Relationships at the forefront for John Calipari
New Arkansas head coach John Calipari's journey from Lexington, Kentucky, and the Wildcats to Fayetteville and the Razorbacks can be attributed mostly to relationships.
A friendship with John Tyson — the billionaire heir to the Tyson Foods empire — sparked the initial conversation between Calipari and Arkansas Athletics Director Hunter Yurachek during the coaching search process.
"(Tyson) said, ‘You need to talk to my AD while you're in Phoenix. He’s in Phoenix,'" Calipari said Wednesday. "What? Well, tell him to call me and I’ll meet him tomorrow. You want me to talk about candidates? I didn’t even know … And we met for about an hour-and-a-half, maybe less than that. Part of the time we talked about other people. Then he said, ‘I know that you think this is a great job. Why not you?’ Why not me? ‘Yeah, why not you?’"
If that conversation sounds somewhat familiar, it's because Calipari said in the past that it was the same back-and-forth he had with the late former Arkansas Athletics Director Frank Broyles that almost caused him to leave Memphis in 2007 to take over in Fayetteville.
He declined Broyles' offer, and said his reasoning was because of the players in his program. There wasn't a transfer portal at that time and he didn't want to leave his team ahead of a run that would turn out to end in Calipari's lone national championship.
"Back then, you had players that were there to play for you, to be with you," Calipari said. "You were helping to groom them to get ready for what their future was. And if you left, they were stuck there. They couldn’t leave.
"They had to play for whoever the coach was. And John (Tyson) got mad at me. I said, ‘I’m not leaving these kids.’ And it was Derrick Rose, Antonio Anderson, Chris Douglas-Roberts, Joey Dorsey, Robert Dozier, Shawn Taggart. A great group. But it wasn’t about winning or losing, it was about leaving them."
With the way the transfer portal works now, the question of staying or leaving isn't a concern for head coaches anymore. The players that Calipari left behind at Kentucky have every chance to leave and find a destination that works for them.
Calipari still had his doubts, though, but that was remedied after he had a conversation with Houston head coach Kelvin Sampson, who reaffirmed his decision to leave Lexington for Fayetteville.
"It was Kelvin that said to me, ‘What are you talking about? They can go wherever they want. They can go wherever they want if you stay. You go or stay. They can go to another school, they can stay, they can go pro, they can do whatever they want now,'" Calipari said. "I said, ‘You know what, I want to be happy with this, and I want to go and say let’s do this together.’ I told Hunter, administrations win championships. Let’s do this together."
That's who John Calipari is. He's a player's coach, and that's what he's attributed his success to.
"I'm always going to be a players first coach," Calipari said. "I'm sorry. It's about the players. For some reason people think you can't really be a coach that wants to win if you're about the players. No, you can do both.
"You can be, 'Every decision I will make will be, 'is this the best decision for these guys?' Not me as a staff, nothing. Is it the best decision for them? When we're doing things, how we're doing things. You saw my team this year. We played totally different. Why? It was the best way for that team to play."
Right now, the Razorbacks have zero scholarship players on the roster, but Calipari said on Wednesday that he feels "confident" it will change soon.
HawgBeat will closely follow all movement regarding Arkansas basketball's roster and coaching staff, so stay tuned to The Trough premium message board for the latest.