The rivalry between Kentucky and Louisville never gets old, especially with high-profile coaches like Rick Pitino and John Calipari now leading the signature programs at each university. Recent troubles for Pitino and Louisville have not gone unnoticed by those in Lexington, but Calipari tried to suggest today recent comments by him were not intended to be a shot at his counterpart in Louisville.
“The stuff is blown up more than it should be, and if he took it wrong, I apologize,” Calipari said Thursday during a radio interview with ESPN’s Mike & Mike morning program. Calipari was setting the record straight over comments he made about coaches needing to be held accountable for on-campus issues.
From Calipari’s earlier interview on the Mike Lupica Show, which sparked this conversation;
“All I can tell you is this: If it happens on your campus and it happens with your assistants and those people, you probably have a good idea of what’s going on,” Calipari said. “It happens back in their hometown, it happens back with their family … there’s no way you can know. You just can’t know. All I can say is most coaches have an idea if it happened on their campus. You might not be the first to know about it but you eventually hear about it.”
Today, as he makes his way through the offseason carwash in Bristol, Calipari refined his statement to calm things down a bit in the state of Kentucky.
“The thing I said specifically, about Louisville, if it happened, it’s not good [for] any of us and it’s not good for college basketball,” Calipari said. “I said: ‘I don’t think their coach knew. I just can’t believe that,’ and that’s what I said. And I haven’t changed my opinion of that.”
Calipari went on to suggest the whole story has been exaggerated and blown out of proportion, which tends to happen with anything said by a major figure in the sport, especially when recent headlines at a rival have been opening the doors for criticisms. Deep down inside though, you just have to have a sense Calipari was taking a shot at his rivals. And honestly, who would really blame him for that?
[ESPN]
