March Madness: Rick Pitino-John Calipari saga adds another chapter on Saturday
Rick Pitino, left, and John Calipari. Credit: AP / Steven Senne; AP / Charles Krupa
PROVIDENCE, R.I.
The fever dream of so many hard-core college basketball fanatics will come to life here on Saturday. It’ll be No. 2 St. John’s against No. 10 Arkansas in a West Region second-round game for a spot in the Sweet 16. But it also will be Red Storm coach Rick Pitino squaring off against Razorbacks coach John Calipari.
A Pitino versus Calipari matchup holds a ton of intrigue. It’s not just because they are two Hall of Fame coaches who have thrived in the NCAA Tournament, Pitino with seven Final Fours and national championship game wins with Kentucky and Louisville and Calipari with six Final Fours and one national championship with Kentucky.
It’s as much about the drama that’s been unfolding between them for more than three decades.
Though Pitino, 72, is six years older, they’ve known each other since they worked summers at the Five Star Basketball Camp, when Calipari was a youth instructor and Pitino was a guest lecturer. As each made his own mark in college coaching, they kept running into each other.
They were Conference USA rivals when Calipari was at Memphis and Pitino at Louisville from 2001-2005 and in-state rivals from 2009-17, when Calipari was coaching Kentucky and Pitino was coaching Louisville.
They are older now and the rivalry has faded a bit — or at least they wanted to sound that way on Friday when their teams practiced at Amica Mutual Pavilion — but one still can see the residue of some bad feelings.
Asked about their similarities, Calipari replied, “He has Gucci shoes and I have itchy shoes.”
Asked about his intersection with Calipari, Pitino said, “I certainly have great respect for him, but we’re not really close. Everybody tried to talk that way. It was just a Kentucky-Louisville and Louisville-Memphis thing.”
Pitino played some role in Calipari getting his first job, at UMass in 1988. Pitino, then with the Knicks, was an alum and recommended the young assistant from Pitt for the gig.
“I didn’t like what was being said about him back then because some people were pushing other coaches and UMass was in dire straits,” Pitino said. “They couldn’t come up with the money to pay the coach. They had no budget, nothing. They really fell on hard times. I thought John was the one guy that could resurrect the program.”
Pitino reportedly chipped in $5,000 toward his salary to seal the deal. Calipari has bristled at the idea that he didn’t earn the job on his own merit.
As Calipari turned UMass into a powerhouse and Pitino was rebuilding Kentucky into one, comparisons started to be drawn. Calipari was labeled by the broader media as a “Pitino clone,” and that, too, didn’t land well with him. That storyline peaked in the 1996 Final Four as 35-1 UMass lost in a national semifinal to eventual national champion Kentucky.
Both went to the NBA after that, Pitino to the Celtics and Calipari to the Nets, but both ended up back in the college ranks, and when Calipari got the Kentucky gig before the 2009-10 season, the itchy shoe was on the other foot. He enjoyed being at the state’s preeminent program.
In a 2011 radio interview, Calipari was speaking about the greatness of the Wildcats and said, “It’s a unique thing. There’s no other state, none, that’s as connected to their basketball program as this one because those other states have other programs.”
Pitino’s reply came on CBS as he said, “Four things I’ve learned in my 59 years about people: I ignore the jealous, I ignore the malicious, I ignore the ignorant and I ignore the paranoid . . . If the shoe fits anyone, wear it.”
Calipari not only won eight of their 10 Kentucky-Louisville matchups but turned the tables from the 1996 Final Four storyline. His Wildcats dispatched Pitino’s Cardinals in the 2012 Final Four semifinals en route to winning the national title.
Still, each must be credited for ways they changed the game. Pitino was the first coach to use the three-point shot as a weapon when he took Providence to the 1987 Final Four. Calipari created the one-and-done era by making Kentucky the destination for NBA-bound high school seniors and taking the Wildcats to four Final Fours in five seasons ending in 2014-15.
The sharpest edges in Calipari v. Pitino clearly have softened now. Calipari was asked about the rivalry Friday and replied, “I have never seen him as a rival. Louisville was a rival. He happened to coach there.”
He added: “You know, he’s on chapter two of his new book and we’re on chapter one — as a matter of fact, we’re probably on the first few pages of the chapter. It’s both of us writing another story and being able to come back here.”
Roger Rubin returned to Newsday in 2018 to write about high schools, colleges and baseball following 20 years at the Daily News. A Baseball Hall of Fame voter since 2011, he has covered 13 MLB postseasons and 14 NCAA Final Fours.
