The Very Worst

The feeling hits everyone at a different time. Some first felt contempt for this man in 2008, when his Memphis crew led by Derrick Rose and the most talented college basketball team in a decade somehow squandered the National Championship to a Kansas squad whose players currently ride someone’s bench in the NBA. Others began to lash out after the questionable recruitment of superteen John Wall from the Raleigh area before his first season at Kentucky, and Wall’s subsequent, prompt exit from the team for the NBA after one season, fattening this man’s already swollen list of didn’t-even-come-close-to-graduating “student-athletes” on his basketball teams. You certainly lost some respect for him after it was determined that his 1996 UMASS team (that’s right, UMASS, that school that you thought had not been relevant since the Revolutionary War) and his 2008 Memphis squad would be forced to vacate their remarkable NCAA Tournament success in light of investigations that revealed a hodgepodge of player “gifts” and bogus SAT scores. Even if the aforementioned shenanigans failed to dissuade the casual observer from harboring even the slightest amount of respect for University of Kentucky Head Coach John Calipari, it goes without saying that, following this past Sunday’s historic Elite Eight matchup between the North Carolina Tar Heels and Calipari’s Kentucky Wildcats, every level-headed American would agree that John Calipari is the sleaziest coach in the United States. Surely you felt it when CBS inexplicably elected to bypass footage of the priceless, warming goofiness of John Henson or the classiness of a Roy Williams wardrobe in favor of showing Calipari, whose greasy glare and slicked-backed hair make Sonny and Michael Corleone look like the patron saints of a non-profit organization. Granted, many will now say, “Gee, he can’t be worse than Krzyzewski, can he?” Well, a closer look indicates otherwise. Krzyzewski actually can claim a few admirable qualities. First, he is loyal. He has sacrificed the sheer anticlimax that is living in Durham to remain the coach of Duke University for, basically, his entire career, even turning down stratospheric contract offers from the Los Angeles Lakers. He also encourages his players to stay all four years and graduate, a strategy that essentially benefits all parties involved except the North Carolina Tar Heels and their supporters. Calipari, the itinerant Mafia coach, is characterized by neither of those attributes, and come next week, watch and marvel at the exodus of nineteen and twenty year olds from his “program,” bound for the NBA, where at least the money that they will be paid is wholly legal.