From beginning to end, John Calipari’s return to Rupp Arena was a surreal experience
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Game day: Arkansas 89, No. 12 Kentucky 79
Click below for more of the Herald-Leader and Kentucky.com’s coverage of Saturday night’s men’s basketball game between Kentucky and Arkansas in Rupp Arena.
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Everything in Rupp Arena seemed out of place on Saturday night.
And by the time the night was finished — an hours-long cascade of familiar faces in unfamiliar places, one bizarre experience after the next — the strangest sight of all might have been the one staring back from the scoreboard at everyone left in the building.
The numbers there seemed just as illogical as everything else that had happened in Rupp on this night. Arkansas 89, Kentucky 79, they said. Twelve hours earlier, few would have believed it. Twelve months earlier, no one would have believed it. Not that it would happen like this, at least.
It certainly wouldn’t have made any sense to those who played the biggest roles Saturday night.
Not long after the buzzer ended and the celebration in the visiting locker room subsided, Adou Thiero and D.J. Wagner made the short walk to the podium in the Rupp press conference room.
Thiero approached the raised stage from the right side, stopped, and expressed his confusion.
“There’s no stairs,” he exclaimed.
A UK Athletics official that had been following behind assured Thiero that there were, in fact, stairs. They were just on the other side of the stage. He and Wagner awkwardly walked around a curtain, came out on that other side, and walked up those stairs to answer questions.
About 20 minutes later, John Calipari had just finished up his postgame remarks. He got up from that same table, shuffled toward those same stairs, glanced at the door at the bottom of the descent and turned to an Arkansas staffer.
“I’m used to going in that door,” the 65-year-old coach said with a grin. “I can’t go in that door.”
That’s the door that leads to the UK locker room. That’s the locker room that Calipari commanded for 15 years before leaving Kentucky for Arkansas last April. It’s the locker room where Thiero spent the past two seasons. It’s the locker room where Wagner prepared for every home game as a college freshman.
Thiero and Wagner lost their way to the postgame podium because they’d never been that way before. Kentucky’s players do their interviews in another part of the backstage area at Rupp.
Thiero and Wagner are no longer Kentucky players. Calipari is no longer the Wildcats’ coach.
A whole bunch of folks wearing Razorback red Saturday night looked lost before the game began.
At 6:56 p.m. EST, the first of the Arkansas contingent stepped foot on the Rupp Arena court. It was Brad Calipari, the coach’s son who spent some of his childhood in Lexington, committed to the Cats as a walk-on, came back as a graduate assistant and is now on his father’s staff in Fayetteville.
The younger Calipari spotted a familiar face across the court, smiled and headed that direction.
On that side of the court sat the UK students who had basically forced their way into the building a good hour before their usual entrance time. The scene outside Rupp had been so hectic — the line to get in so out of sorts — that officials just decided to open the gates early and let ’em in. Some had camped out overnight.
As soon as those students saw the coach’s son, they let him have it.
“Boooo!” was the response to Brad strolling across the Rupp court.
At 7:07 p.m., another odd sight.
This time it was Tyler Ulis who came walking out of the visitors’ tunnel. Ulis — one of the most beloved Kentucky players in memory — was wearing a red shirt with a gray Razorbacks logo.
The former All-America point guard retained the same steely focus that made him such a deadly playmaker on that Rupp Arena court. Ulis stared straight ahead as he entered the arena. He didn’t get the same treatment from the UK students, perhaps his status as a Kentucky legend shielding him from the jeers.
At 7:25 p.m., Zvonimir Ivisic — a sensation on Calipari’s final Kentucky team — emerged. He stepped onto the court with a nervous grin. Thiero walked out alongside him.
“Boooo!” cried the student section.
At 7:35 p.m., Wagner jogged through the tunnel and hit a Kentucky fan near the front row with a high-five before those on the other side of the court caught sight of him. As soon as they did?
“Boooo!” they screamed.
On Friday night, the Razorbacks had the building all to themselves. Calipari and his players did some shooting and did some talking. No fans in the stands.
“I kind of got my emotions out of the way last night when we came in,” Thiero said. “Just taking a look at everything, embracing everything, like, ‘Damn, a lot of memories was made here.’”
Thiero said that experience made the one of actually playing Saturday easier. Wagner agreed.
“I felt a lot of emotions yesterday, just walking back in the gym for the first time, being on the other side, being on a different team. You know, like shooting around as a different team,” he said. “So it kind of felt, like, a little weird.”
Everything about this night was weird.
At 7:54 p.m., it was Kenny Payne who came walking in. A big smile on his face, the longtime Kentucky assistant — who returned to Rupp two years ago as Louisville’s head coach and came back Saturday as a member of Calipari’s staff once again — shook hands with old friends and acquaintances standing around the court.
Payne sat on the visiting bench for a few minutes — spent most of that time talking to a longtime UK staff member — and then retreated back to the locker room.
At 8:13 p.m. came the arrival of Arkansas athletics director Hunter Yurachek, the man who hired Calipari away from Kentucky last April, a move that shocked all of college basketball. Tipoff was still nearly an hour away, and that section looking down on the baseline in the upper level of Rupp — the one that was often empty during Calipari’s final seasons at UK — was already full.
At 8:30 p.m., photographers and videographers crowded around that visitors’ tunnel. Thousands of other eyes were fixed on that same spot.
At 8:34 p.m., Kentucky’s players emerged from the tunnel on the other side of the arena. The building was completely filled by that point. The fans erupted at the sight of the Wildcats, who had to tell those trying to get a shot of Calipari’s arrival to get out of the way so they could go through their final warm-ups.
At 8:37 p.m., Kareem Watkins — a longtime UK walk-on and graduate of the university — led the Razorbacks out to the court for their layup line. The boos rained down on them.
At 8:43 p.m., shouts of “Tubby!” filled the area around the Arkansas bench. Sure enough, former UK coach Tubby Smith was there, smiling and shaking hands with everyone he passed on the way to his seat.
At 8:49 p.m., Everett McCorvey — the director of UK Opera Theatre — sang the opening lines of the national anthem and directed the Rupp Arena crowd in the singing of the rest, a spectacle that never disappoints, one that’s always reserved for one big home game per year.
At 8:55 p.m., the UK pregame hype video came to an end with words from Kentucky’s new coach, Mark Pope — the man who replaced Calipari — telling the crowd that there was no place in college basketball like this one. The fans were in a frenzy.
At 8:56 p.m., Watkins led the Razorbacks onto the court for the final time.
And then, the man that everyone had come to see — whether they’d admit it or not — arrived.
Calipari walked out of that tunnel, took a look at what was waiting for him on the court, and stepped onto the floor with a comedic expression on his face. He was smiling, one eyebrow raised so high he looked like a cartoon character getting ready to coach a basketball game.
And some of those who had been waiting all that time did what they had been waiting to do.
A chorus of boos met Calipari as he walked onto the court. Some dressed in blue clapped for the former Kentucky coach, but boos are louder than polite applause, and these boos were audible from all corners of Rupp Arena.
Calipari kept smiling as he shook hands with UK’s assistants and greeted Arkansas supporters sitting behind his bench. At 9 p.m., Pope showed up to raucous applause. The two coaches who have spent the past several months — and especially the past few days — praising each other embraced warmly at center court, spoke for about five seconds and parted ways.
And a little more than two hours later, Calipari’s team came out on top.
The Hall of Fame coach said he had pulled his former UK players aside leading up to the game to check on their mental state heading into it.
“Are you guys OK?” he asked them. “Going back here, you’re gonna be OK?”
“And they all said, ‘We’re fine, Coach. We’re worried about you,’” Calipari recalled.
As soon as the game started, that smile faded and the Calipari that this crowd had come to know and mostly love over the previous 15 years made his appearance. He was on the refs. He was on the court. At one point, Wagner walked over to steer him away from an official, the 19-year-old intervening in an attempt to calm down his coach.
Was Calipari more amped up for this one than normal? Wagner smiled.
“Nah, that’s how he is every game,” he said, still smiling, as Thiero started laughing out loud next to him. “He tells us that in the game, sometimes, if you feel like he’s going too crazy, come over here and tell him. Like, ‘Calm down, Coach. You good.’ So that’s just something I was just telling him, like, ‘Just calm down. Like, you good. It’s gonna be good.’”
Thiero was good. He scored 21 points and pulled down eight rebounds. Wagner was good: 17 points and a season-high eight assists, with just one turnover. Ivisic was good, too, adding 14 points and hitting four 3-pointers, some of those stopping UK in its tracks as the Cats attempted to come back in the second half.
Afterward, Calipari was good, too. His Arkansas team limped into Rupp Arena with a 1-6 record in SEC play. The Razorbacks were double-digit underdogs against the Wildcats.
“We needed to win a game, so it didn’t matter who it was against,” Calipari said.
The UK coach repeated that it was “a privilege and an honor” to coach the Wildcats for 15 years. He thanked the fans for their support and the families of players for entrusting their sons to him over that time. He said he returned to the postgame locker room with 190 text messages waiting for him. He assumed that many of those were from former Wildcats.
“Not that they’re ever going to root against Kentucky,” he said. “They went to school here. But they also have a relationship with me. But the only emotion I had was we got to win the game.”
After the buzzer sounded and the postgame handshakes were complete, Calipari made a beeline for that visitors’ tunnel. He jogged off the floor, security around him, not glancing up at those fans in the stands. He was expressionless. No smile on his face this time, despite the victory.
There were plenty of smiles on the faces that followed him out. Payne and Ulis and the players who’d played for both teams in this rivalry were grinning from ear to ear. If there were any boos on the way out, they weren’t loud. Most of the UK fans looked on in stunned silence.
“We miss you Tyler!” yelled one as Ulis disappeared down the tunnel.
Once it was all settled, Calipari looked back on the days when he started at Kentucky. The SEC was in a pitiful state. Top to bottom, the conference was down. Back then, the coach took advantage of the situation. The Cats won their first 54 games on the Rupp court with Calipari as coach. Pope won his first 11 before Alabama ended that two weeks ago. The loss to Arkansas makes it two defeats in a row in the building where Pope went 25-1 as a player.
“This is like maybe the best league — you ready for this? — ever. Ever,” Calipari said. “And that’s why I’m saying: what Kentucky is doing and how they’re doing it — Mark Pope is doing a great job. Not a good job. A great job. And what they’re doing … we kind of got ’em today. Just move on to the next game. This is one game. And if anybody takes it more than that, you’re crazy. It’s one game.”
Pope and his players have been taking the one-game-at-a-time approach to this season, and they’ve been quick to point out that all of these games count the same. Pope has said he and his team approach them all in the same way.
After Saturday night’s loss, he acknowledged that this one was a little different.
“My guys were hurt. My guys are really hurt in the locker room,” Pope said. “They know what this building means. They know what this jersey means. They know. They see everything and hear everything, and they know what matters. And they’re getting an up-close look at how much it means to the people they’re playing for.
“And so I have a locker room that’s as down tonight — not down,” he corrected himself. “Down is not the right word. As hurt as we have (been) all season long.”
Pope said he and his players talked afterward about how, especially in this league, they’d have to move on from this one quickly and focus on the next one. In this case, a trip to Oxford on Tuesday night to play No. 23 Ole Miss, which gave top-ranked Auburn a game earlier Saturday.
Pope reiterated it was “super painful” to be on the losing end of this particular game, and he stated the obvious regarding the night as a whole.
“You know, if there’s anything about tonight, it was just, like, all kinds of complicated, conflicting, upside down, twisted up feelings with everybody in BBN,” Pope said of the weird scene in Rupp.
He didn’t make an excuse out of it, but Pope said these Cats would need to find their way without starting point guard Lamont Butler, the “heart and soul” of this team — sidelined again due to injury with no return date in sight. His backup, Kerr Kriisa, remains out with a broken foot. Starting power forward Andrew Carr played after missing most of the last two games to injury, but he was still limited.
Pope’s team is trying to find its way through those setbacks. Younger players are growing into new roles. Older players are having to figure out how to excel in different ones. And these Cats are trying to do it in this SEC, a league that had 13 of its teams projected to make the NCAA Tournament when Saturday’s games began. Arkansas was not one of those teams, but the Razorbacks played like one Saturday night.
It won’t be any weirder after this. But it won’t be any easier either.
“This is a journey for us,” Pope said. “This is not a coronation. This is a journey. And we’re going to earn our way through it. And there’s going to be some real pain on the way. And certainly, for my guys, tonight was super painful.”
This story was originally published February 2, 2025 at 3:08 AM.
