"Who is going to guard this guy?": An oral history of Jodie Meeks' 54 points against Tennessee
Daniel Cobb
Published Apr 07, 2026
With Kentucky coming to town, Bruce Pearl surely wasn’t surprised last Friday when The Athletic approached him after his news conference to sneak in a couple of quick questions about the Wildcats. They just weren’t the questions he was expecting. They were questions about that time 10 years earlier when Jodie Meeks took a blowtorch to Pearl’s Tennessee team and damn near burned Thompson-Boling Arena to the ground.
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Now the coach at Auburn, Pearl was understandably caught off guard when asked to share his memories from that night, Jan. 13, 2009, when Meeks only needed 22 shots to score 54 points — the former almost as unbelievable as the latter. In one blisteringly efficient regulation game, he broke Dan Issel’s 39-year-old Kentucky scoring record, beat Tony Delk’s 13-year-old mark with 10 made 3-pointers and tied Louie Dampier’s 43-year-old feat by sinking 14 of 14 free throws.
“Awwwww, come on!” Pearl said, rolling his eyes and laughing.
His former Tennessee players are similarly reluctant to relive that night — none responded to multiple attempts to contact them for this piece — but one former Vols assistant, the guy whose job it was to create a defensive game plan for Kentucky, did own it. Steve Forbes, now the big whistle at East Tennessee State, readily recounted the carnage: “Probably one of my lowest moments as a coach.” When pressed, Pearl paused long enough to share his own quick assessment of that historic performance (we’ll get to that), joining the voices of Meeks, former UK coach Billy Gillispie and star Patrick Patterson, current Cats coach John Calipari and several others in telling the tale of dominance and what might’ve been had Meeks returned for one more season in Lexington.
First, some background. Knoxville is, was and probably always will be a tough place to play well. Joe B. Hall only won twice there from 1972-85. Calipari has lost four of his last five games there. And the Wildcats had lost two in a row at Tennessee heading into the 2009 game. That made what Meeks did individually and what Kentucky did as a team that night, upsetting the 24th-ranked Vols, 90-72, especially stunning.
What makes it even more remarkable, in hindsight, is the way everything unraveled for Gillispie and the Cats soon after. As much of a mess as most of the two-year Billy G era was, things were looking up for a few weeks. The win at Tennessee was part of a 5-0 start in SEC play and a 16-4 start overall. But then Kentucky lost eight of 11 to close the regular season, missed the NCAA Tournament for the first time in 18 years, fired Gillispie and at some point that spring found a bunch of boxed-up T-shirts from Nike commemorating Meeks’ 54-point performance, which turned out to be the high-water mark for the most maligned coach in program history.
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According to legend, Gillispie, always uncomfortable allowing team success to be overshadowed by individual achievements — like the 37 points Meeks scored against Kansas State, the 39 he had against VMI, the 45 against Arkansas and the 46 against Appalachian State that season — hid those “WITNESS” T-shirts from the team in an act of defiance. According to Gillispie, the truth is less scandalous. We’ll get to that too, but let’s start at the beginning. Here’s an oral history of Jodie Meeks’ wild night in Knoxville. (All sources are identified by their role in the game.)
Jodie Meeks, Kentucky guard: “It wasn’t like a beautiful, sun-shiny day. I would like to say it was, but I remember it was real cold and real rainy and the game was at 9 o’clock, and at warmups I didn’t really feel like it was going to be a great night. I couldn’t tell something big was coming. I didn’t feel like myself.”
Steve Forbes, Tennessee assistant: “When Billy got the Kentucky job, he called me and asked what I thought of the team. I’d been Billy’s assistant at Texas A&M, and I told him I thought Jodie Meeks was going to be a really good player for him. That was a year before that game, so it wasn’t like I didn’t know. Going into it, it was my scout, and it wasn’t like I didn’t know Kentucky’s offense from working for Billy and it wasn’t like I didn’t know Jodie could score.”
Tom Leach, radio voice of the Wildcats: “We were talking to Bob Kesling (voice of the Vols) before the game, and he pointed to this kid who looked like he was about 12 but was a manager for the basketball team. Bob said, ‘He was Jodie Meeks in practice yesterday and he had 36.’ So we thought Jodie might have a good night. Didn’t think 54.”
Mark Krebs, walk-on Kentucky guard: “We always had to pass by the Tennessee players before we went to our locker room. We warmed up on one end and then had to walk past them to get to our tunnel, and it was pretty typical for them to be talking. There was always a war of words, a little attitude, about what you’d expect from a rivalry game. But Jodie Meeks never said a word. He was always quiet and let his shooting do the talking.”
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Billy Gillispie, Kentucky coach: “I’m sure the Tennessee guys were chirping. That’s what they were good for.”
Meeks: “There was a lot of trash talk going on before and during the game.”
Leach: “Bobby Maze guarded Jodie most of the game and was a notorious trash talker, so he was supposedly talking the whole night and Jodie never said anything — not until the very end.”
Tracy Webster, Kentucky assistant: “It’s funny because I ended up going over there and coaching at Tennessee and getting to know the guys on the other side. Bobby’s not going to admit what he said — or what Jodie said to him later — but it was something like, ‘I got him. He’s done. He’s shut down. He’s not getting anything.’ Ahahahahahahahahahaha, oops.”
Meeks: “My first 3-pointer went off the side of the backboard. I told myself I was going to shoot one more 3, and if I didn’t hit it, I was just going to start driving the ball for a while to get in a rhythm. But I hit the next one.”
He hit his next four 3-pointers, in fact, bookended by layups over Maze, and had 16 points in the first 13 minutes. Then another trey, a pair of free throws, a three-point play and two more from the line to make it 26 at halftime. Kentucky led, 41-37.
Patrick Patterson, Kentucky forward: “The video game ‘NBA Jam,’ and the one quote, ‘He’s on fire,’ that pretty much sums up Jodie whenever I think of that game. Everything he put up was going in. Steph Curry 3s in transition. What I remember is Jodie in the huddle being like, ‘All right, Coach, what play is for me next?’ It was him wanting the ball every single opportunity and us understanding that. He was hot. He was pretty much carrying us that whole game. Anytime I think of it, ‘NBA Jam,’ ‘He’s on fire’ pops in my head.”
Dan Issel, UK’s career scoring and rebounding leader: “My wife and I were in Colorado watching the game on television, and at halftime I told her, ‘I think one of my records is getting ready to fall.’ I sort of felt it all along, through that whole game, that he had a good chance to break it. (Issel scored 53 at Ole Miss in 1970.) I’m surprised it lasted as long as it did, but it’s that adage, ‘Records are made to be broken,’ and Jodie just had a phenomenal game that night.”
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Forbes: “It’s funny how you see the game. I remember having this discussion with Bruce at halftime, and he said, ‘Man, Patterson is killing us,’ and I said, ‘Nah, Coach, Meeks is killing us.’ But we were so attentive to Patrick. He was such a force on the block, I don’t think we did much different in the second half. (Patterson had five points and seven rebounds in the first half.) Looking back, we probably should’ve double-teamed Meeks. One of the reasons he really got going was because of the presence of Patrick Patterson. When you have a really good post player like that, it demands at least one and a half players guarding him all the time, so we gave him that, and obviously Jodie got loose. And once he got going, it was like there was no stopping him.”
Meeks hit a pair of jumpers right out of the locker room and sank his sixth and seventh 3-pointers to reach 36 with 16:42 to go. His 10 points helped stretch the lead to 53-41. By that time, he’d victimized almost every able-bodied Tennessee defender, swishing multiple shots over Maze, Wayne Chism, Cameron Tatum, J.P. Prince and Josh Tabb.
Krebs: “I remember the shrugs. I remember their coaches looking like, ‘Who is going to guard this guy?’ But they were guarding him. I remember Jodie hitting so many shots that were really well-contested and the defender running down to the other end and looking at their bench like, ‘What do you want me to do?’ He was perfect from the line, so fouling him wasn’t going to help. I just remember the look of confusion. As the guy who had to guard him in practice, pretending to be the other team’s guy who would be defending Jodie, it kind of made me feel better about what I was going through every day when he had that kind of games against high-level teams.”
Forbes: “What I remember most about it was he got it in a lot of different ways and it was very economical. I’ve never counted the dribbles, but it was kind of Klay Thompson-esque. I don’t think he dribbled the ball a whole lot, and he got them off transition, in half court, off sideline out-of-bounds plays, baseline out-of-bounds plays, every which way.”
Gillispie: “We were always concentrated on winning the game. Coaches aren’t over there on the sideline doing stats. That’s for you reporter guys. Coaches and players are trying to win the game first. That’s the single focus. Maybe it’s different these days in the NBA, but Jodie was always a major, major, major team guy, so I doubt he was over there counting points. That wasn’t for us to do. That’s for the sports information director to do.”
Leach: “At some point near the start of the second half, I started looking up numbers. The first one I looked up during a commercial break was most points by a Kentucky player in Knoxville, which was Melvin Turpin with 42 in 1983. I remembered watching that game as a kid, so that was the first big landmark I was thinking of.”
Meeks sank four more free throws to hit 40 points and passed Turpin by nailing his eighth 3-pointer with 7:07 to go, at which point Kentucky led by a dozen and could afford to give him a breather. But it would need to be a quick one if he wanted to make history.
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Meeks: “I never knew what the record was. I knew it was 50-something, but I didn’t know the exact number. I know the first time I noticed my stats was in the second half, when I got taken out and looked up to see what the score was and I saw the number next to my name. ‘Wow, I’ve got 43 points!’ That was the first time I realized how many I had. I would’ve probably guessed it was 27, 28. But when I saw 40-some, it was like, ‘OK, this is crazy.’ ”
Webster: “The points came from inside the offense, the plan for what we were doing, so I remember finally realizing what was happening when he had 30-something and thinking, ‘Oh, my God, he might get 40,’ and then when he got 40 being like, ‘Oh, my God, he has a chance for 50!’ And that’s a different kind of 50 points when you get it at Tennessee. As a coach, you try not to get too excited about the numbers, but eventually you just have to say, ‘He’s hot, keep running stuff for him.’ I thought Coach Gillispie did a good job of that, and the guys playing with him did a great job finding him.”
Meeks got to 49 points by swishing his ninth 3-pointer in the right corner and his 10th directly in Tatum’s face from the right wing, after which Chism turned himself into an Internet meme — head cocked back, eyes closed in the pose of an utterly defeated man — as Meeks popped out his mouthpiece to make room for a big grin.
Patterson: “I remember Wayne Chism. He was doing a lot of talking. He reminded me so much of Kevin Garnett as far as being the trash talker of the team, the leader of the team, but at the same time, even when you’re losing still talking trash. There aren’t too many guys like that who will still talk trash even when you’re losing or when someone else is scoring 50 points and hot and in the zone, which Jodie was. And Wayne was still talking, talking crap. He never stopped. He went all the way until the buzzer went off.”
And this is where Meeks delivered the true highlight of the night. He was fouled with 4:11 remaining and stepped to the line for a chance at just the fifth 50-point game in Kentucky history. Everyone seems to agree that Chism and Maze were inexplicably still jawing at him. There are conflicting reports, however, about the exact language when Meeks finally broke his silence. Footage from the TV broadcast shows him saying something to Maze, who is closest to him on the left side of the lane, but his mouth is partially obscured.
Leach: “This was later backed up by other people around UK: He leaned over to Bobby Maze and said, ‘In case you lost count, this is 50.’ The crazy thing was he hadn’t made the free throw yet. He just knew he was going to make it. And that’s apparently the only thing he said the whole night.”
Leach’s recollection of what Meek said may be cleaned up just a bit. Three sources, none of whom wanted to go on the record, agreed Meeks used “50” and a colorful expletive in his declaration.
Meeks: “I didn’t say that. It’s funny, though, I just saw Bobby for the first time in 10 years this past summer, and we were talking about that night, remembering it and laughing. I know he said something, and I just cut him off and said, ‘I got 50.’ I watch the game over and over and (their exchange) is funny every time I see it. When I saw him over the summer, he said that Bruce Pearl was really upset at the whole team that night, saying, ‘How did you let one man beat you?’ ”
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Meeks broke Issel’s record with 1:31 to go on a pair of free throws. He finished 15-of-22 from the field, 10-of-15 from 3-point range and 14-of-14 from the line. He added eight rebounds, four assists and a steal for good measure — and only turned it over once in 39 minutes.
Issel: “I called him the next morning — he probably didn’t have a clue who I was, it came so far before he broke it — and told him it’s something he’ll remember for the rest of his life. I told him his name would be legendary in the hearts and minds of UK fans, because I knew how much that record, any record at UK, meant to me and to those fans. I told him he would be remembered for that game for a long, long time.”
Gillispie: “It was a great win for Kentucky basketball, at Tennessee. I’ve always been a team guy first and the individual stuff comes later. His 54 points got us over the hump that night. It was a great win for us and a great individual achievement, one of the best I’ve ever been involved in. James Harden, who has been on a crazy roll with scoring, went for 58 points the other night, but they got beat. And I promise you a competitor like him would rather have 28 if his team would’ve won the game. Jodie is that kind of competitor, and the most amazing thing about his night, other than winning, is he did all that on 22 shots and 14-of-14 from the line. I doubt anyone has ever done that on that few shots. Harden took 33 shots and 24 free throws to get 58 points, so he shot the ball 57 times. Jodie shot the ball 36 times to get 54. That’s just unbelievable and unheard of.”
Patterson: “He only took 22? Oh, my God, I would have thought he took more than that.”
Meeks: “It’s kind of one of those things where you feel like you’re just floating and there’s nothing the other team can do. It’s just your night. When that type of stuff is happening, it’s like, ‘Wow, I wonder what my family is thinking right now. I wonder what the commentators are saying about me.’ ”
Gillispie: “Steve Forbes, I guess because they’re in a football-crazed state, was considered Tennessee’s defensive coordinator, and I can still see his face in the handshake line, because it was red as a beet — as was his head, because he doesn’t have any hair. I guess he was a little bit embarrassed about a guy getting that many points on him.”
Forbes: “I remember calling Billy on their bus ride home. I told him I was going to quit. He said, ‘No, you’re not,’ and I go, ‘Well, I feel like it.’ I mean, I felt embarrassed. Because not only did we lose, but he got 54 in our building and it was my scout. I’m not afraid to admit that. Some guys probably wouldn’t. I take pride in doing a great job, and if he’d gotten 54 in Rupp the next time we played them, I’d probably be running my own lawn service now.”
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Meeks scored 14 points on 4-of-14 shooting (0-for-7 from 3) in Kentucky’s second meeting with Tennessee that season.
Forbes: “We didn’t win that one either, but I wasn’t having that again! The next time we played them, I think we played triangle-and-two or box-and-one.”
Kentucky fans will swear that after the first game, an irritated Gillispie told ESPN’s Jeanine Edwards, “This is the University of Kentucky, not the University of Jodie Meeks.” He did not. Several games later, he said a version of that to Edwards during a halftime interview at Ole Miss, when she asked about Meeks’ low point total despite the Wildcats having the lead. “This is Kentucky. It’s not Jodie Meeks,” he said then. “This is not a one-man team and that’s really a bad question.” But this general sentiment would later fuel speculation about what really happened to those commemorative T-shirts. It was a big story when Calipari was hired in the spring of 2009 and boxes of the gear from Nike — reportedly shipped within days of Meeks’ 54-pointer — were discovered. It has long been alleged that Gillispie kept them locked away, a total secret, for months, a suspicion fueled by a Lexington Herald-Leader report after the shirts were finally distributed to the team.
Martin Newton, Nike representative (to the H-L in 2009): “You’d have to ask Billy Gillispie about that.”
Meeks: “I heard he hid them, but I don’t know for sure. I just know I didn’t receive them until about April. It wouldn’t surprise me if he did hide them, but I don’t know. He had certain feelings about (individual recognition), that it was more about the team, and I understood that part. But I have to say he was happy for me. The next day, I had a bunch of interviews and he was cool with that. It wasn’t a situation where I was worried about how he was feeling.”
Gillispie: “Most things in Kentucky take on a life of their own, and that did too. I never heard about any T-shirts being sent until after I was fired when people were trying to be as mean to me as they could. The people who researched that deal said Nike did send some T-shirts that I was unaware of — and the reason I was unaware of them was that they made a mistake on the T-shirt, so our equipment manager just kept them in the box and never said anything to me. I think that’s what happened, but I really have no idea. I don’t think I would be the kind that would keep anybody from wearing a T-shirt after scoring 54.”
Patterson: “A hundred percent, it wouldn’t surprise me if he tried to keep something away from us. Not at all. That’s just the way he was. I can 100 percent see him trying to keep those shirts away from us, especially Jodie, after his accomplishment.”
Krebs: “People have asked that question a lot over the last 10 years: Was Coach really mad that Jodie scored so much? And I have to give him a pass on this one. He was excited we won the game, genuinely excited about the way a bunch of us played, the screens that were set and the defense that was played and winning an SEC game on the road. He was genuinely excited after the game, and I remember him looking at Jodie and saying something like, ‘You were unbelievable tonight.’ Now, I think he was uncomfortable with the idea of one guy being bigger than the rest — I remember him saying something like, ‘This isn’t the University of Jodie Meeks’ — but I think that was just trying to level his head and point out we still had the rest of the season to play and that he didn’t have to feel like any time he didn’t score 40 or 50 it was a bad game. So I would give him a pass on that one.”
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Which leaves just one last order of business in the Tall Tale of Jodie Meeks: an alternate ending. Not long after the greatest scoring performance in school history, Meeks left the program with one of its all-time greatest what-ifs when he entered the 2009 NBA Draft, where he was the 41st overall pick, instead of returning for his senior season and playing with Patterson, John Wall, Eric Bledsoe and DeMarcus Cousins — a team that went 35-3 and lost in the Elite Eight because it went ice-cold from 3-point range.
Meeks: “I thought about that a lot. It would’ve been a great team. I honestly don’t think we would’ve lost a game. But for my career, I think I did the best thing for myself. I averaged 24 points in college, so the only thing more I could do was win, and that’s very important, but your own career is more important. I needed to move on and get going in the NBA. You only have a certain amount of time you can play basketball (he’s out of the league now after earning more than $30 million), and as a senior they might’ve been like, ‘Oh, he’s too old now,’ even though it would’ve been just six months later.”
Calipari: “What’s the only thing we were missing? Shooting. The only issue would’ve been they all would’ve had to share minutes, so instead of playing 37 minutes a game, dudes would’ve had to play 24, 25 minutes. But if they were willing to do that, it would’ve been scary. Because John and Eric and him? Come on. Now you put those three guys together even — John could’ve guarded a bigger player and so could Eric — and the way John and Eric would drive the ball, Jodie could’ve just been who he was. But I understood. He met with me and said, ‘You’d be my third coach in three years and last year was torture.’ And I just said, ‘I get it. I understand.’ ”
Patterson: “We didn’t have that knockdown 3-point shooter that a lot of teams have. I believe 100 percent if we had Jodie we would have won (the national title). We still should have won, but we fell into West Virginia’s trap, which was to have us shoot shots knowing we weren’t a good 3-point shooting team. We fell into that hole.”
Krebs: “I’m not going to say we go 40-0, but we hands down win the championship, because of the way John ran the team, the way Jodie operated, the way the floor would’ve been spaced out, it would’ve been unbelievable with DeMarcus and Patrick inside. You know, I got a scholarship because Jodie didn’t stay, but I would’ve happily given up that scholarship to win a national championship.”
Last week, the day before his Auburn team lost at home to Kentucky, Pearl bristled at a request for his memories from that time almost exactly 10 years earlier when Meeks terrorized his Tennessee team. After a brief protest, he relented, half-heartedly.
“Jodie had an amazing night and, of course, he went on to be a really good pro,” Pearl said. “If I had it to do all over again, I would’ve trapped the ball out of his hands. But I wasn’t smart enough to do that.”
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He winked and kept walking, like a man trying to get as far away from that night as possible. Who can blame him?
Staff writers Justin Ferguson and Brett Dawson of The Athletic contributed to this story.
(Top photo: Wade Payne/AP)
