John Calipari’s return to Kentucky will be a strange one | Lexington Herald Leader
Forty-three weeks to the day that John Calipari met Hunter Yurachek in a Phoenix hotel room, the former Kentucky basketball coach will return to the place he called home for 15 years, set to square off with the program he led to the stratosphere of the sport, and play the starring role in one more surreal scene inside Rupp Arena.
The home of the Wildcats has seen so many of those in recent months, all of them set in motion back in April, on the other side of the country, where Calipari made a decision that shocked the college basketball world.
Of the strange scenes that followed, none will be stranger than the one Saturday night in Rupp, where Calipari will walk onto the court — likely wearing red instead of accents of blue — and lead his Arkansas Razorbacks in a game against Kentucky.
It all started on April 5 of last year, 15 days after Calipari’s Wildcats lost to Oakland in another NCAA Tournament stunner, on the eve of the Final Four.
By the time the Kentucky coach agreed to meet with Yurachek — the athletics director at Arkansas who was searching for a new men’s basketball coach — at the site of the national semifinals, UK AD Mitch Barnhart had already confirmed that Calipari would be back in Lexington for a 16th season.
But the conversation between Calipari and Yurachek evolved from an advising session on who should be the next leader of the Razorbacks to an offer for the Wildcats coach to take the job himself. By the end of the weekend, he had agreed to do just that.
One week after Calipari left Kentucky for its SEC rival, Rupp Arena hosted its first strange event in the aftermath of that departure.
The hiring of Mark Pope — a former UK player — as the new coach of the Wildcats was met with shock at first. The Wildcats’ fan base came around quickly enough, and by the time Pope was ready to reintroduce himself to Big Blue Nation on a Sunday afternoon in Rupp, the response was overwhelming.
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