Calipari Is Still Working on His Transition Game

He’s too young, he’s too emotional, he’s never coached in this league, he makes way too much money, he’s ruthless, he’s insincere and he cheats.

What else do they say?

Oh yeah, he’s a Rick Pitino clone--reprehensible as John Calipari is supposed to be, he isn’t even entitled to his own identity. He’s an I-me-mine guy with dollar signs in his eyes and a getaway map in his glove compartment, which he’ll use when his contract window opens in 1999, by which time he will have figured out his Massachusetts miracle was a card trick, compared to what it will take to turn the New Jersey Nets around.

Ambition is a terrible thing in one capable of fulfilling it so young, which may be one reason Calipari gets whacked so much. It’s so much a part of his career, it has become one of his favorite words as in:

“Pitino told me, ‘I got whacked coming up. People do it because you’re a threat.’ ”

As threats go, the one posed by Calipari zoomed up in a sports car and just ran over the toes of a bunch of senior citizens waiting for the bus.

At 37, the NBA’s second-youngest coach, he has a five-year, $15-million contract, second only to Pat Riley, who was a mature 50 when he broke the bank in Miami. Before Calipari’s new peers met him, they were calling him “this guy” and worse.

Everywhere else, they may have honeymoons but he’s not in Amherst, Mass., anymore.

The press, driven by the Manhattan-based tabloids long accustomed to wadding up Net coaches and throwing them away, started in on him. Net players rolled their eyes at his summer get-togethers and criticized his long practices and animated sideline style. The regular season wasn’t two weeks old when the first old pro, Vince Askew, jumped into his face and was immediately dealt away.

“Somebody asked me the difference between college and the pros, in getting the guys to buy in,” Calipari says.

“In college, you could walk in and say:

“ ‘OK, this is what you’re going to get from this situation: a college education, an opportunity after basketball ends with all our alums. During your playing time, you’re going to get better. You’re going to be challenged. You’re going to be with players who are here for the same reasons. You’re going to get all the exposure you need, and if you’re good enough and if you work hard enough, you’ll get opportunities in basketball.

“ ‘Now, this is what I’m asking you to do: da-da, da, da-da.’

“Here, it ain’t that way.”

*

On the other hand, it’s simpler in the NBA, where everyone answers to a single standard: the standings.

For better or worse, the bargaining is out front and the money is on the table. The profession isn’t broken down between good guys and outlaws, sainted Coach Ks, Generals, Michelangelos and haunted Tark the Sharks, merely coaches who win or lose.

In the college game, a professional, big-money, high-stakes business masquerading as an amateur sport, one may become a successful coach while acquiring an image worse than a street hustler’s.

As Calipari says, it’s a . . . war out there. In the myriad recruiting battles in which he made his bones, he notes he was never found to have broken any rules but however he did the job, the job got done.

His vocabulary is full of phrases appropriate to the struggle: “got whacked . . . buried us . . . bashed us . . . went ballistic.”

For example, if a player such as Bobby Martin, the best prospect in South Jersey, orally commits to Villanova but winds up at Pittsburgh, where Calipari is making a name for himself as a precocious assistant, Villanova Coach Rollie Massimino may “go ballistic” (get angry), “bashing us” (complaining to the media) and trying to “bury us” (get even, say, by having one of his players, Doug West, allege that Pitt offered him money).

A young man who comes as an assistant and revives a moribund program must survive that cross-fire. Calipari did, with obvious assets--youth, enthusiasm, magnetism and, according to the whispers that are the Muzak of this nether world, ruthlessness.

When lowly Massachusetts contemplated hiring Calipari in 1988, there was so much muttering in the background, it took testimonials from Pitino; Larry Brown, his first boss; and Big East Commissioner Dave Gavitt to get him this humble opportunity.

What happened after that became the stuff of legend, due in no small part to Calipari’s cultivation of same.

The program was so bedraggled the men’s and women’s coaches shared an office, dialed rotary phones, played in a dank gym called “the Cage” before crowds that dwindled to 500 or so during semester break when the dorms were closed and players, who had to stay on campus, were moved in with the international students.

Calipari went 10-18 his first season, made the NIT semifinals in his third and the NCAA sweet 16 in his fourth when his Minutemen knocked off Big East champion Syracuse.

He was on his way to fortune as well as fame, having thoughtfully gotten bonus clauses paying him 10% of NCAA prize money and a percentage of season-ticket sales. As he notes in his book, “Refuse to Lose,” Massachusetts gave them up readily, because their worth when he arrived was zero, and the probability of achieving them was little higher.

He also copyrighted the slogan “Refuse to Lose” in the manner of an earlier coach-capitalist, Riley, the owner of “Three-peat,” even if Byron Scott coined it.

Calipari now makes about $600,000 a year off “Refuse to Lose,” or as much as some NBA coaches make in salary.

In salary bonuses, sneaker contracts, TV shows and merchandise sales at his store--Coach Cal’s Closet--his yearly Massachusetts take rose to $1 million a year.

Not that it was always a merry harvest. Along the way, he had firefights of every kind, including his mano a mano with Temple’s John Chaney, who shoved him on a sideline and tried to fight him during a postgame news conference.

There was nothing collegiate, amateur or sportsmanlike about it. Feeling as if he was fighting for his career and good name every day, Calipari divided the world into friends and enemies.

Massachusetts made last spring’s Final Four, a crowning achievement for a coach with a roster that had more scrappers, such as his Puerto Rican guard tandem of Carmelo Travieso and Edgar Padilla, than stars such as Marcus Camby.

“In my 18 years at ESPN, he did the greatest rebuilding job,” Dick Vitale says. “If I told you someone could go to Massachusetts and, three years in a row, beat the No. 1 team in the country--Duke, [North] Carolina, Kentucky--I’d have been in an insane asylum.”

Yet nothing could change the way the land lay after this epic struggle, not even so magnificent an effort. He would always have awe-stricken admirers and die-hard critics.

Wrote the Boston Herald’s Steve Buckley before the Nets’ first appearance this season in the FleetCenter:

“It says in John Calipari’s book--and I won’t name the title, fearing the little weasel will show up at my door, demanding a fee--that when he took over the New Jersey Nets, he wanted to surround himself ‘with people who are strong in areas I’m weak.’

“By that, I assume he wanted to hire some coaches who are not complete frauds. . . .

“Coach Cal has gone from being an icon in Amherst to a nobody in New Jersey. His team is lousy, his speeches are sneered at behind his back and the Nets get about as much coverage from the glitzy New York media as the Fairleigh Dickinson wrestling team.”

Aside from that, however, New Jersey isn’t so bad.

*

This ain’t no Picasso here. If the coach is trying to sketch something, he better have a big eraser.

--Net forward Jayson Williams

Nov. 20, 1996

*

Calipari says he only reads USA Today if someone brings him a clipping he should see, like one of his players just went off on him or the organization.

This being (greater) New York, that’s once or twice a week.

For scores, he watches CNN. For entertainment, he likes the History Channel, where he can watch old wars and get respite from his own.

In real life, Calipari doesn’t have a pitchfork, horns and a tail. He doesn’t tape the conversation so he can copyright anything interesting anyone says.

In person, he’s relaxed, boyish and charming. He doesn’t look like a soul-less opportunist. What he does look like is probably what he was all along: a coach, only younger.

It’s a relaxed morning, a couple of months into the season. Calipari has already hit a land mine or two and survived. He has lost a lot of games. Not that he’ll admit it, but even with 15 million good reasons for being here, it’s harder than he thought it would be.

“I can’t worry about what’s being said,” he says. “I’ve been there. When I was at UMass--’You’ll never get it done, graveyard job’--I just never bought into it. And I’m not buying into it here.

“I get discouraged. I’m not going to lie to you. I look at some of these teams and I think, ‘Holy cow, how can we ever get there?’

“Well, they’re getting old. We have [salary] cap money in two years. I’m going to try to free up more cap money. We get another good pick [in the draft]. The way it’s looking, we’re going to get a real good pick. . . . New York’s going to get older. They’re not getting younger, they’re going to get older.

“I just try to keep my eye on that big picture. And I’ll tell you this, you say that there was a stigma about New Jersey. There was a stigma about UMass.”

Like any group, the NBA has a bias against outsiders. College coaches are greeted with a worn phrase--”doesn’t know the game”--as if it were a science, rather than a simplified version of basketball with a legislated defense and a handful of offensive tactics that most teams share.

However, there are classic mistakes, such as talking wistfully of one’s struggles on campus, a world NBA players have left behind. Early on, Calipari did it a lot and his players went into that thousand-yard stare, their eyeballs glazing over. But he would plow ahead, anyway.

By next season, he will have an NBA frame of reference, just like theirs. He has already added talent, courtesy of Dallas’ Don Nelson, and subtracted $36 million worth of Shawn Bradley. In the summer of ‘98, the Nets can be $14 million under the cap, making them the big dogs at the free-agent buffet.

Of course, this is (greater) New York and there are a thousand controversies between now and then.

Then there are the rumors Pitino will leave Kentucky and Calipari will succeed him. But Vitale’s Calipari-to-UCLA rumor didn’t exactly pan out, did it?

He’s not even at the one-year mark yet and Calipari insists his dream is alive, even if his illusions aren’t. Vitale is still out there scouting up a campus haven for him.

Calipari’s dream is not to need it.