LOUISVILLE, Ky. (WDRB) – As he took the stage at Bud Walton Arena on the University of Arkansas campus for the first time as the Razorbacks’ new basketball coach Wednesday night, former Kentucky coach John Calipari had a familiar look.
He looked like a president the first time you see him after he’s been out of office. Like many of my friends a couple of months after they got out of the media business. Like Denny Crum when I saw him a few months after he departed as University of Louisville coach.
He looked relaxed. He looked relieved. And I expect, in time, Calipari will look rejuvenated.
I don’t have any reason to want the best for Calipari. I was not close to him. I don’t remember ever having a one-on-one conversation with him. And yet, seeing him work the room as he has worked so many rooms in this Commonwealth, I found myself hoping he could find some happiness in his next college stop.
It doesn’t always happen. For those rare championship coaches who move on to coach somewhere else, the rule more often than not is that they have experienced their best days, competitively speaking.
The next chapter is more denoument than triumph. Bob Knight at Texas Tech is the archetype. Larry Brown after Kansas? Went to a championship game at UCLA (lost to Crum), but never the Jayhawk heights. Rick Pitino won a title after leaving Kentucky, but there were rocky times.
Calipari is an interesting case. He can still attract the best young players in America. The problem is that the best young players aren’t what is required to win national championships anymore. You need experienced players. You need to be savvy about what transfers to add, how much talent to accumulate, and how much to pay it.
To some degree, Calipari still seems like a coach stuck in the old world. He’s talking about the great facilities at Houston. Facilities don’t matter the way they used to. Facilities aren’t the reason Kentucky couldn’t guard Jack Gohlke.
But even in his first Arkansas appearance, Calipari took a bit of a shot at Kentucky athletics director Mitch Barnhart, I thought, when he said, “Basketball coaches win games. Administrations win championships. And you know why? Because they want to. And it’s important to them.”
The payroll would say otherwise. Calipari was the CEO of basketball at Kentucky. The successes were his. So were the shortcomings. Let’s leave it at that. There is more than enough support in place at Kentucky to win national championships.
Otherwise, Calipari reprised some of his greatest hits for the Arkansas crowd. Cast in a new reddish hue, the lines landed. They’ll keep landing, unless Calipari can’t win. Unless he can’t adapt to the new landscape.
In the famous Jim Collins book, Good to Great, Kroger and A&P grocers confronted the same brutal facts in the late 1960s. Both companies had research showing that superstores were the way of the future. A&P looked at the data, considered the cost of redoing every store, thought about having to change the way it had done business for most of a century, and threw the data away.
Kroger looked at the same data, accepted that what it was doing wasn’t going to be sustainable, and got to work updating its stores.
You know where the companies are today.
When you see that the way you’ve done things isn’t working, that’s not the time to double down. How Calipari responds to that fact, more than anything Calipari does, will determine his success, or lack thereof, at Arkansas.
Calipari knows who he is. In a savvy move, he resisted the temptation to do the school’s traditional “Woo Pig Sooie!” chant. He’s a steelworker’s son from Pittsburgh. He doesn’t need to call any hogs. That’s not a visual the world needed. The one that was needed was one of a confident, Hall of Fame coach embracing a new chapter. That, college basketball got.
As for Kentucky, Calipari’s parting thought was this.
“We’d been there 15 years, folks,” he said. “And great times, great achievements — 40 players to the NBA, 30 kids graduated. I love that state. I love the governor. The people are the salt of the earth. They’re generous. They’re kind. They grew up kind of like we did. They grew up like we did. . . . All I can tell you, we loved our time there. We gave every ounce of everything we had to that job, that state and that school. So I walk away sad, but knowing no regrets. We left nothing on the table. There’s not a whole lot more we could have tried to do.”
Calipari said he talked to a priest while he was in Phoenix for the Final Four and described his dilemma in choosing between getting back to work at Kentucky and making a change and going to Arkansas. Calipari said his friend counseled him to walk for an hour, and for the first half hour to have in his mind that he was the Arkansas coach. And on the way back, he was to have in his mind that he was coming back to Kentucky.
“And you’ll see what moves your heart and what you want to do,” Calipari said the priest told him. “And I did that. And I’ll be honest. When I thought about coming here, and building this program and making it something special, it got me excited.”
Calipari didn’t say it, but the thought of coming back to Kentucky, repairing the frustration with fans, mending rifts with administrators and maybe some boosters, it probably made him a bit weary.
In Arkansas on Wednesday, Calipari shed that weight. We’ll now get to see how he operates again without it, and who decides to pick it up in his place at Kentucky.
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