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John Calipari acknowledges possibility of getting booed in return to Rupp Arena
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John Calipari was the head coach at Kentucky for a decade and a half, and he won a lot of games there and even captured a national championship in 2012.
That’s all well and good, but then there’s the flip side. There’s the way Calipari suddenly left Kentucky after last season and then the very next day took the coaching job at Arkansas, an SEC rival. That brings us to Saturday night, when the 65-year-old Calipari will bring his Razorbacks to Rupp Arena for a primetime showdown on ESPN.
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Tip-off will be at 9 p.m. ET, and then the game will go on between the struggling Hogs and the 12th-ranked Wildcats, who snapped a 2-game losing streak on Tuesday night with a gutsy road victory over Tennessee. But if there’s a situation where the actual game itself will take a backseat, it’s on Saturday night, because the real show will be what kind of reception Calipari receives from those passionate Big Blue fans.
Calipari, who went 410-123 from 2009-24 in Lexington, knows all those victories and that 1 national title can’t save him from a possible rude welcoming back to Rupp Arena. And he said he’s ready for whatever comes his way on Saturday night.
“You get booed. I’ve done this so long. I tell you I got bazooka holes in my body. So, when you shoot arrows, it doesn’t even hit skin, it just goes through one of those bazooka holes,” Calipari told Hogs Plus on Wednesday.
Sometime before tip-off on Saturday night, we’ll know exactly how Calipari was received by Big Blue Nation. And then the actual game will start.
Cory Nightingale, a former sportswriter and sports editor at the Miami Herald and Palm Beach Post, is a South Florida-based freelance writer who covers Alabama for SaturdayDownSouth.com.
