NICHOLASVILLE, Ky. — John and Patty Holtmann make their way over toward the brick fireplace in the living room for a photo. John is wearing a white Ohio State golf shirt with a Block O logo on the chest. Patty’s shirt is black and sleeveless, but it has the same Block O as John’s.
“We took off the UK gear before you got here,” John says.
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Among the things Chris Holtmann learned growing up here? His deadpan sense of humor.
Chris helped John clear 35 trees from a one-acre plot of land on Carolyn Lane to make room for the three-level split home the family had built in 1987, when Chris was in high school. It’s just outside of Lexington, about 10 miles from Rupp Arena on the University of Kentucky’s campus. Before that, the Holtmanns lived near the Henry Clay Estate on the east side of Lexington, not far from where Kentucky coach John Calipari lives now. Since moving from Cincinnati when Chris was still a baby, the family has never lived more than a few miles from UK. They’re not native Kentuckians, but they assimilated quickly.
“The bleeding blue thing is a real thing down here,” John said.
Not really for the Holtmanns. Not anymore, anyway. Especially not this weekend, with Ohio State playing Kentucky on Saturday in the CBS Sports Classic in Las Vegas. But before Chris became a basketball coach, it was unavoidable that he and his family became enamored with the Kentucky Wildcats basketball team. And Chris was, with posters on the wall of his bedroom and dreams of playing in Rupp Arena driving him through his childhood. Following those teams helped Chris form the love of the sport that’s brought him to heading up one of the top programs in the country. That sentimentality surely wanes as one enters the profession, climbs the ranks and starts to see other programs as competitors, but that doesn’t change the role Kentucky had in shaping Ohio State’s basketball coach.
The values held in the home, and the lessons taught through the game while growing up in Kentucky helped mold Chris Holtmann into the man and coach he is today.
John and Patty Holtmann met when he was 16 and she was 15. They grew up in Cincinnati, Patty on Mount Adams and John on Mount Auburn. They’ve been married for 51 years, and moved to Lexington when John got a job as an optician there in 1973. Chris was born in Cincinnati in 1971, but spent the majority of his young years in Kentucky.
John and Patty Holtmann. (Bill Landis / The Athletic)John worked side jobs to help the family make ends meet. Chris often helped. They would do neighborhood yard work, cutting grass, removing trees and cutting firewood. They delivered the Lexington Herald-Leader to homes in their neighborhood. That was a family ordeal, gathering in the morning to bag the papers before John and Chris would go out on bikes, or depending on the weather and the size of that day’s paper, John’s car, tossing papers onto their neighbors’ driveways and doorsteps. John also took on a job cleaning a local trucking firm, Ok Trucking, in the evenings. Chris and his older sister would help their father clean trash from offices and buff the floors.
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It went on that way until John, who didn’t get a raise at his optician job for six years, saved up enough to buy the business for himself in 1987, right around the time the family moved just outside of Lexington to Nicholasville.
“You look back now and say, ‘Thank God I did that,'” Chris said. “I would be a different person, a different coach. I’d probably be a different dad if I didn’t have those experiences. I am so grateful that I got to see first-hand what most dads do to provide for their family. The work and the sacrifices that it takes. He needed help. I don’t think in his mind he thought it was a parenting exercise. He legitimately needed me to help and lend a hand. But a real byproduct of that is you got to see the work ethic that has made so many people special and successful. I think my dad is a survivor. He didn’t grow up with incredible opportunities, neither did my mom, certainly no entitlement. You look back on that and say, everything that he’s gotten he’s completely earned.”
Chris echoes those sentiments now when he talks about his basketball teams. Ohio State entered this season ranked No. 18 in the country and picked to finish third in the Big Ten. Before losing to Minnesota on Sunday, the Buckeyes were on the cusp of likely being ranked No. 1 in the country. They’re No. 5 right now, and if they beat No. 6 Kentucky on Saturday, will find themselves right back in that No. 1 conversation.
There were lofty goals placed on this team from the beginning of the year. Chris’ mantra has remained steady.
“We’ll get what we earn,” he’s said countless times.
“I like how Chris said that,” John said. “I hope some of that comes from how he grew up.”
It was very much a blue-collar upbringing, emphasis on the blue.
Chris’ bedroom was on the bottom level of the home in Nicholasville. Walk through the front door, take a left down the short flight of stairs and there it is just off the family room. It looks different now, redecorated as more of a guest room and no longer looking like a shrine to Kentucky basketball. But that’s how Chris described its old look. Autographs from Sam Bowie and Mel Turpin that Patty lucked into when bumping into them at a mall one day, posters of Rex Chapman and team photos of Rick Pitino’s squads — they hung alongside posters of U2 and Martin Luther King Jr. on Chris’ walls.
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Most of that stuff is off the walls now. Though there’s still a collage of Pitino’s 1991-92 Kentucky team framed on the bedroom wall next to an old Butler schedule poster. Out in the family room there’s a framed poster of Tubby Smith’s 1998 national championship team with autographs from Jeff Sheppard, Scott Padgett, Allen Edwards and others.
Chris lived and breathed Kentucky basketball in his youth. Ronnie Lyons, a former UK player who was the leading scorer in Adolph Rupp’s final victory and later moved down the street from the Holtmanns, would play shooting games at their house with Chris on the hoop John had installed in the driveway. John poured concrete into the base out of fear of it tipping over on dunks. But Lyons was a shooter, and would stand back against the garage where the asphalt slopes down a bit, hitting jumpers from angles that had the rim sitting higher around 11 or 12 feet, hardly rippling the net.
Chris Holtmann helped Jessamine County High reach the state Sweet 16 in 1990. (Bill Landis / The Athletic)When Chris was a scrappy point guard for Jessamine County High, he’d touch his socks before shooting free throws like his favorite Kentucky player, Kyle Macy. They called Chris “Bunny” because of the way he hopped around the court. As a senior he helped the Colts reach the 1990 state tournament, where he earned MVP of an opening win against Paducah Tilghman at Freedom Hall in Louisville, with the Sweet 16 that year moved from its more frequent home in Lexington.
“My biggest regret was I always wanted to play in Rupp,” Chris said.
The closest he got was playing on the Blue Courts on Kentucky’s campus during the summers. He also played in the Dirt Bowl, a local men’s league at Douglass Park where the area’s best players would mix it up. One night, Chris found himself matched up against former Kentucky guard Dicky Beal. Beal picked his pocket on three straight possessions.
“The coach brought me out, put his arm around me, tried to console me and was basically like, ‘We’re gonna give the ball to somebody else,'” Chris recalled.
Lexington is where Chris got his intro course to basketball. He eventually became an NAIA All-American at Taylor University in Upland, Ind., and then began his coaching career.
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“If I had grown up in a different place, I don’t know if I would have fallen in love with basketball or not,” Chris said. “The state is so single-minded, and that kinda fit me. Pretty much every kid grows up with a ball in his hand and a hoop in his yard. Basketball was it for me. It consumed me.”
It in turn consumed his family, because as Chris said this week, if you’re in Lexington, “you have no choice.”
John and Patty don’t hide the fact that they were once ardent Kentucky basketball supporters and still follow the team now. Chris jokes that his mom will watch Ohio State games on TV and listen to Kentucky games on the radio at the same time. That’s not exactly true, Patty said, but one year, she was out shopping with Chris’ wife, Lori, around the holidays, and shocked Lori when she popped her headphones on so she could listen to a Kentucky game on her Walkman. Patty’s allegiances have since shifted some, and now she asks Chris for a new roster each year so she can pray for each Ohio State player individually in the upstairs office in the house in Nicholasville.
The decor now gives the vibe of a house divided, with Kentucky, Butler and Ohio State stuff on the walls. It’s not of course, because John and Patty are first and foremost hoping for their son’s success. They don’t approach that flippantly, though, because they’re still in Big Blue country even if it’s an Ohio State house.
When Chris was an assistant at Gardner-Webb in 2007, they played Kentucky at Rupp Arena and stunned the Wildcats with a 84-68 win. John, Patty and some other family members were there to witness it.
“That was very sad,” Patty said. “It’s never quiet in Rupp Arena, but you could have heard a pin drop.”
They have a photo of the scoreboard flashing the final score, empty seats in the background. It’s in the garage, out of plain sight from any UK fan who might be visiting the house.
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“I think for them, they really would love for us to sometime go play at Rupp again,” Chris said. “I told them that’s not gonna happen. You can forget about that.”
So they’ll get the next best thing on Saturday.
(Top photo: Bill Landis / The Athletic)
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