In case it wasn’t obvious already, John Calipari knows how to tell people what they like to hear. If you’re a top-ten basketball talent and you want someone to tell you you’ll be a lottery pick with the right coaching, he can do that. If your stud forward wants to meet Jay-Z or Drake, he can reasonably promise that, as well.
If you’re a fan of the Kentucky Wildcats, he’ll give you goosebumps from the podium, as well.
At Kentucky’s Big Blue Madness event, Calipari stood on a stage that looked like something out of America’s Got Talent, and crooned the words every Wildcats fan wants to hear: “We don’t just play college basketball, we are college basketball. As you know, we are everyone’s Super Bowl.”
Now, there might be a few other programs in the country who can claim to be Super Bowl caliber opponents, and claiming title to all of the sport’s charms is hubris in the extreme, but Calipari has always been a showman. If cranking up the love inside Rupp equals cranking up the hate outside of Lexington, he’ll take that heat.
Midnight Madness events are full of goofy stunts, as we’ve seen plenty of times already today. Cal might not dance, he might not get shot out of a cannon, and he might not jump out of a perfectly good airplane, but he doesn’t have to. The man brings the electricity to the building without stunts.
Want to see his whole revival tent speech? UKAthletics.com has it:
