I stood across from an 18-year-old Karl-Anthony Towns before the 2014 McDonald’s All-American Game, and asked him what made John Calipari different. Towns was the crown jewel of Calipari’s recruiting class at Kentucky that season as one of four Burger Boys headed to Lexington. This was almost an underwhelming blue chip haul by Calipari’s lofty standards at the time after he pulled in a record six McDonald’s All-Americans the year before, a group that led his team to the national championship game even as a lowly No. 8 seed.
Towns immediately knew what he wanted to say.
“He never lies to you,” Towns said of Calipari at the time. “He keeps it straight with you. Cal really does a great job of always being honest. That’s the way the program is, it just runs on honesty.”
Fast forward 12 years later. Arkansas guard D.J. Wagner is at the podium for SEC media day, and he’s asked about why he’s still with Calipari for a third season after both made the leap from Kentucky to the Razorbacks. Wagner was once the No. 1 recruit in America, and widely presumed to be a one-and-done top draft pick. That didn’t happen after an underwhelming freshman campaign with the Wildcats exposed some holes in his game, but he never lost the support of his head coach. Wagner’s answer mirrored Towns’ more than a decade earlier:
“He’s always honest with you. He never sugarcoats nothing,” Wagner said. “That’s what it’s about. It’s a blessing to be able to play under John Calipari for three years. I mean, that’s a blessing to me. So that’s it, really. He’s a legendary coach. He’s a great coach. And he’s been with us every step of the way. He’s loyal, and he’s always got our back.”
So much has changed about college basketball since Calipari landed his first head coaching job at UMass in 1988. At the time, he was a 29-year-old tasked with turning around a program that hadn’t made the NCAA tournament since the early 1960s. Calipari had the Minutemen in the Final Four by his seventh season on the job, though that one was wiped off the official record books because Marcus Camby allegedly accepted $28K in jewelry and cash from an agent. Today, every player Calipari coaches and recruits has an agent and is handsomely rewarded for their talent through NIL. As the sport has undergone mammoth changes, Calipari has stayed true to himself, and it has given him more longevity than almost all of his long-time rivals.
Calipari is 67 now, and realistically he doesn’t have too many more years left in coaching. The days of the NBA trying to hire him out of the college ranks are long gone — at this point, he’s older than every active NBA head coach. It’s hard to believe he’s that old, because it still feels like he’s on the cutting edge of how to treat players. On Thursday, Calipari will lead Arkansas into the Sweet 16 for the second straight season. Just listen to him gloat about his latest collection of freshmen and the joys of coaching after all these years in the game.
Calipari has always put his players first, which was something of an radical concept in college sports even a decade ago when the prevailing wisdom was that athletes should be grateful for free tuition as they made their universities millions. Calipari never fell for it.
Contrast Calipari’s approach with that of Tom Izzo. The legendary Michigan State head coach has also found success on his own terms, but at 71 years old, it feels like he has deep resentment for the changing nature of the sport.
Not Calipari. In many ways, he molded college basketball to his whim and still came out on top.
I remember when Calipari proudly declared that every eligible player on his team would enter the NBA draft back in 2016. I remember when a record five Kentucky players became first-round picks back in 2010, which Calipari called the “greatest day in the history of the program.” I remember Dajuan Wagner — DJ Wager’s father! — trying to return for his sophomore season at Memphis until Calipari pushed him out the door because he knew his NBA stock was at an all-time high. Two years later, Wagner was diagnosed with ulcerative colitis, and his career was mostly over.
It’s easy to think Calipari shouldn’t have the same advantages in today’s landscape of college basketball. Pay-for-play is now fully ingrained in the culture of the sport with NIL budgets pushing past $20 million annually for the sport’s biggest programs. You don’t have to became a first-round NBA draft pick to get rich playing basketball anymore. Yet for some reason, recruits still flock to Calipari.
Next season, Calipari has three more top-25 recruits coming into Arkansas, led by standout shooting guard Jordan Smith. Duke is the only other program who can match that type of haul. The coach’s greatest power might be his ability to always stay on message, and it resonates with players to this day. Just listen to him talk about how “administrations win championships, coaches win games” after advancing to the Sweet 16 this year.
Devin Booker put it simply when asked about why Calipari continues to succeed back in 2024. Booker was nearly a decade into his NBA All-Star career at the time, but he never lost sight of the man who who help him get there.
“They treat you like pros,” Booker said of Calipari and his staff at Kentucky. “They want you to be pros. Some teams are picking up on it, but Cal is the first one to promote sending your best players to the pros after one year.”
Many people will tie Calipari to the portrait of the sleazy college basketball coach. That’s only the case for those who don’t know him. For the players who crossed paths with the Hall of Famer, Calipari has been defined by keeping it real. All these years later, it’s still paying off.
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