My whole career I wasn’t a great player. I didn’t play for one of the name coaches in our business. I wasn’t a blue-chip player. I didn’t have a leg up on anyone. My mom always told me that a person should dream bigger than their surroundings.
— John Calipari, from his book “Players First: Coaching from the Inside Out”
ATHENS, Ga. — The coach walks out to the loading dock and turns into a human being. The game is won, the questions are over and John Calipari can just be Cal. For a few minutes, he doesn’t have to sell anybody anything. Everybody here is already sold.
The Kentucky team bus is parked down here. It’s a safe space. The media, and their talk about Kentucky’s perfect season, are behind the closed arena doors. Hundreds of Kentucky fans, and their relentless pressure to win, are watching from the street, behind a barrier. That weary deadpan look Calipari gives the TV cameras is gone. His players are here. Their families are here. He mugs for photo after photo with daddies and mamas and uncles and aunts. Ashley Judd, Kentucky’s No. 1 celebrity fan, is back here, too. “Great game!” she says as she gives him a hug.
It was in fact a great game. Georgia played fearless basketball, running right at Kentucky’s thicket of big men and scoring at the rim. With just over nine minutes left, the Bulldogs were up nine and the Athens crowd was supersonic. Then the Wildcats came back, sure as the tide. Nothing showy about it. Kentucky found easy shots and made them. Georgia had hard shots and missed. In the end it was 72-64, and the fans in blue — a quarter of the crowd — lingered and cheered as the home fans went home.
Calipari was brilliant. It wasn’t his plays; it was how he used his players. He changed lineups at just about every dead ball, running in new players two and three at a time, like a hockey coach changing lines. He pulled his 6-foot-11 freshman forward, Karl-Anthony Towns, eight times. Towns might be Kentucky’s most talented player, though the Wildcats have so many stars that it’s more a matter of taste, like picking your favorite “Fast and Furious” car chase. But Calipari kept yanking Towns, who was in foul trouble, and yelling at him. Once, when Towns committed a charge instead of passing out of trouble, Calipari waited until Towns got to the bench. Then the coach spun and shouted: “TELL ME WHY YOU DID IT!”
At the end, Towns was back in the game. With just under three minutes to go and the score tied, he converted a three-point play. The next time down the floor, he scored again to put Kentucky up five. Georgia never got closer. Inside the last minute, with Georgia down six, Calipari told his guards to feed Towns the ball. He knew the Bulldogs would foul. He wanted to see how Towns would handle free throws in a big game.
Towns made them both.
“‘Scared money don’t make no money’ — that’s what I was saying to them in the huddle,” Calipari says.
That’s a 56-year-old white guy from Moon Township, Pennsylvania, quoting the wisdom of Young Jeezy.
“I’m not a genius,” Calipari will say if he spots a microphone within 100 yards. For a man who talks so much about honesty, this is a bullpile. He is undoubtedly a genius at college basketball in its current form. The only thing to decide is whether he is a regular genius or the evil kind.
WE SHOULD PROBABLY decide soon, because Kentucky is about four weeks from history. The Wildcats are 31-0 and nine wins away — three in the SEC tournament, six in the NCAA — from the first undefeated college basketball season since Indiana in 1975-76. Since the ’70s, the task has become even harder — more games, more good teams, an extra round in the NCAA tournament. If Kentucky ends up 40-0, you could make a case for Calipari as architect of the greatest team ever.
But Calipari builds his teams to burn. As many as nine of his players could be taken in this year’s NBA draft. And Calipari says getting players to the league is his ultimate goal — more than a title, more than 40-0.
Calipari, who declined a one-on-one interview for this story, has said for weeks that it wouldn’t bother him much if the Wildcats lost before the tournament. His friends think differently.
“I’ve had conversations in the last week with him,” says Dave Pendergraft, director of pro scouting for the Dallas Mavericks, who worked for Calipari with the New Jersey (now Brooklyn) Nets. “I said, ‘Cal, you need to lose one to learn from it.’ Not once did he agree.”
Ric Elias, Cal’s friend and the CEO of marketing company Red Ventures, is a hoops junkie who played on a team Calipari coached at Michael Jordan’s fantasy camp. They’ve been friends since. Elias sees the same drive in Calipari that he sees in people who run Fortune 500 companies.
“What floats his boat is competition — not just in sports but in business,” Elias says. “There’s 50 big-time coaches. Only one wins.”
He describes Cal’s leadership as “seeing around corners.” In 2005, when the NBA and the National Basketball Players Association decided that high school players had to wait at least one year before becoming eligible for the draft, Calipari saw around the corner. He was at Memphis and took a team built around one-and-done star Derrick Rose to the NCAA title game in 2008. In his sixth year at Kentucky, he has maxed out the plan, hoarding elite high schoolers who need a gap year before they can go pro. Kentucky announces itself before every home game as The Greatest Tradition in the History of College Basketball. Now, it’s basically Oak Hill Academy for the NBA.
“’Scared money don’t make no money’ — that’s what I’m saying to them in the huddle.”
– John Calipari
Kentucky fans don’t seem to mind; the Wildcats have won a national title and been to two other Final Fours since Calipari arrived. The players don’t seem to mind; 16 of his former Kentucky and Memphis recruits are playing in the NBA, and they’re making $103 million this season alone. Calipari signed a new deal with Kentucky last June for $52.5 million over seven years.
The worry is in the shadows behind those stacks of money. Calipari has never been charged with cheating. But twice — after he took UMass to the Final Four in 1996 and did the same with Memphis in 2008 — the NCAA found violations that happened while he was there. At UMass, star Marcus Camby admitted taking money from an agent. At Memphis, there was an investigation into whether someone took the SAT for Rose. Rose denied it, but his score was ruled invalid. The NCAA wiped both schools’ Final Four appearances and 42 wins from the record books. Four years ago, when Kentucky gave Calipari a basketball marking his 500th career win, the NCAA sent the school a letter saying his official total was just 458. After some grumbling, Kentucky adjusted its records. Calipari kept the ball.
Corruption in college sports is so common that any team with the talent of this year’s Wildcats is bound to draw doubters. But the history of Calipari’s previous teams trails him like a shot-blocker running down a fast break. Bob Knight, who coached that unbeaten Indiana team, cited Calipari as an example of how “integrity is really lacking” in college basketball. Judy Rose, athletic director at Charlotte, knows Calipari from their time together in Conference USA. She praises his skill as a coach. So if he were a job candidate, would UMass and Memphis bother her? “If you look at the history, maybe. I would certainly think that the University of Kentucky …” She pauses. “Cal hasn’t been charged with anything, you know?”
But as in the rest of big business, sometimes the deeper issue is what’s legal. Even some of Calipari’s friends, such as Michigan State coach Tom Izzo, worry that Calipari’s focus on in-and-out players is hurting the game. “I think John has done a hell of a job,” Izzo said last week. “I’m not sure I’m crazy about the way everything has worked out.”
This season, it has worked out fine for John Calipari. On the loading dock in Athens, among friends, he laughs and hugs like the host of the world’s greatest party, waving to the fans in the street as he climbs on the bus. The man pays such attention to detail, you wonder whether he picked the bus company himself.
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