Another Greenberg Classic

BYLINE: ALAN GREENBERG; Courant Staff Writer

SECTION: SPORTS; Pg. C1

LENGTH: 3435 words

DATELINE: AMHERST, Mass. –

John Calipari was 29 years old and had no head coaching experience when he was hired to be the men’s basketball coach at the University of Massachusetts eight years ago. The team hadn’t had a winning season in 10 years. There were no championship banners in the ancient gym rafters, just birds and squirrels. The phones in the basketball office were rotary dial.
Today, UMass (31-1) is again ranked No. 1, and led by Hartford Public High School’s Marcus Camby, is perhaps the most feared team in America. The Minutemen held the No. 1 ranking for nine consecutive weeks earlier this season — the longest time atop the polls since Duke in 1992 — and are six victories from a national title.

Calipari, 37, who assembled this team, is one of the game’s most admired — and resented — coaches.
He has built a dynamic basketball program out of nothing. Strapped to a second-tier conference like the Atlantic 10 — which UMass has won an unprecedented five consecutive times — UMass made a national name for itself because of Calipari’s willingness to play anyone, anytime, anywhere.

Calipari also built the program quickly. He used the quick-fix method, recruiting players other colleges backed away from because they were academic risks. Recruiting analyst Bob Gibbons called Calipari’s methods shrewd.

San Antonio Spurs coach Bob Hill has known Calipari 20 years. They met when the UMass coach was a high school freshman point guard in Moon, Pa., a working class suburb north of Pittsburgh, and Hill was a Pitt assistant. Hill tenderly terms Calipari “the little brother I never had.”

Talking about their friendly one-on-one competitions, Hill smiles broadly and said Calipari “will do whatever it takes to win.”

Hill didn’t hesitate when told that’s exactly how some perceive Calipari’s recruiting methods.

“What’s wrong with that? Isn’t that how most of the successful people in this country have made it? Isn’t that how some of the most famous families built their fortunes? Most people have stopped at nothing to get what they want. That’s the American way.

“It’s also the American way to cut those people down.”

No standard rejections

Many of Calipari’s peers are quick to praise him as one of the game’s best motivators and recruiters. Even his critics ackowledge that his teams win because they play smart and they play hard. And former UMass player Lou Roe, now a rookie with the Detroit Pistons, calls Calipari “the most inspirational person I’ve ever been around.”

Still, some coaches were privately pleased by last season’s Boston Globe story reporting that seven of Calipari’s players, including four starters, were on academic warning or probation for having less than a “C” average. Two of the starters on probation were Camby, then a sophomore, and former Weaver star Michael Williams, then a senior.

Calipari declined to be interviewed for this story. When Calipari turned down The Courant’s initial request via UMass sports information director Bill Strickland — “He thinks you’re going to do a hatchet job on him” — Strickland asked if The Courant would be willing to submit a list of sample questions. The Courant faxed 16 questions ranging from things Calipari had learned from his parents to his reasons for declining to reinstate Williams, whom Calipari had suspended last season. Calipari declined to answer any of the questions.

Michael Hooker, who resigned as UMass president last summer to become president of the University of North Carolina, termed the academic situation of the team “embarrassing.”

To play, practice, and receive an athletic scholarship as a freshman, a prospective recruit must have a 2.0 (C) in his core courses and a 700 SAT. If he lacks either or both, he can be admitted to the school but is ineligible to compete or practice as a freshman. In NCAA parlance, these athletes are known as Proposition 48s.

But ultimately each school sets its own admissions and academic boundaries. UMass admissions director Arlene Cash said she has never rejected an applicant whom the basketball program wanted.

What, Cash was asked, might make an applicant unacceptable to UMass?

“A 1.5 GPA, 450 SATs, bottom 2 percent of the [high school] class,” she said. A perfect SAT is 1,600 and you get 400 just for signing your name.

At UConn,which is also a state university that competes at the highest levels of Division I basketball, recruits are held to a different standard. “If he’s not in the top half of the class, with a 700 SAT and a C [2.0] average, don’t come in my door,” said UConn admissions director Ann Huckenbeck, “and I’ll be backed up all the way up the line.”

UMass Chancellor David Scott makes no apologies for UMass’ liberal admissions standards or the course selections of its men’s basketball players. Camby was on academic probation with a 1.8 grade point average and needed a 2.2 to finish the 1994-95 season. He took 13 credit hours that semester. His courses were Human Development (child development), Afro-American Music I, Public Health, an independent study course in Afro-American History and Golf I.

“If you go to a place like Harvard, they probably have a 95 percent graduation rate, but they’re more selective,” Scott said. “Part of the quality of education isn’t just your student body going in, but your ability to create winners as opposed to selecting predetermined winners.”

Now, the basketball team is successful in the classroom as well as on the court, according to the school. Having beefed up the team’s academic support system since the Globe’s revelations, UMass said eight of 13 players had a 3.0 or above on a 4.0 scale during the last two semesters. One of the players, junior Tyrone Weeks, on probation a year ago, made the Dean’s List with a 3.5, though the school would not reveal his courses. UMass also said that former Philadelphia prep superstar Lari Ketner, who has been forced to sit out his freshman season because he failed to meet the NCAA’s admission standards for a Division I scholarship, has received above a 3.0 in his first semester at the school.

“These supposedly academically at-risk kids,” Strickland said, “are not only getting by, they’re thriving.”

Of seniors who played at least one year for Calipari, 70 percent went on to graduate. The school’s graduation rate is 65 percent. Scott said that many men’s basketball players are like 10 percent of the student body inasmuch as they come from inferior schools and inadequate support systems. Scott, 55, said there is no pressure exerted on Calipari to win. Nor does he believe that Calipari’s program “is out of proportion here.”

Recognizing a potential problem

Bob Gibbons, whose North Carolina-based publication, All Star Sports, is one of the country’s most respected scouting services of high school athletes, said Calipari “knew from the get-go that he wasn’t going to beat the established programs for players.

“He took the road less traveled. He’s a smart basketball coach who beat the system with guys who wouldn’t be admitted into other schools.”

In 1992, Gibbons raised questionsin his newsletter about Calipari’s relationship with AAU coach Wayne Simone of Southington because so many of Simone’s players went to UMass. There were seven. Roe, Camby, Williams, Edgar Padilla and Derek Kellogg were key players on the 1994-95 UMass team. Simone also coached these players in summer tournaments not affiliated with the AAU.

Roe was Calipari’s first real star, and he was eligible as a freshman, to the surprise of many schools, including UConn, which coveted him but backed off because it believed Roe would not qualify for an NCAA Division I scholarship. After several failures, Roe said he scored 700 when he took the SAT in May of his senior year. By that late date, Roe said, many big-time progams lost interest but UMass did not.

“They were big-time schools,” Roe said, “and UMass wasn’t. Simple as that.”

Said Simone: “Other schools were backing off the kids because they didn’t think they were going to qualify. With Lou Roe, UMass said, ‘We’re going to take you if you qualify. We’re going to take you if you don’t qualify. We love you.’ UConn wasn’t doing that. BC wasn’t doing that. Syracuse wasn’t doing that. Calipari isn’t going to miss a trick.”

Roe said the youth of Calipari and under-30 assistants Bill Bayno and James “Bruiser” Flint was key. “Those guys felt like brothers to me,” Roe said. “I felt I could tell them anything. It was like hanging out with your friends.”

Calipari has since distanced himself from Simone. Last season, Simone’s complimentary tickets for Roe’s and Kellogg’s last regular season home game were withdrawn.

The summer tournaments, some underwritten by major sneaker companies, are events in which college recruiters flock to see the best of the blue-chip talent play. But they are bothersome to the NCAA.

“[These tournaments are] something that’s creeping over the college landscape,” said David Berst, who heads the NCAA’s enforcement division. “For some time, we had it isolated to New York, Los Angeles and Chicago. That isn’t the case any longer.

“A number of these people [coaches of teams in summer tournaments] are not the kind of people I would like to have a drink with. Their involvement only seems to be for their own personal gain, or seeking to exploit the celebrity of the prospect for job, money or other recognition.”

Simone said that “people are pushing the kids to go to certain schools, and maybe something changes hands there.”

But he said that was not the case between him and UMass.

“People think there’s obviously something there, that I got something for kids to go there,” Simone said. “The program was bad. The program stunk. They didn’t have anybody. They had playing time [to offer]. They recruited the heck out of those kids.”

Recruiting questions didn’t end once Calipari and Simone parted.

The case of Ketner, the 6-10 center, caused LaSalle to complain to the Atlantic-10 office. Ketner, after orally committing to his hometown school of LaSalle, signed with UMass. Ketner took official paid recruiting visits to LaSalle and Maryland after he had committed to UMass. LaSalle didn’t find out about Ketner’s signing until UMass athletic director Bob Marcum mentioned it to Explorers athletic director Robert Mullen.

Ever the entrepreneur

In the days when UMass basketball was lower than a sunken ship, Calipari never met a microphone or notepad he didn’t like. He’s always been a salesman, whether it was as a youngster, a coach selling the UMass program or convincing a recruit Amherst was the place to play.

Part of Calipari’s charm, friends say, is that he never forgets. “I can introduce him to 1,000 people,” boasts Calipari’s high school coach, Bill Sacco, “and he’d remember 1,000 people’s names. I really thought he’d be a salesman, because he was a great motivator, a great leader.

“He always had a great presence with people, but he never seemed to be under pressure. I’ve seen how he talks to kids. You would fight to go [to UMass] because he never says the wrong thing. And if he says the wrong thing, he says it in a way that you don’t take it as the wrong thing.”

Even as a kid, Calipari was a mover and shaker. His midget league football coach remembers him as a kid “who could talk you ear off without ticking you off.” Calipari’s father, Vince, was a fueler at the Pittsburgh International Airport, who never made more than $16,000 a year while John and his two older sisters were growing up. Their mother, Donna, sold ice cream at the school cafeteria to help the family finances.

Young John was resourceful, irrepressible, and of course, basketball-crazy. While in elementary school, he served as the ballboy for the Moon High varsity, sitting on the bench handing out towels, dressed in his little red V-neck sweater and tie. He was the quintessential gym rat, using a comb to open the door and sneak in after-hours. He was varsity captain and president of the class of 1978. Naturally, he addressed them on graduation day.

Calipari wanted to play Division I basketball, and enrolled at North Carolina-Wilmington, one of the few schools to offer him a Division I scholarship. But he hardly played there, and as a sophomore transferred close to home, to Division II Clarion. He was feisty. He broke his cheekbone but played wearing a wrestler’s mask. But it was his Michael J. Fox entrepreneurial skills, more than his basketball, that caught people’s attention. Calipari ran a basketball camp at his old high school and used the money to buy trailers, which he rented to fellow Clarion students.

“He was money-hungry,” Hill said, “but not in a bad way. John always has a way figured to make extra money. And he never lacked for confidence.”

To the surprise of no one, Calipari majored in marketing. He spent summers marketing himself, schmoozing and networking at Howie Garfinkel’s renowned Five Star basketball camp, where he met Rick Pitino, a UMass alum who later would persuade him to take his current job.

Calipari always seemed to have a knack for doing the right thing. Joe DeGregorio, who coached at Conard and Coventry in the 1960s and was later Calipari’s college coach at Clarion (Pa.) State, recalled how when he and his wife had the Clarion team over for dinner, Calipari was one of the few who always wrote a thank-you note.

Calipari had a year of eligibility left, but bid Clarion goodbye. Those summers at Five Star, impressing the basketball professors while angling for an invitation to the big time, had paid off. At 22, the original eager beaver — Calipari grew up at 888 Beaver Grade Rd. — became Larry Brown’s volunteer assistant at Kansas, where he finished his degree.

He coached the junior varsity and organized the “Little Jayhawks” ball-handling squad that entertained at halftime. At the beginning, he served the varsity players their meals. And he helped recruit. He stayed three seasons, leaving for Pitt in 1985.

Calipari came away with a bride, Ellen Higgins, a secretary in the KU athletic business office. She had formerly been married to Kansas and Los Angeles Rams football star Nolan Cromwell.

“He chased her,” said Hill, who was also a KU assistant. “He’d come into the office every morning and sit there figuring out an excuse to go over there.”

Calipari hasn’t forgotten the folks back home. He stays in touch with his former coaches, inviting them on his radio show or joining them for dinner when he returns to the Pittsburgh area, enjoying that they can bask in his reflected glory.

But now that Calipari spends as much time on Good Morning, America as he does in Moon Township, Hill cautions him about “false friends and true enemies.”

And Calipari’s rapid rise, combined with his youth, quick tongue and sideline behavior that, not unlike some of his peers, often resembles that of an overtired 2 year old, has only served to ratchet up the resentment.

Temple coach John Chaney, later saying that he was incensed over Calipari’s attempts to lobby the officials, was involved in one of the more public and uglier coaching confrontations on Feb. 13, 1994. After the Minutemen had defeated his Owls, Chaney burst into Calipari’s postgame press conference shouting, “I’ll kill you, I’ll kick your butt.” Chaney had to be restrained.

Along with the resentment from outsiders comes affection from his players.

“He was the type of guy, by the time he finished talking to you, you wanted to get up and work your butt off,” Roe said. “He’s the main reason I became the player I was at UMass. When I had doubts, he made me believe. He made dreams seem like reality.”

Success benefits the university

College basketball is big business, because a winning program can mean millions of dollars to a school in ticket sales, NCAA Tournament money and alumni donations.Scott, the UMass chancellor, said private fund-raising increased from $12 million in 1994 to $14 million in 1995. Even more dramatic was the growth of UMass alumni clubs, from eight in 1994 to 59 today. Scott ascribes much of the growth to the success of men’s basketball.

Ultimately, it can even raise admission standards, as the national publicity from a winning program encourages more and better students to apply. Scott said out-of-state applications have increased by more than 40 percent in the past two years.

“There is no doubt being ranked No. 1 has brought enormous visibility to UMass,” Hooker said by phone from North Carolina. “And that’s what UMass needed. Student applications had fallen off, as had fund-raising. Basketball has been of incalculable value to UMass.”

It has also made the coach rich. Calipari, who signed on for a $63,000 base salary in 1988, now makes nearly $1 million a year, all things considered. Besides big-time coaching staples such as his TV and radio shows, sneaker contract and summer basketball camp, Calipari also has a clothing store, Coach Cal’s Closet. He also is guaranteed a percentage of UMass’ gate receipts from any regular season game of his choice each season, a highly unusual perk. This season Calipari chose the Great Eight game at Auburn Hills, Mich., against Kentucky.

Calipari’s first UMass team went 10-18 and lost by 19 to Florida Tech. Two of his players were arrested for breaking and entering. Calipari dismissed them, but soon came Jim McCoy from Pittsburgh, Tony Barbee from Indianapolis and Harper Williams from Bridgeport. Then came the Camby crew, and the 1993 opening of the 9,493 seat Mullins Center. Instead of birds and squirrels, those rafters hold NCAA banners.

Now the Minutemen play tough games for a national ranking, not just acceptance. And now, they win those games. They began the 1994-95 season by crushing defending national champion Arkansas at Springfield in the Tip-Off Classic. Arkansas went on to lose to UCLA in the 1995 NCAA final and UMass went to the Final Eight, before losing to Bryant “Big Country” Reeves and Oklahoma State.

Critics may sneer at the Atlantic 10, but nobody sneers at Kentucky, Florida, Wake Forest, Georgia Tech, Syracuse, Memphis State and Louisville, non- conference opponents UMass has beaten this season.

Donta Bright, a senior from Baltimore, was a consensus first-team high school All-American. But except for Bright, whose failure to be eligible as a freshman because of a sub-700 SAT score forced some schools to stop recruiting him — the Atlantic Coast Conference, for example, does not recruit Prop 48s — Calipari has won without landing the bluest of blue-chip recruits.

But that is changing.

Besides Ketner, who should be Camby’s replacement assuming the junior turns pro after this season, more help is on the way. According to Gibbons, UMass’ latest recruiting class is its deepest. It also may be one of the best in the country.

It includes Ajmal Basit, a 6-9 power forward from New York City who played for Bobby Hurley’s father at St. Anthony’s; Mike Babul, a 6-6 small forward from North Attleboro, Mass. who was coveted by UConn and North Carolina; Chris Kirkland, a 6-6 forward from McKees Rocks, Pa.; Winston Smith, a 6-5 swingman from Elizabeth, N.J.; and Monte Mack, a 6-1 guard from Boston. Their academic status will not be available for a few weeks, according to UMass.

Calipari and UMass may not have the reputation of basketball’s royals, the Kentuckys, North Carolinas and UCLAs, but they’re not just a regional story any more.

Six years ago, in a game against George Washington, when his program was still a lot closer to nowheresville than the Final Four, Calipari ripped off his suitcoat and unbuttoned half his shirt before the officials called a technical foul. On Feb. 24 against GW, UMass’ only loss of the season, the coach of the nation’s No. 1 team had only to raise his voice and arms to get two quick technicals and be ejected for the first time in his career.

Even when his gestures are small, John Calipari has gotten too big to ignore. He dresses for success. Coat-and-tie when UMass appears on ESPN, turtleneck and slacks when it’s on ESPN2. Calipari, a millionaire, donated $20,000 to the UMass library, which Hooker, his former boss, was quick and proud to point out during a brief interview.

“That shows his commitment,” Hooker said.

Simone is more cynical.