PROVIDENCE, R.I. — Because time measures history even as it moves on from it, and because college basketball remains perpetually dictated by larger-than-life coaches with enormous levels of power, money and personality, the latest chapter in a relationship that is not, in fact, a relationship, is going to play out here on Saturday with great anticipation. It might feel like nostalgia. Or a hallucination.
Rick Pitino, coaching the St. John’s Red Storm, and John Calipari, coaching the Arkansas Razorbacks, will go head-to-head for the 24th time in a college game. Pitino is 72. Calipari is 66. Their first matchup was in 1991, a win for Pitino. The most recent was 2016, also a win for Pitino. In between, the two have gone from young allies to old foes; foes who want desperately for you to believe that one never crosses the other’s mind, and that their shared history is as much a matter of longevity than it is personal ties.
Today, they’re both in the Naismith Hall of Fame. On Saturday, they’ll both coach in the NCAA Tournament with a trip to the Sweet 16 on the line.
But it’s not about them, right?
“We’re preparing for his players, he’s preparing for our players,” Pitino said after second-seeded St. John’s first-round win. “John and I don’t play one on one anymore.”
Pitino would have a point, if not for who he is, and who Calipari is.
Only two coaches have ever taken three different programs to the Final Four. One is Pitino — at Providence, Kentucky and Louisville. The other is Calipari — at Massachusetts, Memphis and Kentucky. (NCAA record books argue such things, but the games nevertheless happened.) No one has ever taken four different programs to the Final Four. The fact that one of these two men could stake that claim this year speaks to two inarguable facts running headlong into each other.
Both are lifers, apparently incapable of walking away. Calipari, even after being among the top two or three paid college coaches for the past decade, still often sounds like he can’t get ahead. Pitino enjoys horse races and memberships at America’s most elite clubs, but moved to Greece to coach international basketball (when no one in the U.S. would hire him after a ruinous ending at Louisville) and rode buses as Iona coach while in his late 60s.
Both win, so much so as to overcome scandals and investigations, public dignities and indignities, personal sensitivities and insensitivities, and survive no matter what. This is why each is where he is, spending these days coaching at what they say (perhaps with fingers crossed behind their backs) will be their last stops.
The two have long existed with this shared kinetic energy. Pitino and Calipari have a similar aura, always have. The suits. The sound. The hair. You imagine them at an Italian restaurant, maybe at a table at Camille’s or elbows up in the back bar at Massimo’s. Such a reality might’ve been the case in another life. But college coaching is a profession built on a rickety bridge of fragile friendships that can rot away with each tipoff, every recruiting battle and the always dangerous game of measuring one against the other.
Friday’s pre-second round news conferences in Providence were a portrait of what can happen. Calipari and Pitino fielded question after question about the other. Neither had very much to say, making it sound as if they only know each other as a matter of coincidental circumstances.
Calipari said he hadn’t seen the video Pitino produced earlier this year asking Kentucky fans not to boo Calipari in his return to Rupp Arena this season.
“It was nice of him,” Pitino said. “I would rather have a Christmas card, but that was nice of him.”
The room got a good laugh.
“We don’t know each other’s wives or children,” Pitino said. “We’re not really close friends. I don’t know a whole lot about him except he’s a terrific basketball coach.”
Rick Pitino doesn’t know a lot about John Calipari?
That was a sentence said out loud on Friday. A mind-bending statement, one conjuring thoughts of writer Julian Barnes. The English author once wrote, “When we are young, we invent different futures for ourselves; when we are old, we invent different pasts for others.”
Calipari and Pitino have known each other since working at Howard Garfinkel’s famed Five-Star Basketball Camp in the Pocono Mountains outside Scranton, Pa. Pitino, the older of the two, was a counselor in the ’70s when Calipari was a player. When Calipari became a counselor, Pitino, out and running early in his coaching career, was a featured speaker.
In 1988, Pitino, then leading the Knicks, not far removed from coaching Providence to the 1987 Final Four, was on the advisory committee to hire a new coach at his alma mater — the University of Massachusetts, where he played in the early ’70s.
A variety of names were in the mix. Lehigh head coach Fran McCaffery. Fairleigh Dickinson’s Tom Green. Some locals wanted former Minutemen player Doug Grutchfield. Larry Bird’s high school coach, Hill Hodges, reached out. Then there was a list of notable assistants — New Mexico’s Larry Shyatt, Notre Dame’s John Shumate, Rhode Island’s Al Skinner, Connecticut’s Howie Dickerman, Syracuse’s Bernie Fine, and Pittsburgh’s John Calipari. Pitino, according to an April 1988 Pittsburgh Post-Gazette story, recommended Shyatt, while also endorsing Calipari.
Calipari landed the job and was introduced at a news conference held at the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame in Springfield, Mass.
Over the years, especially after Pitino returned to the college game as Kentucky coach, and the two began crossing paths regularly, including in the 1996 Final Four (a Pitino win), ties began to fray. It’s long been known that Calipari never particularly appreciated Pitino regularly taking credit for him landing the UMass job.
Years passed.
On Friday, Calipari explained the non-relationship between he and Pitino as a byproduct of proximity in the throes of their careers. One year after Calipari moved from a failed stint in the NBA to Memphis in 2000, Pitino tucked tail after a burnout with the Celtics to take over Louisville. The shared orbit wasn’t large enough for both. Then Calipari took Pitino’s old job at Kentucky in 2009, lining up directly as Louisville’s in-state rivals, and that orbit collapsed on itself, sucked into a blackhole.
“You’re not going to be friends when you got those two jobs,” Calipari said Friday.
Yes and no. Other high-profile coaches directly opposed have maintained some genuine friendships. Jim Boeheim and Jim Calhoun. John Thompson and John Chaney. Many, many others. It’s doable, if you can stay above the fray.
Some can’t.
“They’re both outgoing, big personalities, big talkers,” said Boeheim, the Hall of Fame Syracuse coach who hired Pitino as an assistant in 1976 and has known both for the better part of 40 years. “They’re good on their feet, but they’re also very different. I don’t think people realize that.”
As different as they are similar, in fact.
Calipari holds a 13 -10 advantage over Pitino in college games. The two went 3-3 in the NBA.
And in the NCAA Tournament? 2-2
Saturday will break the tie.
Maybe for good.
But with these two? Maybe not.
(Illustration: John Bradford / The Athletic; photos: Andy Lyons, Jonathan Daniel / GettyImages)
