LEXINGTON, Ky. — John Calipari had already stayed longer than expected. He was the featured guest on a panel about how to lead and succeed at the highest level in sports last week at the Central Bank Center, and after several classic, rambling Calipari anecdotes, he was barreling through his allotted time. The moderator made a gentle, futile attempt to silence the most ungovernable mouth in college basketball: OK, I think we’re about out of time. Calipari grinned and shook his head.
“You understand,” he said, “I leave when I feel like leaving.”
And to paraphrase Leonardo DiCaprio’s famous line from “The Wolf of Wall Street:” He’s not bleepin’ leaving. Not any time soon, at least.
Over the last 18 months, Calipari has watched three legendary coaching contemporaries call it a career. North Carolina’s Roy Williams, Duke’s Mike Krzyzewski and Villanova’s Jay Wright all retired, leaving Calipari as arguably the face (and voice) of the sport. But their departures also raise the question of how much longer Kentucky’s 63-year-old coach wants to keep doing this. There are many theories, all of which make him laugh.
“I’m having a ball,” he said that day on the panel. “I don’t have a timeline. But I’ll know. You know when? When I can’t help kids anymore.”
Entering his 31st season as a college head coach and Year 14 at Kentucky, a job he used to say no mortal man could handle for more than a decade, it’s clear Calipari is not yet out of energy or ideas. He’s still recruiting aggressively, as far ahead as the 2025 class, still scheduling games way out — a six-year series with Gonzaga was just announced and there’s a report one of similar length with Indiana is coming soon — still pushing the envelope on what constitutes the “gold standard” at Kentucky. Why cause such a stir stumping for a new state-of-the-art practice facility, after all, if he wasn’t going to be around to see it get built?
Before he leaves, “I just want the program to be future-proofed,” Calipari told The Athletic during a 30-minute interview last week. “Like Coach (Adolph) Rupp did, where the next guy comes in and there’s been a standard set.”
The clearest sign that Calipari isn’t ready to ride off into the sunset? He’s still way too busy dreaming big dreams, and he’s got a doozy in the works.
“We’ve got to take care of the sport,” Calipari said. “Before I’m done, I hope there’s things we’ve done that people can look back on and say, ‘Wow, that was big at the time.’ And I think summer basketball is one of those.”
There it is. Cal’s new cause.
He’s kicked around lots of outside-the-box ideas over the years, but this one actually has legs. His plan for teams to play a handful of exhibition games every summer has growing support around the country, including from Dan Gavitt, who oversees NCAA men’s basketball. Coaches who are just playing out the string don’t think up ways to make their offseason busier. But here comes Calipari, veteran carnival barker, banging a drum for something he thinks will increase visibility for the sport he loves. It’s a sport that, with football driving conference realignment and many other big decisions in college athletics, and with the NBA inching toward drafting players straight out of high school again, Calipari believes is under siege.
“George Raveling, John Thompson and John Chaney impacted our sport in a really positive way, but they were not afraid to speak up for the good of the young people in our sport,” Calipari said. “The decisions that they made, I think they were the first ones to really say, ‘We are going to shape college basketball,’ instead of having it dictated to them. I’m not sure that we are together enough to do stuff like that now — maybe we are — but there are things that need to happen in college basketball to compete with what’s going on around us.”
This is how he talks, even now, always plotting the next move, trying to anticipate what the landscape will look like down the road. Calipari scoffs at critics who think he’s about out of time just because it’s been seven years since his last Final Four and three years since his last NCAA Tournament win. No, he’ll leave when he’s ready, and he isn’t yet.
Calipari estimates he’s been talking about the need for college basketball to create a version of the NBA’s Summer League for at least five years now. Gavitt says their initial conversations about it happened pre-pandemic. That got put on ice for a couple of years, though, as the game’s leaders focused all of their energy on figuring out how to navigate COVID-19 and play an actual season. But now they’re revisiting that big idea, and Calipari has whipped up considerable support for it among his colleagues.
“We thought the time was right to get this topic back on the radar and get people seriously thinking about it, and we have,” Gavitt said. “If you think about college basketball in relation to every other level of basketball, it really has no presence of any significance in the summer. It just kind of goes dark. Meanwhile, in the last decade-plus, you’ve had all sorts of things around the game of basketball pop up and be very, very popular. The NBA free agency period, the Summer League, the grassroots travel season, The Basketball Tournament, the Big 3, the WNBA season. So it seems like there’s this great opportunity in the summer that college basketball is missing out on altogether.”
The way Calipari pitched it: The players are already on campus working out with their coaches and teammates in July and August, so why not let them play a couple of exhibition games too? Right now, college programs are allowed to take a foreign tour to play summer exhibition games once every four years. But the fan (and TV network) interest in Kentucky’s trips to the Bahamas to play games in 2014, 2018 and this August helped convince Calipari that letting every team play a few games every summer — right here in the U.S., in their home gyms even — would be a great way to get people buzzing about college hoops during the dog days.
“Why not play games in Rupp Arena against good teams, maybe teams that won’t schedule you but now they’ll play you in a summer game and people get to see that, or against in-state teams, whatever?” Calipari said. “Have it televised on SEC Network. I’ve been pushing for five years now that we need to be doing stuff in the summer to bring light to college basketball, like spring football, except we’re playing games. And now it’s catching on, like OK, maybe we do need to do this. It’s something that we just can’t wait for. You can’t say, ‘Well, in three years.’ You can’t wait. We have to protect the kids, protect the sport.”
Calipari is on the National Association of Basketball Coaches ad hoc committee that deals with issues facing the sport — Williams, Krzyzewski and Wright were on it with him before they retired — where he has friends in Michigan State’s Tom Izzo, Gonzaga’s Mark Few and Harvard’s Tommy Amaker. Craig Robinson, executive director of the NABC, said this month that “anecdotally, our coaches are thrilled” about the idea of summer basketball. “This is a win-win for everyone,” he said. “We’re proposing that Division I men’s basketball programs be permitted to compete in two or three exhibition-style contests against other Division I opponents.”
In an important step, Gavitt recently presented the idea to all 32 conference commissioners and “they were intrigued conceptually,” although lots of details still need to be worked out. Likewise, the NABC’s Player Development Coalition, a group of players representing programs all over the country, has “expressed initial interest and support for this idea,” Gavitt said. For the players, a summer event could mean new name, image and likeness opportunities. For conferences, it could mean new broadcast revenue. For coaches and fans, a chance to find out early how good freshmen and transfers really are.
“In that July and early August time period, there’s not a ton of competition for viewership and engagement in sports. Anybody in the media will tell you that’s probably the quietest time of the year, so we see that as an opportunity for college basketball to get into that space,” Gavitt said. “The idea would be to do something very limited, not a crazy number of games, and provide a lot of flexibility, taking into consideration the academic calendar and institutional resources, so if Murray State wanted to do something within their budget and Kentucky wanted to do something different, fine. I can imagine some really creative things that conferences or rivals could do. It just seems to have a lot of potential and we’re excited about exploring it and trying to figure out how to make it a reality.”
Can college basketball capture some of the excitement surrounding the NBA Summer League? (Ethan Miller / Getty Images)
There are still several hurdles to clear before summer college basketball is officially a thing, but everyone pushing the idea is cautiously optimistic.
“Our hope would be as early as next summer,” Gavitt said. Assuming the idea is approved, “it’s not going to be hard to get this off the ground.”
It might’ve been, though, without Calipari leading the charge. In 2021, he won the NABC’s Guardians of the Game Pillar Award for his work helping to create the McLendon Minority Leadership Initiative, which creates access to and opportunity for meaningful employment experience for minority candidates. He’s been the driving force behind telethons that have raised millions of dollars for disaster relief in Kentucky and around the world. Arguably the greatest recruiter in the modern era, Calipari typically gets what he wants. But he’s often making those requests on behalf of others.
“He’s had tremendous success but still cares about the future of the game,” Gavitt said. “Couple that with Cal’s creativity and his vision and he’s just very thoughtful about our game and opportunities for players and how it fits into the larger basketball universe and why it’s important to keep it healthy and progressive and contemporary. Now, does some of it benefit his program? Maybe. But most of it doesn’t have a huge impact on his program, because they can do things most programs can’t. He looks more broadly than just what’s good for the University of Kentucky. Even with these big ideas, he’s always mindful of, ‘OK, how’s this going to work for everybody?’ He is an appreciated leader in that way.”
It would be fascinating to see how many Kentucky fans would use that word, appreciated, to describe Calipari after the Wildcats went 9-16 in 2021 and followed that up by losing — with a Final Four-worthy team — to 15th-seeded Saint Peter’s in the first round of the NCAA Tournament last season. The backlash was brutal.
“We had some guys dealing with mental issues,” Calipari said. “As much as I tried to take it on, there were some guys who got hit pretty hard. That’s the thing: When you have raving fans, which is what we all want in this profession, when you’re winning, they’re raving fans; and when you’re losing, they’re raving fans. And you’re getting no help. Everybody outside our program, they’re piling on, so the guys are getting it from everywhere. My concern was: How do I make sure that these guys are OK and thinking right? And then we use it as fuel.”
Calipari will tell you his 2019-2020 team might’ve won it all if the postseason hadn’t been canceled, the 2020-2021 team’s development was stunted by COVID limitations and last season’ team was simply derailed by injury. But the fact remains, UK hasn’t won a game in the tournament since 2019 and hasn’t played on the last weekend since 2015. The other low-hanging fruit for Calipari critics is pointing out that he only has one national title, a decade ago, despite all of the high-end NBA talent that has come through Lexington. Still, he claims to feel no pressure.
“I’ve been fired before and I did all right,” he said. “Look, if we did what everybody thought we should be doing, I should have eight national championships by myself and going after John Wooden. But things have changed. A lot more teams, a lot harder to advance. I’d love to do it for the city, the state, for the university, for all our fans. Hell yeah, I’d love to do it. I’d love to win three more, four more. But you can’t tell that. Getting to a Final Four, which we’ve done four times and probably would’ve done with the 2020 team, that is the key. From there, stuff happens. Somebody gets hot, you get a shot-clock violation not called (Wisconsin in 2015), this or that goes the other way. But yeah, you want to be in there and you want to win it.”
Calipari appears to have assembled another Final Four-level roster. Kentucky will be a preseason top-five team led by returning national player of the year Oscar Tshiebwe, who has made no secret of his mission to avenge last year’s failure and carry the Cats deep next March. Interestingly, though, Calipari is cracking down on that kind of talk. The shock and devastation of the loss to Saint Peter’s, the sudden end for a team he thought was going to make a run, caused him to rethink his approach to coaching this group.
“What I’m trying to do is take the word championship out of our equation,” Calipari said. “Because I don’t want to put it on the kids, like you gotta do this now. That’s not fair to them. We’re competing against ourselves. How can we become the best teammates? How can we become our best version? My approach has been different, because these kids have enough pressure and I don’t want to put more on them.”
In the summer of 2019, after Kentucky came within one shot of making another Final Four, Calipari signed what was widely deemed a “lifetime contract.” In reality, it was a 10-year, $86 million deal that included an interesting clause: After the 2023-24 season, he could step down as coach and become an ambassador for the university and athletic department, an ostensibly cushy gig that would pay $950,000 a year.
There is a popular theory that Calipari will chase another banner (or two) with this year’s team and the next — ideally coaching No. 1-ranked recruit DJ Wagner, son of his first Memphis one-and-done, Dajuan Wagner, in a perfect career bookend — then exercise that ambassador clause in the summer of 2024. This is one of those theories that tickles him. For one thing, whenever he does stop coaching Kentucky, he says he’ll move away from Lexington, not because he doesn’t love the city but “It’s not fair to the next coach. I’m done when I’m done, because whoever the next coach here is deserves a clean run.”
That next guy might have to wait a while, though.
“Now I want to know any normal human being that would give up a $9 million job for a $1 million job? Who would do that? I’m not doing it, OK?” Calipari said, laughing. “If something happens with my health or I don’t feel like I’m up to it, that is like an insurance thing for me. That’s all it was. Now, if they want me to stop and pay me $9 million for the next five years, I’d probably consider it. But I would say, ‘What am I gonna do? I gotta do something.’ ”
For the foreseeable future, that something sounds like it’s going to be what he’s always done: chase recruits, ignore the noise and throw out outlandish ideas for his program and sport until the next one sticks. The night before he addressed those UK students at the convention center, Calipari was in Dallas visiting a five-star recruit. He said he still gets a thrill from sitting in a family’s living room and learning their story, hearing their dreams and laying out a tried-and-true plan for getting there.
“I’m loving this job,” Calipari said. “I understand what it is. You can’t listen to all the crap. I just want positive people who want to do stuff, who say, ‘How do we get things done?’ And if you’re not that guy, you’re not going to be around me. When I went to UMass, there were two types of people: The ones who’d say, ‘Well, here are all the problems.’ I already know those. Beat it. And the other group: People tell me no because, ‘We don’t do that here.’ I don’t want those people around me either. If you’re just always trying to figure out a way to say no, don’t. We’re at Kentucky. We’re only here for a short period of time. Let’s run with this. Let’s go get this.”
(Top photo: Courtesy UK Athletics)
