Calipari: We are a little light with only couple of guys eligible to return. Billy Richmond and hopefully Chris Massie will be eligible at that point. Antonio Burks may have to sit out this game and Almamy Thiero our freshman, 6’9”, 260, has a leg injury so we’re short about 4 players which makes it kind of tough. We are going to start 2 freshmen, 2 players from a year ago, John Grice and Anthony Rice. John Grice has not played in a year and a half.. He’ll be a senior. A pretty young team with a couple of guys coming off the bench who are pretty young.

Calipari: We were a good defensive team a year ago and historically we’re usually a good defensive team and a good rebounding team. I would hope our offense is a grind-it-out offense. Last year we were the second leading scoring team in our league. We aren’t afraid to play fast, but in the same sense we are the kind of team that can score in bunches. The issue with this year’s team is we don’t just break down players. We need to get good shots for each other. We’ve really got to execute. We’ve got to do it together and that becomes a little bit of an issue because we are so young.

Calipari: In a paragraph, my goal each year is to help each player have a career year and to get those players to play together. It’s simple…. have each guy have a career year and have that group of players play good together. Get them to play off each other.

Calipari: I hope that I’ve inspired some people to overachieve. I would hope that I’ve raised the bar in demanding a whole lot and usually when you demand a whole lot, you get a whole lot. If you accept mediocrity that’s what you are going to get. We want guys that will play at a high level. We want to recruit players off of winning teams, state championship teams because normally they understand that you have to sacrifice and give up a little bit of your game for your team. We always try to recruit good, tough, hard-working players. Cheap players don’t get it done for me. I don’t enjoy coaching them and I don’t think you can win with them. I’m just trying to inspire hard-nosed guys that are sometimes overlooked. I’ve coached two McDonald’s all-Americans in my career, Donte Bright and Dujuan Wagner. That was the only, McDonald’s All-American that we were able to recruit, not that I wouldn’t have recruited others, we just weren’t capable of getting there.

Calipari: For one thing, you’ve got to look back to the family, mother and father, and say what did they believe and how did they raise you? In my family, my grandparents, none of them were high school educated. My parents were high school educated, not college educated. My grandparents came through Ellis Island and the whole idea of our family had always been you could achieve what you want to achieve. Dream big dreams. Don’t be afraid to dream. That’s what this country is about, to the point my mother always thought I was going to be President of the United States. In her mind, why can’t you be that? She wanted for her family that we were all college educated and it happened. We are the first three college educated in our family, my sisters and I. I think it started at UMass where instead of seeing an empty coalmine, you see a gold mine. You approach is as, it can be done, even though it’s never been done. They didn’t dig deep enough and so we took a program that hadn’t graduated anybody in 6 years, 15 percent graduation rate, no African Americans had graduated in 6 years. to an 80 percent graduation rate after 8 years. Eighty percent of our African Americans graduated and we won a whole lot of ball games. Final Fours, couple of Elite Eights, couple of Sweet Sixteens. Now we weren’t able to do it with the McDonald’s All-Americans because we couldn’t get those kind of kids, just one when I was here and one there.

Calipari: Well, it was down. There were people who acted like they have never won. They didn’t know Julius Erving went there. There had been good players and they had won New England championships. But Umass didn’t invest in the program when they went into the Atlantic 10. They invested as though they were still in the Northeast Conference, which they weren’t anymore. So they weren’t able to get it done. The building stunk, the offices stunk, they had a single secretary for men’s and women’s basketball, rotary phones, and we did get the budget increased. It was not increased a lot by Memphis standards, but it was increased a big number to them. We ended up with a total budget of half-million to $600,000. When we went to the Sweet Sixteen our budget was I believe, $800,000. That is when all the other budgets of the Sweet 1Sixteen teams were like $1.2 million and up. So we worked with less but we had a great staff with Bruiser Flint, Billy Bano, John Robic, and later Eddie Schilling. All four became Division I head coaches. I think if you need to surround yourself with great people and I was able to do that at Massachusetts and here I hope I did the same. I’ve got two former players, Derek (Kellogg) and Tony (Barbee). So I think we have a good team of people.

Calipari: The biggest difference is I started with some facilities at Memphis that I didn’t have at Umass. When I started at recruiting Massachusetts, it was a vision that we were selling because there wasn’t yet results. The vision was we were going to compete for a national title, you’d improve as a basketball player, we set goals for individual players, and what we thought they could achieve nationally and within the league. Then later on, we started selling results. “You’re going to win. You’re going to be in the NCAA tournament. You are going to get rings. You could be national player of the year, like Marcus Camby. You can be national player of the year with us.” A player could be freshman of the year with us. I’ve coached 10 years and I’ve had 10 freshman start. This will be my 11th year and two more will start. 12 freshmen in 11 years have started, including two rookies in the NBA. So I’m not afraid to play young guys. Now we are selling results also, but results at a higher level. Developing NBA players, whether you’re a guard, like Dujuan Wagner or whether you’re a big man, like Marcus Camby. I sell that I have been a coach in the NBA, I know what they are looking for because I was there. So it’s more results oriented. I’ve done it versus a vision of “I can do this.” It’s almost like you are investing money. If you look at where you are going to put your money, are you going to look at the guy’s results or what he’s saying to you. So I look at it in those terms.

Calipari: The problem we have is we have too many teams in Conference USA so you can’t really compare them. In Atlantic 10, we had a nice mix. Now we’ve got 14, so it’s just hard to compare them because of the size of the conference. But both conferences had good teams at the teams at the top and some bad teams at the bottom. That’s just how it is.

Calipari: The same programs…… Cincinnati, Marquette, Charlotte, and Louisville. Probably 4 or 5 teams like us. St. Louis is even going to do pretty good. Tulane, TCU, Houston, South Florida will be okay.

Calipari: I want half the guys from the city of Memphis and the other half from around the country. I don’t think you can do anything when you are just recruiting local kids because what happens is, in my opinion not everyone of them can play so now you are getting kids and you are not playing them. It’s better if they go away and get to play. So if you get 4 or 5 that you know are going to play and want to be in your 8 or 9 man rotation, that’s good.

Calipari: Well it’s a little different here in that our building is so big and we have to raise revenue for the rest of the athletic department. So I’ve got to play a lot of home games, kind of like Syracuse. Now I used to get on Jim Boeheim. Well, you can’t play all home at homes because our building seats 20,000. We make $250,000 on a home game. So I can’t go on the road as much. So we are trying to play 5 or 6 good teams this year…. at Syracuse and Villanova, Missouri, Mississippi, Arkansas, and Illinois. That’s a pretty good schedule. Last year was Temple, Tennessee, Alabama, and Iowa. The other 5 or 6 games need to be at home. So we play half of those good games on the road and half of them at home. At Umass it’s a little different. When I was at UMass we’d play 9 or 10 neutral site games and it didn’t matter because we made $100,000 on a home game and on some of the neutral site games we made $100,000. , So playing at home didn’t matter as much. We could go neutral or home and make the same money for the school.

Calipari: I tell them, “coach as though you are going to be a head coach. I want you to look at things down the road. I want you keeping stats. I want you to think about what’s going on here and I want you to throw out suggestions about what you think may be happening.” I told every one of them that. Most of them have done well. They’ve gone out and done a pretty good job. They are all terrific guys and I think they are all terrific coaches. What I’ve always said was, we are here to help each other. You guys are here to help me and I’m here help you. My goal as an assistant under Larry Brown or who ever I worked for was real simple. I wanted them to get coach of the year. I wanted my head coach to be coach of the year, then I did my job. I tell them you’ve got work as though you are head coach and do the best job you can and we’ll help each other.

Calipari: I enjoyed my time there but the organization I was in was like a small business, It was always 30 days from bankruptcy so even though we had the best finish they’d ever had in their division, to that point, second place, and better attendance records than they had a year ago it never seemed like it was on solid footing. We had better numbers, more excitement, more people involved in the program in that organization. We were always 30 days away from bankruptcy so the team was sold. There was new ownership, not the people who hired me and then you had a lock out. We went from, getting to the play-offs in 2 years and we took Chicago to the wire in two games. We had them in Chicago, had them beat, tied ball game, 25 seconds to go, we had the ball. Michael Jordan stole the ball from Kerry Kittles and a dunk ball ended it. But we were right there to the end. What you find out is the strong organizations can withstand being rocked and they just stay strong and move on. But ones that are like small businesses, they evaporate. Everyone that was there when I was there got fired. President got fired, the assistant coaches got fired, the head coach that followed me, they all got fired. What I always say is you either hang together or the Ben Franklin way, then you will hang one by one, which is what we did. But I enjoyed it. I still talked with the guys that played for me like Keith VanHorn. Whether it’s Sherman Douglas, Tony Massingburg who’s working out with us right now. He was let go by the Grizzlies or whether it’s the Sherm Douglas who called me for advice on coaching positions. I still talk to the guys and if I go to the games, I know them and I have a good time. For me, you’ve got a lot of college coaches who just want to get into the NBA because of the money. Give me one hit and I’m retired. I did that already. Now if I went back, it would only be where I thought we could win. Where I could turn around a program, turn around an organization. Get a group of people and say, let’s get this thing, juice it up and let’s get it going. Just like we did in New Jersey. We had the biggest turn around in my second year in the NBA. We had 17 men turnaround. Like I said, attendance was great. There was a lot of good stuff.

Calipari: When you are coaching in college, you teaching life skills. If the guys late or he didn’t do what he’s suppose to do, you throw him out of a practice, you suspend him, and you are teaching life skills. In the NBA, you are trying to win ball games and if a guy is a jerk the same way he is in college, in the pros, you start them, you give them 20 shots a game and you promote him in the papers so you can trade him. You can’t discipline him. If you discipline him no one else wants him.

Calipari: What can I say about Seth? (Voice from across the room “he’s bald”) (Laughing) Yeah, let me just leave it that way, bald.

Calipari: The ultimate competitor.

Calipari: Funny. I mean, these guys are all good coaches. I’m saying that to you and I’m not talking about their coaching but he’s a funny guy, really creative and funny.

Calipari: Can I say a friend? I consider him a dear friend.

Calipari: A really dear friend and I would say that John Robic was the ultimate organizer. He really did a great job for me.

Calipari: I’ve know him for so long. Classy guy.

Calipari: Prosser’s a great coach, very humble about the visibility of what he does. Everybody knows he can really coach but if you talked to him you wouldn’t think he knows anything. He’s a very humble guy but a terrific coach.

Calipari: Another funny guy, I mean he really is. He’s a program changer too. He’s one of those guys that gets in and he’ll change a program in a year.

Calipari: If you talk to me about two guys, I guess there’s three, that if you were to hire one of three guys to change out a college program, all different at a glance, it would be Rick Pitino, Bobby Huggins, and Rick Barnes. Those guys would be the three that I would say if you wanted an immediate gust of wind, more than anybody I know, I’d say those three. Pitino will get it done.

Calipari: Analytical. More capable than analytic.

Calipari: I would say player’s coach.

Calipari: He’s a good one there. He was the promoter. He is one of the original guys You’ve got to promote, you’ve got to sell tickets, you’ve got to fill arenas, you’ve got to recruit, and that started with Lefty Dressell. Well some guys just want to get in the gym and just watch players and watch tape. The job is bigger than that, it’s more than that. Most of these jobs, the program doesn’t sell itself. If you are in a place where it just sells itself and then you go somewhere else and you’ve been an assistant watching a guy where the program sells itself and all that. You go to get a job and you can’t get it done. No one’s coming to the games, you can’t recruit, but you really know X’s and O’s It doesn’t matter. I think Lefty was probably the first coach that understood that,

Calipari: I really like Larry. He’s another guy that I think is a terrific guy and a great staff.

CigarBoy: Ed Schilling?

Calipari: Very grounded human being who can really coach. Unbelievable work ethic. He’s another organized guy. I needed organized people around me.

Calipari: First of all he’s very grounded so he never gets too up or too down. So I think he’ll get that across to his players. He’s also very driven and usually the players will take on your personality. If you are driven kind of person, that’s how they are going to become. If you are laid back that’s what they are going to do. That’s just how it is. He is very driven and very grounded. It think he is truly one of those guys that cares and if you care, you’ll always have guys that want to play for you. You can get on them. You saw me today. I’m getting on guys. The thing is when you care about them you can do that. You can get on guys. If they don’t think you care you can’t say anything, you disconnect, and I think he cares.

Calipari: Well, the only thing is I don’t know how you do the RPI and how accurate it is. We played South Carolina in the NIT final, they were at that time, a 46 and we were like 60 and we were up by 20 with two minutes to go. So how could they be a 46 and we be a 60? For us the problem was our league, the way we schedule, on our side, you can’t win enough games to get in, and on the other side, 17/18 wins is enough to get in. So it’s a problem in that whatever our out of conference schedule is, not only do you have to win some of those games, those teams have to play well after you’ve played them. So if you ever would have told me Iowa, Temple, Tennessee and Arkansas, that’s a great schedule, would have all played poorly, and tanked the season, I would have said you’re nuts! There’s no way. So we could have had 23 or 24 wins and not gotten in last year based on RPI which is crazy. It’s ludicrous!. In the last two years, we’ve won, in our league, 12 road games. We won 6 road games a year the last two years. Road wins….. that’s HUGE! And that’s why I said, they don’t take that into account. RPI just doesn’t consider road wins. They don’t think that’s any different that a home win. Now, my teams at UMass had always been high in the RPI, and all that because of our schedule and who we play and I wasn’t afraid, I’m still not afraid to play teams. We aren’t trying to build up a record. We are trying to win games and get this team ready for the NCAA tournament. But our conference, the way it’s set-up this year, South Florida, Tulane, TCU, any of us, could win 22 games and not be in the NCAA tournament again.

Calipari: I like two Italian restaurants in New York. IL Vegavunda and then I like, the other place was……oh what’s it called, I’m loosing my mind. (to a distant person) Hey Smitty, what’s that Italian place I told you I may meet Greg Sands tomorrow night? Olives and Boxes….. and Carmine’s. Carmine’s in New York City is pretty good and then if you talked about here you’ve gotta’….well I’m not going to mention one place in Memphis because I'll get killed because there's ’bout 5-7 places that I’d say are really good places. There’s a new place down there that’s really good. For a steakhouse, I like Ruth Chris’ in Philadelphia. Ruth Chris’ is my favorite place.

Calipari: Yeah I did. There’s another one I like in Providence, it’s oh… I’m telling you, my mind’s gone. (To someone across the room) What’s that place in Providence I always go. It’s right there on the river? (No answer What about in Chicago, where do I go in Chicago when I’m up there? Chop House? What’s that place in Providence? I just talked about it but I can’t remember? Well, what the heck, I gave you four.

Calipari: I don’t have a CD player. I listen to the radio a little bit. My daughters listen to their stations, whatever they have on. I don’t listen to talk radio, I don’t read the newspaper, I don’t look at chat rooms. I’m not really on the Internet. I don’t do anything there. I read USA today. I watch CNN. I watch the History Channel. I love Biography. My wife has got me into Trading Spaces and While You Were Out, which is a home decorating show. Can you imagine? History Channel is the greatest. Biography is the great too. Discovery Channel is unbelievable and the Travel Channel’s not bad either because they have some good stuff on there. I love World War II stuff. If it’s on, I watch it, and the Sopranos.

Calipari: My family, my two daughters, my son, and my wife. I’ve been so blessed to have financial security for my family. I’m driven because I really want to do a good job for the University of Memphis and this city. I’m really driven to do the best I can. There is a fire there which I thought might have been out before I took this job because I, you know, you get drained by getting fired. You get dragging, you get tired and you just don’t need to go through that. I don’t need to coach financially. I’m fine. My family’s fine. I don’t have to work. But I’m here and I’ve really got the fire to do it. You watch me out there. You know I’m driven and I’ve got a fire to get this program to do well. I want these players to do well. I’m driven to really compete at the highest level in this program.