UK notebook: Calipari restoring players' swagger

Calipari gives 'beat-down' players jolt of confidence

By Jerry Tipton / Herald-Leader Staff Writer

Jerry Tipton

After two seasons of boot camps, bleeding feet, broken noses, concussions and a bullheaded emphasis on toughness, Kentucky basketball enjoys a renaissance.

New coach John Calipari intentionally limited last week's first four-at-a-time workouts so as not to overtax the players physically or mentally.

"I'm not trying to beat these guys down," Calipari said Saturday after what he called an "ad-lib talk" to kick off a tour to promote his new book, Bounce Back. "What I'm trying to do is build them up. I'm trying to get them to dream. I want them to think outside of where they thought the last couple years, that they can do special things if they choose to do it."

Calipari never mentioned his predecessor, Billy Gillispie, who employed an unrelenting — to be kind, let's call it — tough love. But the new coach's message seemed clear: The holdover players lacked a kind of ambition born of confidence.

An audience of about 300 alumni at UK's Student Center heard Calipari use one of his favorite lines: The heralded freshmen think they "poop ice cream."

Then the new UK coach added, "They think they're going to win every game. We have to get the returning players to dream big again and dream like Kentucky players have always dreamed.

"They seem a little beat down."

Not that Calipari is all sweetness and light. He noted how he made changes to the team weight room in the Craft Center. He set an all-business tone by moving the wimpy treadmills across the hall to what had been a player's lounge.

"The weight room is the weight room," Calipari said. "It's not a cardio room. When you're in that weight room, I want you to lift like you're a football player."

Speaking of overcoming adversity and discouragement, Calipari's book, Bounce Back, advises and encourages readers in dealing with life's setbacks. Calipari made it sound like a mid-life crisis inspired the book.

"It's a real chance to say, 'Can you make a real difference in people's lives?'" he said. "I feel it when I'm coaching basketball. That's why I love what I do. But that's 100 players in my lifetime. I'm 50. What if it becomes 100,000 because of the book? ... Hopefully a lot of good can come from this."

Calipari started the process by handwriting 200 pages. "That's your coach," he told the audience. "I'm a little nuts."

Given the boundless enthusiasm surrounding the new coach, it sounded cuckoo to hear him predict plenty of problems this upcoming season: player jealousy, outside influences, injuries ...

"All of a sudden, they write we got the wrong guy for the job," Calipari said of the media.

But having learned to handle past adversities, he said he's ready to follow his book's advice.

"Bounce backs never end," he said.

But Calipari acknowledged a limit to his ability to handle criticism.

"If people crush this book, it will crush me," he said. "It really was a book to give back. I just hope it helps."

Tough to swallow

Before the season, the NCAA ruled Derrick Rose eligible to play. After the season, the NCAA changed its mind and punished Memphis for playing an ineligible player.

How can the NCAA punish Memphis for its own mistake? That's a reasonable question.

As NCAA spokesman Chuck Wynne explained it, the Memphis case was unusual only in the attention it drew even though the penalty — removing or "vacating" the Tigers' record 38 victories in the 2007-08 season and a Final Four appearance — caused critics to cry foul.

The NCAA orders programs to vacate victories "from time to time," Wynne said, particularly in sports that use foreign-born players. For instance, after being ruled eligible, a player is subsequently found to have played in a professional league in a foreign country, he said.

Eligibility depends on two factors: academic standards and amateur status.

If a players fails in either area, the NCAA can act retroactively.

"One of the remedies is you vacate the games," Wynne said. "So it's not unheard of. It's not unprecedented."