Dan Shaughnessy of the Boston Globe is upset that UMass is going to honor Kentucky head coach John Calipari this week.
Calipari led UMass to the Final Four in 1996 but that trip was infamously vacated due to mistakes made by Marcus Camby.
Shaughnessy, who has notably hated on Calipari in the past, believes UMass should cancel the celebration.
Here is an excerpt of his thoughts:
It’s Calipalooza for the University of Massachusetts Athletic Department this week. John Calipari, UMass’s former head basketball coach — a man who took the Minutemen to their greatest heights and lowest depths — will be honored Tuesday and Wednesday at events in Boston and Amherst.
What an embarrassment for our state university. You’d think our UMass officials would have as much good sense as the president of the University of Memphis, who canceled a Cal celebration after initially thinking it would be a good idea to honor college basketball’s all-time bag man.
Not our guys. Not here in the Hub of the Universe, and the great Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Our guys are going full steam ahead with the two-day event to honor a man who oversaw a program that broke rules and treated academics as an afterthought.
Tuesday night at the Colonnade Hotel is your chance to enjoy “An Evening with Naismith Basketball Hall of Famer John Calipari.” For a mere $300, you can rub elbows with Coach Cal and listen to stories of the golden days of UMass basketball, when Calipari took the Minutemen to the Final Four. That was one of the more thrilling sports stories of 1996 and it remained a wonderful memory right up until it was learned that star player Marcus Camby already had turned professional while he was still playing for UMass. Camby had a couple of agents and had been the recipient of cash, thousands of dollars worth of jewelry, and the services of prostitutes while he was playing for coach Cal (Camby’s jersey number already is retired at UMass, so go figure).
There was more. UMass players’ transcripts obtained by the Globe in 1994 indicated that there was a significant problem in the classroom: Camby and three teammates played while they were on academic probation. Last March, Steve Satell, a former tutor for the UMass basketball program, told the New York Times, “Coach Calipari could have created a great academic program, but he ruined it. And the university was absolutely complicit.’’ A Connecticut AAU coach who delivered many players to Calipari at UMass told the Times that Coach Cal’s recruiting philosophy was, “If you qualify, we want you. If you don’t, we still want you.’’
After the Camby disclosures, the NCAA spanked UMass, fining the school $151,000 and forcing UMass to erase its Final Four appearance. In NCAA parlance, UMass’s Final Four appearance was “vacated.’’ It never happened. Cal was long gone when the sanctions came down. After the Final Four, he bailed on UMass, signing a $15 million contract to coach the New Jersey Nets.
None of this is problematic at UMass. Here they are, 20 years later, raising money for the basketball program with a “night” for Coach Cal, which will be followed by a halftime ceremony Wednesday when Calipari’s name will be raised to the rafters at the Mullins Center on campus in Amherst.
