LIKE IT IS

No denying Calipari, Pitino two of a kind

— P robably millions of words have been written or spoken this week about how Louisville’s Rick Pitino and Kentucky’s John Calipari don’t like each other.

It is true. They don’t.

Pitino won a national championship at Kentucky before bolting for the Boston Celtics and the NBA, then he left there because he couldn’t win consistently on that level. Now he’s taken three teams to the Final Four.

Calipari vacated his Final Four appearance at Massachusetts after he had already left for the New Jersey Nets, where he was fired 20 games into his third season. He would have taken three teams to the Final Four, but UMass and Memphis had to vacate their appearances. In fact, the 2007-2008 Memphis season is off the NCAA books.

The vacated games have left his reputation more than a little tarnished everywhere but where the grass is blue.

Pitino hasn’t been a choir boy, either. He was named in eight of 64 sanctions while he served as an assistant and interim head coach at Hawaii, and there was a widely publicized affair a few years ago at Louisville. Sometimes he wears a white suit in the winter as well.

Even with all of that, this semifinal game Saturday is bigger than the coaches, although Sir Richard and King John may never realize that.

Kentucky is divided between blue and red. It always has been, and it always will be. The schools only started playing each other regularly after the NCAA pitted them against one another in 1983.

This second matchup of the season seemed very unlikely most of the year.

In January, the Cardinals lost five of seven games, including two at the KFC Yum! Center. (That name alone leaves no doubt college athletics has become a business.)

The Cardinals hit a soft patch in their schedule and then looked like they were falling apart.

Understand, this is not the typical Pitino team. His chuckand-duck approach is more like stumble and rumble.

The three-point line, once his best friend, is almost a plague.

This team is more MMA than up-tempo, and Pitino seemed to struggle with getting the players to play together.

They finished the regular season by losing four of five games, including one to South Florida, where Stan Heath has given new meaning to the phrase “playing ugly”.

Then the Cardinals put it together in the Big East Tournament, knocking off Seton Hall, Marquette, Notre Dame and Cincinnati. That vaulted the Cardinals to a No. 4 seed.

The trip to the Big Easy was anything but easy.

After slipping by Davidson 69-62 and New Mexico 59-56, Louisville knocked off No. 1 seed Michigan State 57-44 and then beat No. 7 seed Florida 72-68.

The man who used to like to score in the 90s and 100s is now trying to keep games in the 50s and 60s.

If he can do that against Kentucky — a monumental chore and perhaps the biggest challenge of Pitino’s career — the Cardinals have a shot, albeit a long shot.

There will be much debate until tipoff Saturday, but the focus until then will be on the coaches.

It’ll be on how Pitino befriended a 14-year-old camper one summer and later helped him get the UMass job, even putting up $5,000 seed money.

That’s something Calipari has forgotten and now denies.

Some say they were buddies until 1996, when Pitino and Kentucky beat Calipari and UMass in a Final Four game that officially no longer exists.

The bottom line may be that they are too much alike to not know each other well. Both are driven to win, and both are the headliners in their program.

For sure, the Cats and Cards make this a dynamite Final Four.

Sports, Pages 15 on 03/29/2012

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