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.
Fans came in droves to his introductory press conference, 20,000 or so filing into the building — with thousands more turned away outside — transforming the occasion into a revival atmosphere that raised eyebrows across college basketball.
Six months after that, an even more surreal sight: Rick Pitino — enemy No. 1 in Rupp Arena for the better part of the past two decades — walked onto the court, wearing a blue shirt with a UK logo, and the crowd greeted him with a thunderous ovation.
Pope put his arm around his former coach, who spoke to the UK fans that had booed him mercilessly for so many years. “I am so happy to be back,” Pitino said, the Big Blue Madness crowd hanging on every word.
The Hall of Fame coach who resurrected Kentucky from the depths of probation and lifted the Cats to the pinnacle of college basketball looked back on his time in Lexington and then forward to what was coming next.
“And now we get to root for a gentleman that — there have been a lot of great coaches here, a lot of great ones — but we get to root for someone that that name Kentucky is what he’s all about,” Pitino said. “It’s not about Pope. … The most selfless, humble young man I’ve ever coached in my lifetime. One of the great, great examples of what Kentucky basketball is all about. Mark Pope is going to lead you to greatness, in every sense of the word.”
No one mentioned Calipari by name that night. But Pitino’s remarks — whether intentional or not — surely summoned thoughts of his longtime rival for all who were listening and knew the backstory.
On Friday — 16 weeks after Pitino’s Big Blue Madness appearance — this surreal UK basketball trilogy will come to its natural end with the return of Calipari, who will be back in Lexington one night before he walks onto that Rupp Arena court under the strangest of circumstances.
