Rick Pitino and John Calipari made sure not to provide any extra bulletin board material on Friday, but the pair of Hall of Fame coaches, who will meet Saturday when No. 2-seeded St. John’s takes on No. 10 seed Arkansas with a ticket to the Sweet 16 on the line, were brutally honest when asked about their relationship.
“We don’t know each other’s wives or children. We’re not really close friends,” said Pitino, who is the first coach to take six different schools to the NCAA Tournament. “At a very young age, I knew him well when he was in Coraopolis, playing in Moon Township. I knew him well back then, but I don’t think we have been to dinner one time in our lifetime.
“We’re both Italian, we both love the game. I think that’s where the similarities end.”
While the two coaches might not be best friends, they are the only two coaches in NCAA Men’s Basketball history to take three different teams to the Final Four. They each have two wins against each other in NCAA Tournament showdowns, and this could be their final encounter in the Big Dance to determine who takes the all-time series.
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It’s a script so surreal that Hollywood writers would have sent it back to the drawing board for edits to make it more believable. St. John’s and Arkansas? Coached by Pitino and Calipari? It’s the ultimate March Madness gift of drama from the basketball gods to have the two active winningest coaches in the sport meeting again on Saturday.
Five years ago, all signs pointed to Pitino’s time in college basketball being over when he was in Greece coaching Panathinaikos after getting fired from Louisville due to an FBI investigation into allegations of bribery in college basketball. The fact he’s sitting as the head coach of a St. John’s team that has rewritten program history this year is pretty remarkable, so much so that he admits to this being the most surprising season of his 38-year head coaching career.
On the other side is Calipari, who shocked the college basketball world last year when he left Lexington for Fayetteville. There never appeared to be a world imaginable that Calipari would leave Kentucky for somewhere else, but recent years of NCAA Tournament downfalls led to the change in destination.
A combined 1,758 victories, 13 Final Fours, three national championships, 29 conference tournament titles, and countless NBA players.
While the two won’t admit that they’re rivals, there’s too much history for them not to be. In 2016, Calipari made a statement on a radio show that coaches should be aware of what happens with their team on campus, later backtracking and saying it wasn’t about a Louisville scandal. When Pitino took the St. John’s job, he came out and said that he wanted to break away from Calipari and become the only coach to reach the Final Four with four different schools. He also said earlier this week that the only coach he’s considered a rival was Jim Calhoun.
“You know, he’s on Chapter 2 of his new book, and we’re on Chapter 1,” Calipari said. “As a matter of fact, we’re probably on the first few pages of the chapter. It’s both of us writing another story and being able to come back here.”
The book about this rivalry, originating out of a passion to win titles coupled with the Bluegrass rivalry and a couple of larger-than-life Italian personalities, actually started at Howard Garfinkel’s legendary basketball camps in the late 1970s.
“He’s much older than me, but we started in that camp and I have always looked up to him because when I was a camper he was a counselor,” Calipari said. “When I became a counselor, he was a speaker. He was there with Chuck Daly and Hubie Brown and I could go on and on.
“Everywhere he’s been, he’s made a difference. I will study what he’s doing. I always do. But there’s the formula, whether it’s me or him or another coach, the relationship with the kids to get them to play hard and play with a winning attitude. That’s something he’s always done. Again, understand I don’t know how long he was at Louisville when I was at Kentucky, but you’re not going to be friends when you’ve got those two jobs.”
As for Saturday’s second-round game, Arkansas comes in having won six of its last eight games with Johnell Davis, Trevon Brazile and DJ Wagner in sync, while big man Jonas Aidoo had 22 points in the first-round win over Kansas. Leading scorer Adou Thiero, who has missed the last seven games, practiced Friday, leading Calipari to describe him as a “big maybe” to be available.
On the other end, St. John’s has relied on the nation’s top-ranked defense and a red-hot guard in RJ Luis. Avoiding a slow start – which has been a theme for this team – has to be at the top of their minds if they are going to advance to San Francisco.
Pitino made note that he and Calipari aren’t deciding the game on the court.
“I don’t go against coaches, I go against teams,” Pitino said of Calipari. “He doesn’t have to worry about me. My jump shot is long gone. He’s gotta prepare for our team, we’ve gotta prepare for his players. John and I don’t play one-on-one anymore.”
The entertainment value of the two at the podium adds to the fervor of the matchup. Whether they say they want to be the focus or not, both coaches have never been shy of the spotlight, and it’s as bright as ever on Saturday.
“We’re all going to be judged 50 years from now on what we did and how we did it, but I hope years from now people will say that we both got our teams to play hard at a competitive level,” Calipari said. “Do we do it differently? Yeah, I guess. I am who I am. Like it or not, this is who I am and how I deal with kids. We’re all different with that.”
Pitino told his St. John’s team back in October that it was “time to get on Broadway and stay on Broadway.”
On Saturday, another chapter gets written in Providence, potentially the final one between Pitino and Calipari.
And the two main characters meeting under these circumstances, in this situation, with a trip to the Sweet 16 on the line, epitomizes March Madness – in every way.
John Fanta is a national college basketball broadcaster and writer for FOX Sports. He covers the sport in a variety of capacities, from calling games on FS1 to serving as lead host on the BIG EAST Digital Network to providing commentary on The Field of 68 Media Network. Follow him at @John_Fanta.
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