In Jerry Tipton’s book “Deja Blue,” only Kentucky basketball is mentioned more than John Calipari, who coached the Wildcats for 15 years.
Tipton chronicled 14 of those seasons and in his 41 years covering UK athletics he covered Calipari longer than any other coach with the Wildcats.
Tipton was old school journalism. In his 51 total years as a sports reporter, Tipton probably never wrote anything first person. In fact, over numerous shared meals across the nation, he rarely talked about himself.
The book, available at Amazon.com and Acclaim Press, is just the way he was his entire career: Objective, honest and fair.
Over the past few years, reporters have lost a lot of access to players and coaches.
The coaches gathered the wagons and shut off both the media and the fans as their wealth increased.
For Tipton, it all began when Rick Pitino made the decision one day to restrict who could access teams and practices.
After years of covering Nolan Richardson and Eddie Sutton, they both felt that the players are the program’s most important face.
It makes sense—the players are what the people come to watch. He once had the opportunity to handle scrapbooks some admirers had produced for him when he was a player at Arkansas while at Joe Kleine’s house. Each and every game. Each year. There was his gold medal from the Olympics.
Now more than ever, it seems important the players be part of a community. They are being asked to dig deeper in to their pockets for NIL and now the out-and-out pay for play.
Calipari is like 99% of the successful coaches in this country, private. The man could run the CIA.
He is also a marketing genius. The night he was introduced as Arkansas’ new coach, he turned it into a Razorback red pep rally and it all came natural to him.
One adjustment he will have to make: This is the first school he has been at where basketball is second to football in popularity and raising funds.
Kentucky football improved while he was there, and he groused once about how much money Kentucky was spending on football.
UMass has never been a football school. Memphis wasn’t while Calipari was there.
At least for now, Razorback football is the cash cow.
Calipari’s move from Kentucky to Arkansas was unexpected by most. Still is somewhat. It still seems strange to watch him in red after seeing him in blue for the previous 24 years, including his nine at Memphis.
Tipton took nearly a year to write his autobiography after retiring prior to the 2018 season. He discloses near the end of the book that perhaps Calipari’s decision to move 620 miles west had more to do with Calipari than just the Wildcats’ poor performance in the prior few seasons.
It seems that a lot of supporters were never fond of the one-and-done strategy that Calipari popularized. When Calipari declared in 2010 that the first round of the NCAA Tournament had produced the greatest day in Kentucky basketball history, former players took issue.
All-Americans like Dan Issel and Kyle Macy, as well as numerous other former UK players who believed a national championship held greater significance than the NBA Draft, felt betrayed.
It seems that these guys continued to believe it even after Calipari guided Kentucky to the 2012 NCAA title.
But maybe the biggest error made by Calipari was that he guided Kentucky to four Final Fours and three Elite Eights in his first ten seasons. That can cause some irrational expectations.
For followers of college basketball, particularly those in the Big Blue Nation, “Deja Blue” is a worthwhile read.
