Rick Pitino, John Calipari reflect on decades of battles before St. John’s meets Arkansas in NCAA Tournament

Rick Pitino wasn’t interested in hyping up his marquee matchup with John Calipari.

Sure, the Hall of Fame coaches have traded haymakers throughout their many basketball battles over the past three-plus decades.

But before his second-seeded St. John’s tips off against Calipari’s 10th-seeded Arkansas in the second round of the NCAA Tournament on Saturday afternoon, Pitino downplayed the commotion.

“I don’t go against coaches. We go against teams,” Pitino said after his Red Storm surged past No. 15 Omaha, 83-53, in Thursday night’s tournament opener.

“He doesn’t have to worry about me. My jump shot is long gone.”

Of course, the latest chapter in Pitino vs. Calipari doesn’t need any promotion.

Saturday’s game at Amica Mutual Pavilion in Providence, R.I., renews an epic rivalry that’s included four meetings in the NCAA Tournament, two of which came in the Final Four; struggles for supremacy in Conference USA and later the state of Kentucky; and plenty of storylines in between.

Pitino and Calipari, both Italian-Americans who are among the most famous figures in their sport, boast a combined 1,761 wins, three national championships and 13 Final Four appearances.

Calipari leads the head-to-head series, 13-10, though the coaches have not squared off since 2016.

“We both started in Five-Star, the basketball camp with Howie Garfinkel and Will Klein,” Calipari recalled Friday. “He’s much older than me, but we started in that camp, and I have always looked up to him because when I was a camper, he was a counselor. When I became a counselor, he was a speaker.”

It’s been more than 35 years since Pitino, 72, helped Calipari, 66, break through in the NCAA coaching ranks.

In 1988, when Pitino’s alma mater, UMass, was seeking a head coach, he endorsed Calipari, who was an assistant at Pittsburgh. Other candidates had more experience than Calipari, who had not been a head coach.

“UMass was in dire straits,” recalled Pitino, who was Kentucky’s head coach at that time. “They couldn’t come up with the money to pay the coach. They had no budget, nothing. They really fell on hard times. I thought John was the one guy that could resurrect the program.”

That proved to be prophetic.

By his fourth year at UMass, Calipari had transformed the Minutemen into a 30-5 juggernaut. It was during that 1992 postseason that Calipari faced Pitino for the first time.

Kentucky eliminated UMass in the Sweet 16 that year, then won again in a 1996 rematch in the Final Four. Kentucky would go on to win the NCAA championship in 1996, giving Pitino his first title.

The following season, Calipari became the head coach of the then-New Jersey Nets. A year later, Pitino, too, went to the NBA to coach the Boston Celtics.

Their paths would cross again in the early 2000s, when Calipari went to Memphis and Pitino went to Louisville. Both schools were in Conference USA until Louisville moved to the Big East in 2005.

Their rivalry received more juice in 2009 when Calipari became the head coach at Kentucky. Not only was Calipari taking a job once held by Pitino, but he was now coaching in the same state as his predecessor.

“You’re not going to be friends when you’ve got those two jobs,” Calipari said of Kentucky and Louisville. “You’re not going to be enemies, but if he’s real good, you’re like, ‘Sheesh.’ And if we were real good, he’s probably saying, ‘Ugh.’”

Kentucky and Louisville met in the Final Four in 2012 and in the Sweet 16 in 2014, with Calipari winning both games. Calipari won the national championship in 2012, and Pitino won it the following year.

“I respect coaches that can really do this well,” Calipari said, “and if you can do it over a long, long period of time, I really respect you.”

Pitino’s tenure at Louisville ended in 2017 when he was fired amid a federal probe into fraud and corruption in college basketball, a scandal for which he was later exonerated. He coached in Greece and at Iona before taking the St. John’s job in 2023.

Calipari, meanwhile, remained at Kentucky until last season, when he and the program parted ways following an upset loss to No. 14 Oakland in the first round of the NCAA Tournament. It was the third year in a row Kentucky failed to make it past the second round.

Before Calipari returned to Rupp Arena with Arkansas in January, Pitino posted a video urging Kentucky fans to give their former coach an ovation.

But even in that video, Pitino acknowledged he was “not best friends” with Calipari.

“I certainly have great respect for him, but we’re not really close,” Pitino said Friday. “Everybody tried to talk that way. It was just a Kentucky-Louisville and Louisville-Memphis thing. We don’t know each other’s wives or children. … At a very young age, I knew him well … but I don’t think we have been to dinner one time in our lifetime.”

Pitino and Calipari both said they don’t consider their decades of history to be a rivalry. However they label it, there’s plenty of intrigue Saturday with a trip to the Sweet 16 on the line.

St. John’s (31-4) is a 6.5-point favorite over Arkansas (21-13), but Pitino cautioned the Razorbacks boast size and athleticism unlike anything his Red Storm have seen this season.

That size and athleticism loomed large in Thursday’s 79-72 win over No. 7 Kansas, with 6-11 senior Jonas Aidoo erupting for 22 points and three blocks and 6-10 junior Trevon Brazile adding 11 points, 12 rebounds and two blocks.

That duo poses a test for the Johnnies, who own Division I’s most efficient defense but whose tallest starter, Zuby Ejiofor, is 6-9.

Arkansas got a boost Thursday when five-star freshman Boogie Fland, who hails from the Bronx, returned from a right thumb injury that had kept him out since Jan. 18. Leading scorer Adou Thiero has missed the last month with a left knee injury, but Calipari did not rule him out for Saturday, saying, “I have seen crazier things.”

After starting 0-5 in SEC play, Arkansas went 8-5 the rest of the way.

Saturday’s game will give either Pitino or Calipari the edge in their head-to-head NCAA Tournament meetings. Both coaches seek to become the first in NCAA history to take four teams to the Final Four.

“He has Gucci shoes and I have itchy shoes, so we’re different there,” Calipari said. “We’re all going to be judged 50 years from now on what we did and how we did it, but I hope years from now people will say they both get their teams to play hard and at a competitive level.”

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