Hate mail gives John Calipari perspective

Hate mail gives John Calipari perspective


Kentucky coach John Calipari was having a nice Friday. He was at his basketball camp and out on the recruiting trail signing autographs, posing in pictures and kissing babies. It seemed like, as Calipari mused that day, "Everybody loves Coach Cal."

But waiting for him back in his office was an angry note from a Kentucky fan, and as Calipari told his fans on his version of the fireside chat -- a Lexy audio post -- he uses such negativity for perspective:

"There's a letter -- it's typewritten, so I'm not sure -- from Arizona. 'Coach you should resign. You're the worst coach we've ever had here...You care more about the NBA than you do college basketball or Kentucky. I think you should step down. You can't coach. You're not what you're supposed to be doing. Resign your position.'"

"Hey, there you go. Keep things in perceptive. It's never quite as good as it seems, it's never quite as bad as it seems. You cannot please everybody. You keep marching forward."


Calipari has had his fair share of haters for rocking the boat in college basketball, and he knows they're out there. The stance he's taken is that it comes with the territory of being Kentucky's head coach.

He would claim that there exists a silent majority of supporters except for the fact that, well, the Big Blue Nation is not the silent type. So when one fan brazenly fires off a nasty note, it's sort of like firing a spitball at a battleship.

Only that Calipari catches the spitball, takes a look at it, and hurls it right back into a crowd of his followers.

http://espn.go.com/blog/collegebasketballnation/post/_/id/13928/john-calipari-uses-hate-mail-for-perspective