The following article was originally published on November 19, 2004 in the New York Daily News. It is a nice read on John Calipari, whose players have graduated from both UMass and Memphis at much better rates than Herb Sendek’s players graduated from NC State. (We use Sendek as the standard since he was widely accepted by all, including Nina Allen and the Faculty Senate, as such a strong academic coach.)
Calipari’s players graduate at such attractive rates because of his long-term personal commitment to them and their education. At both UMass and Memphis Calipari started a fund from his personal wealth to assist past players to return to school and graduate. So far at Memphis, three pre-Calipari players have taken advantage of this program and gotten their degrees. Two others have are in school now and should graduate soon. We wonder how many of these Memphis players who have benefited from Calipari’s generosity were players on the teams that Lee Fowler coached at Memphis in the 1980s?
CALIPARI DOESN’T DESERVE BUM RAP
“By most standards, John Calipari has enjoyed a successful four-year run at Memphis. The Tigers’ coach has transformed the urban commuter school from a Conference USA afterthought into a Top 25 program that could be closer than anyone thinks to a Final Four appearance. He recently signed a contract extension that will take him through 2010 and reportedly pay $1.5 million per year.
But critics constantly insist on drawing a moustache on his picture.
Just recently, Sports Illustrated trashed Calipari in its college basketball issue, selecting the Tigers as one of the five programs college fans are least likely to root for. Among other things, the magazine blasted Memphis for a zero graduation rate and lambasted Calipari for his association with Marcus Camby, the star of Calipari’s 1996 Final Four team at Massachusetts who admitted he took jewelry and cash from an agent while still in school.
“When I read it,” Calipari said, “I was ticked. It’s bull.”
Calipari has never backed away from a fight, which may be why his Massachusetts teams were so good in the mid-’90s. Sure, he takes dead-end kids, some of them with checkered pasts. But Calipari is quick to point out that all three of his seniors – Arthur Barclay, Duane Ervin and Anthony Rice – are on target to graduate in May and five of seven previous seniors have earned degrees.
“Kids want to come here,” he said before junior forward Rodney Carney scored 33 points in the 24th-ranked Tigers’ 81-66 victory over St. Mary’s last night to advance to the finals of the Coaches vs. Cancer Classic at the Garden. “At the very least, they know they’re going to get their degree and be prepared for life because of our summer internship program with FedEx. The upside is, they’ll have a chance to play in the NBA because our players all get better. They like the freedom we give them.”
Calipari, who won the 2002 NIT and has been to the NCAA Tournament the last two years, already has produced two NBA players – guards Dajuan Wagner and Antonio Burks – at Memphis and has two future pros on his roster, Carney sophomore forward Sean Banks and freshman Joey Dorsey. Plus, he has strung together two consecutive Top 5 recruiting classes that should reap the benefits of playing in the sparkling new, 18,600-seat FedEx Forum.
Calipari, who lost two recruits – Amare Stoudemire and Kendrick Perkins – to the NBA out of high school, knows the landscape of college basketball is constantly changing. Most of the great ones leave early for the pros.
“I’ve never held a kid back,” said Calipari, who coached in the NBA with the Nets from 1996-99. “When Dajuan Wagner was here and I knew he was going to be a lottery pick, I ripped up his scholarship papers and told him he had to go. I told him he wasn’t ready, and that he was going to have to work his butt off or he would fail, but I also told him he couldn’t turn down the opportunity. I was on a show on ESPN a couple years ago and one coach said if he knew a player wasn’t going to stay two or three years, he wouldn’t recruit him. You go into the homes of the top 100 kids with that approach and how many are you going to get? None.”
Calipari has been painted with a tar brush ever since Camby’s confession. The NCAA deleted the school’s Final Four appearance from the record books for using an ineligible player. But there were no sanctions. And, in a letter obtained by the Daily News, dated June 8, 2004, Tom Yeager, the chairman of the committee on infractions, told Calipari: “The committee fully recognizes you had nothing to with the violations of Marcus Camby during the 1995-96 season. In a sense, you were an innocent victim.”
None of that made a difference last spring when Calipari briefly flirted with the St. John’s job before withdrawing his name from consideration in the wake of some negative newspaper ink that dredged up the Camby issue again. “I never contacted St. John’s,” he said. “People there came after me. Father (Donald) Harrington (the university president) conducted a complete background search on me and they seemed comfortable we do things the right way.”
Calipari always seems to be haunted by controversy. Just two weeks ago, when Memphis was playing an exhibition game, four players – Barclay, Carney, Dorsey and walk-on Clyde Wade – had their student apartment burglarized. When they filed their police report, they listed their losses at $66,000, $40,000 of that from eight mink coats.
That raised red flags in the media, which wondered what four college kids were doing with eight minks. Dorsey, as it turns out, was storing eight coats and two pocketbooks for a girl he knew who works as a dancer. While Wade was filing a police report, Dorsey was on the phone with the woman, who claimed her losses totaled $5,000. Wade, thinking Dorsey meant $5,000 a coat, told police the total was $40,000. The next day, the woman called Memphis police and told them the coats were fake fur and her losses were $5,000. Detectives looked into her story and found it checked out.
It was just another speed bump for Calipari.
He should be used to them by now. ”
Additional Notes:
While we are on the subject of Calipari, here are two other interesting articles we dug up today:
