Jerry Tipton on UK basketball

Billy Gillispie does not wear a watch.

“When you put a watch on,” he said this fall, “you limit yourself.”

The new Kentucky basketball coach does not like limits. He is all-out. 24/7. Wall-to-wall. So maybe it’s back to the future for a UK program once led by a coach Sports Illustrated dubbed “A Man Possessed.”

Gillispie, by all accounts, is a man obsessed. He is so single-minded he famously couldn’t recall a sister’s married name. He demands overachievement. On the court. In the classroom. On the recruiting trail. Day. Night. Dawn. Dusk.

And he wants it sooner rather than later. On his way to Kentucky basketball, surely a program obsessed, he switched jobs 11 times in 22 years.

“He’s just so driven,” said Steve Forbes, an assistant coach for Gillispie at Texas A&M before joining another high-energy boss, Bruce Pearl, at Tennessee last year. “I don’t think (Gillispie) sleeps. I think he’s like a vampire. My phone rings at 3 or 4 in the morning, I know who it is.”

During a pre-season workout, Kentucky’s prized freshman, Patrick Patterson, found out about Gillispie’s drive.

“My feet started burning,” he said. “It felt like a burner on the bottom of my feet.”

The players were not meeting Gillispie’s expectations. Patterson recalled the coach saying, “I’ll run you till your feet start bleeding.”

Patterson kept running. The burning from blisters grew more intense. Patterson fought back the pain and continued running.

When the workout ended, Patterson took off his shoes and stared at his socks.

“Blood red,” he said. “My feet were actually bleeding.”

Remembering the moment, Patterson saw significance. “It’s an awakening, right there,” he said. “It’s an eye-opener.”

When Patterson told his mother, she was alarmed.

“What are they doing to you there?” Tywanna Patterson asked her son.

“Mom, I’m fine,” Patterson told his mother. “There are trainers here who know what they’re doing.”

Testimony to the toughness Gillispie intends to instill in his Kentucky teams can be found in a concussion in the first week of practice, then broken noses on back-to-back days of later sessions.

Sophomore guard Michael Porter, who suffered the concussion, described the intense style Gillispie teaches. “In your face,” he said. “We’re not giving you anything. … We’re going to feed off that energy and devour opponents.”

The coach directing the feeding frenzy is not a one-dimensional tough guy with the personality of a drill sergeant with bunions. He can be sentimental and thoughtful.

Take it from a notably tough basketball guy of yesteryear, Don Haskins, the man who coached Texas Western past Kentucky in the famous 1966 national championship game. In retirement, Haskins befriends the coaches at his school, now known as UTEP (University of Texas-El Paso), where Gillispie coached from 2002-04. He had Gillispie — by then divorced, childless and a committed bachelor — to his home for Thanksgiving and Christmas.

“He’d send a note back to my wife,” Haskins said.

The same week Kentucky hired Gillispie, he sent T-shirts and UK athletic paraphernalia to the Haskins’ grandchildren.

“He is a guy who never forgets,” Haskins said.

Gillispie left UTEP after two seasons for Texas A&M. One of the assistants he hired was Forbes, who practically lived with Gillispie the first three months until his family could join him in College Station. The two men often filled quiet time with basketball talk. Once they hit on Roy Williams and his propensity to tearfully exit the NCAA Tournament each year.

“Roy Williams, what a crybaby,” Forbes remembered noting.

To which, Gillispie replied, “I cry.”

“I said, ‘Whatever,’ to myself,” said Forbes, who then made a point to see just how sentimental his new boss truly was. “Every situation when he’d talk about his players, he’d get emotional. I tell you right now, it’s genuine.”

This combination of caring soul and driving taskmaster troubles Haskins. The old coach knows how demanding Kentucky fans can be. If he’d forgotten, Tubby Smith’s departure last spring for a place he could feel “wanted” served as a reminder.

“Tubby Smith is a hell of a coach and he won a national championship,” Haskins said

Smith averaged 26.3 victories and reached three other region finals in 10 seasons as Kentucky coach. That good deed did not go unpunished. Then Gillispie made no secret of his eagerness to take the Kentucky job.

“I wasn’t sure if Billy ought to do that,” said Haskins, who keeps in regular contact with UK’s new coach. “I worry about his well- being because this guy, he is a ball of fire and he has a heart of gold.”

Gillispie, who turns 48 on Wednesday, is not a CEO-type of coach. He wants to be involved in the nitty-gritty decisions.

“He paid attention to every little detail,” Forbes said. “Players. Marketing. Academics. Media. He had total control. Nothing was ever done that wasn’t thought out. There was no doing anything by the seat of your pants. There were reasons we did things.”

Reasons not to do things, too. Gillispie comes to Kentucky with a reputation for being guarded. Even longtime associates get only so close. In his responses to media questions this pre-season, he cited the need to learn about his players as a reason to refrain from commenting on them. He declined to compare his style of play with Smith’s.

“He’s not going to give direct answers on a lot of things,” Forbes said with a chuckle. “He plays his cards close to the vest. Billy’s never going to say anything he didn’t mean to say.”

At UK’s annual Tip-Off Luncheon in Louisville, Gillispie went to comic lengths to avoid saying anything remotely controversial. When asked if he found the record crowd of 1,500 overwhelming, he said, “You’re very, very grateful that people have that kind of interest. But I don’t think it’s overwhelming. And that’s no disrespect to the word overwhelming.”

Gillispie laughs off media questions about being consumed by Kentucky-size expectations. In dismissing the suggestion of suffocating pressure, he said, “I’ll just try to win every game.” But even that might not suffice in a program that once saw the team booed in a home game ultimately won by 29 points. And the coach that night was the almighty Rick Pitino.

Haskins does not laugh. “The expectations, I worry about that,” he said. “I still worry about that. Expectations could be too tough.

“I worry about the guy killing himself. The guy never sleeps.”

Of course, Pitino looked gaunt and pale near the end of seasons, and things worked out well (one national championship and three Final Four appearances.)

Taking the steering wheel of a dynasty program can be daunting. Joe B. Hall, who had the unenviable task of replacing Adolph Rupp, once volunteered, tongue firmly in cheek, to become UCLA coach when John Wooden retired. “Why ruin two lives?” he famously quipped.

Williams, the man synonymous with teary-eyed news conferences, twice faced the challenge of a first-year coach of a top-shelf program. The experiences differed wildly.

He arrived at Kansas in 1989 as a rookie head coach, albeit one with a wealth of experience as a right-hand man to Dean Smith at North Carolina.

“They didn’t know me,” Williams said of Kansas fans. “They had no idea. It was all, ‘Who is this guy?’ “