career happily roaming the LSU sidelines as an assistant, but it didn’t quite work out that way.

One month after Starkey, Sherie and the Tigers returned home from the 2007 Final Four, Sherie was diagnosed with breast cancer. The good news was that it was Stage I breast cancer. The bad news was that it was HER2-positive, a breast cancer that spreads faster and more aggressively than other forms. Within six weeks of the diagnosis, Sherie had begun chemotherapy. After five months of chemo, she began radiation.

For the previous decade, Starkey had operated as if LSU women’s basketball would fall apart if he weren’t in the office. He worked on holidays and had eight years’ worth of vacation days saved up. During the season, on Thursday and Sunday nights after games, he’d sleep in the office because by the time he was done breaking down film, it would be 4 a.m. He figured it was just easier to shower at the gym, nap in his office and be back at his desk by 6 a.m. to start the next day.

“Then Sherie got breast cancer,” Starkey said. “And that was kind of like God smacking me in the face and saying, your priorities are wrong.”

The Starkeys had already faced health problems together. Sherie had been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis before the two met, and through the early years of their relationship, she experienced episodes that required hospitalization or the use of a wheelchair or cane. Dale Brown, the LSU men’s basketball coach for whom Starkey assisted from 1990 to 1996, connected them with a neurologist who had gotten Sherie onto a beta serum medicine that had removed nearly all of her symptoms.

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But this felt different, and Starkey knew he needed to operate differently. He slowed down and prioritized better. And, when he did still need to be on the road for recruiting or games, Baton Rouge showed up for the Starkeys. Friends took Sherie to doctor appointments or checked in on her. They made sure she didn’t miss her coffee dates with her girlfriends. Their LSU family dropped off meals.

In early 2009, when tests came back that determined Sherie was at high risk for breast cancer again, she decided to undergo a double mastectomy. And again, Baton Rouge and LSU women’s basketball were there for her.

Sylvia Fowles and Temeka Johnson called to check in every three weeks. Marie Ferdinand-Harris sent Sherie a pink sweatsuit to wear after surgery.

“When a community helps you get through stuff,” Starkey said, “it’s just a different kind of bond.”

When the Starkeys left Baton Rouge in 2011, Sherie would still return two to three times a year, for weeks at times, to see her village that helped her through her treatment and surgery. And when she’d return to UCF or Texas, Starkey would ask his wife, “How was home?”

Because it always was exactly that. She would say it was good, and that people missed him. He always agreed. The feeling was mutual.

Sherie Starkey, who has dealt with breast cancer, encouraged her husband to return to LSU. (Courtesy of Bob Starkey)

Last year at the Final Four, Starkey got a call from Reneé Braud, an administrative coordinator in the LSU athletic department and someone who had become like family to Bob and Sherie during Sherie’s treatment. Braud was calling because Mulkey had asked her to reach out to Starkey and let him know there was an opening on the staff. Mulkey wanted to bring him in as an associate head coach.

As much as it pained Starkey, he told Braud he had to turn her down. He had promised Harris and Auburn three years, and he was only one year into that commitment. He told Braud to tell Mulkey thanks for thinking of him.

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That night, he couldn’t sleep.

“I mean, I was sitting here thinking this was my one chance to go home,” he said.

He called Sherie and the two discussed it, and the next day, Starkey called Braud back. He asked whether Mulkey had moved on to other candidates. Braud laughed.

“No, she just got off the phone with coach Harris to get permission to talk to you herself,” Braud told Starkey. “She’s gonna make you tell her no.”

It didn’t take that much convincing.

Before, Starkey, 63, had talked about retiring by 66 and moving to the beach with Sherie. It’s a dream fueled by his love of Kenny Chesney, he says. They have a small place on a key in Florida and that — when the two were away from Baton Rouge — was the dream.

But when they got back to Baton Rouge this summer, the plan changed.

“It’s been rejuvenating,” Starkey said, “not just to come home, but specifically work for Kim.”

The two seem like a bit of an odd couple — the flashy Mulkey and the forever-assistant Starkey. But Mulkey says the two think alike, and Starkey agrees. They could talk game plans and details forever. “I wanted him to do every scouting report. I didn’t want to hear a lot of voices,” Mulkey said. “I wanted him.”

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Early in Starkey’s tenure back at LSU, Mulkey texted him one morning to ask him what he thought of the popcorn at the arena. Did he think maybe it could be better?

This, he thought, is a coach I want to work with.

“I’ve never been around anybody like her,” he said.

And Sunday night in Greenville, after LSU had beaten Miami and advanced to the program’s sixth Final Four — Starkey’s sixth Final Four — he and Sherie stood off to the side while players threw confetti at one another and passed around the trophy. They held hands and smiled at the players who have, in many ways, become their kids.

Mulkey came up and threw her arms around Starkey, fulfilling the prediction he had made from afar — Mulkey had, in fact, gotten the Tigers back to the Final Four in two years. He hugged her back and turned his head toward her ear.

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“Thank you for bringing me back, Kim,” he said to her. “Thank you for bringing us home.”

(Top photo courtesy of LSU Athletics)

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