What John Calipari did for Kentucky will eventually be appreciated ... just not now

Yahoo

31-01-2025

The debate in Kentucky this week is how Wildcat basketball fans should greet their former coach, John Calipari, when he returns to Rupp Arena on Saturday as the leader of the Arkansas Razorbacks.
Cheer? Boo? Just do nothing?
The answer is whatever the heck they want, of course. It's a basketball game. Part of the fun of being a fan is reacting (or overreacting) in every imaginable way, good or bad. Calipari is 65 years old and long ago proved he gives as good as he takes. He'll survive.
'My guess is I'm going to get booed,' Calipari said this week. 'But that's all part of it. Shoot, you get booed. I've done this so long, I'll tell ya, I've got bazooka holes in my body. So when you shoot arrows, it doesn't even hit skin.'
Gallows humor as a deflection tactic seems appropriate because as battle-tested as Calipari is walking into enemy arenas that despise him, this is not one he is looking forward to experiencing.
For 15 years — or at least all but the final couple when success started to be tempered, especially in March — Rupp was Calipari's castle and Kentucky was his Camelot.
Now he'll return, likely wearing a red Arkansas sport coat — an outward symbol of where he is now that he never embraced at his previous stops (i.e. he didn't always wear Kentucky blue).
Kentucky fans are free to view Calipari how they wish. There is little debate that the program had gotten stale at the end of his time there. Cal likely did everyone a favor by opting out of essentially a lifetime contract and leaving for Arkansas last spring. Still, he left and for a SEC rival no less. He also took many of his players, recruits and staff with him.
It isn't like UK fans would be jeering some retired old coach. One day Cal will get his flowers. When Rick Pitino finally returned for Midnight Madness last year as a guest of new coach Mark Pope, he was cheered. There was no such love when he was leading Louisville.
What isn't a debate, though, is what Calipari did for the Kentucky program. Maybe he built up so much sustained success that the uncertain nature of his start is forgotten, but things were uncertain in 2009 when he arrived from Memphis.
The Wildcats hadn't reached a Final Four in 11 seasons. Recruiting toward the end of the Tubby Smith era and the two-year run of Billy Gillispie had been mostly pedestrian. The teams weren't talented, exciting or all that successful. There was a real question about whether the expectations and intensity of the job were too big for anyone to manage. Essentially only Pitino — a massive personality in his own right — had truly corralled it in modern times.
But even he left.
Kentucky may believe that winning is a birthright, and its history gives reason for that. Nothing is guaranteed though. In 2009, when Calipari arrived in Lexington, Kentucky wasn't alone in plight. Longtime rival Indiana was searching for a formula to return to prominence as well.
Indiana is still searching.
Calipari, meanwhile, breathed immediate life into not just the program, but the entire state. He was a whirlwind. His first recruiting class featured John Wall, DeMarcus Cousins and Eric Bledsoe. It would only get better at times — a turnstile of breathtaking talent that didn't just win games but thrilled fans.
He barnstormed the state that first offseason, using a book tour to introduce himself to them and them to himself — flying helicopters into little towns and spending hours at gas station diners and coal mine break rooms and low-wattage radio stations. He'd catch old-school breakfasts with Joe B. Hall to learn about the past and use new-school social media to make the place cool.
That first team went 35-3, won the SEC before a horrific shooting night doomed the Wildcats in the Elite Eight. The next season they were in the Final Four. The one after that, they were national champs.
It was part of a lightning-bolt run — Kentucky averaged 30.5 victories a season for his first decade in Lexington.
Maybe this is viewed as inevitable, just the pushing of a button or two, but it was far more complicated. Cal spoke the other day about how Kentucky had 'good bones' when he took it over, and that is accurate. It needed an overhaul though. He provided it.
The bigger the job got, the more intense the spotlight, Calipari tried to not just match it, but use it in a positive manner. When, say, there were floods in Eastern Kentucky, Calipari would organize a televised fundraiser, with players working the phone bank. He embraced individual fans, took time to meet everyone and served as a spokesman for the school and the state — each too often overlooked by the country as a whole.
In the end, you have to win though, especially in March. Calipari didn't do that in his last six years there. He should have won at least one more national title — namely with the 38-0 team he brought to the Final Four only to fall to Wisconsin in 2015. In the end, his tenure became known for losses to St. Peter's and Oakland.
It was contentious and difficult and uncomfortable. Everyone wanted better and no one was wrong for that. Only Adolph Rupp himself coached the Cats longer. So Cal left and is trying to rebuild Arkansas, to uneven results thus far. Kentucky, meanwhile, has moved into a new day — with former player Mark Pope in charge of a likable, scrappy team full of potential.
Does the above merit a roaring cheer? No, not necessarily. There will no doubt be some applause, but this is still an SEC basketball game.
What John Calipari did for Kentucky will eventually be appreciated.
On Saturday, expect a lot of booing. The cheers will come one day.