[TheGuyYouLoveToHate]

http://sports.espn.go.com/ncb/columns/st...id=4043386

DETROIT -- There were no fans. Just John Calipari, a reporter and two cameras in a downtown hotel Saturday afternoon. Yet the new Kentucky coach, likely the highest-paid college basketball coach in the country, was on stage.

He knows his audience, so Kentucky fans, listen up. Coach Cal wants you to know a number of things:


Douglas Jones/US Presswire
Calipari has his share of detractors, but he also has won plenty of people over.
• Calipari cried when he made the decision to leave Memphis.

"I hate to say this for Kentucky fans, but your basketball coach cried," he said. "This was hard."

• Calipari was willing to take less money to coach Kentucky, even though it wasn't offered in that manner.

"I don't want you to tell Kentucky this, but I would have taken less money to go to Kentucky," Calipari said. "Because it's Kentucky. Don't tell them that, though."

He said he thought four or five private school coaches make more money, but he couldn't come up with a name. He said he and his wife will continue to be charitable in Memphis and now in Lexington.

"I don't need the job, because of what happened to me with my NBA experience," Calipari said of being paid millions by the New Jersey Nets. "I don't need the money. I could live a good life. I'm going to Kentucky to have fun. I want the players to have fun."

• Calipari dreamed of coaching at Kentucky.

"It came down to, could I live with myself three years from now, two years from now, if I didn't do this? Could I live with myself, or would I live to regret because maybe now I'm 58, and it opens again, and you know what they say? My dream job, you're too old, and I just said, 'You know what? I can't do it. I cannot live with that.'"

• Calipari wanted to leave only for a job that was considered the best in its league, meaning he wasn't really going to coach NC State or Arkansas after listening to both schools offering him positions in the past five years.

"I want to go to a league where the program I'm coaching is the best in that league," Calipari said. "Now I walk into Kentucky and it's the best program maybe in the country, not just the SEC."

• Calipari knows only that Kentucky athletic director Mitch Barnhart admitted he made a mistake when he told him why he didn't hire him two years ago instead of Billy Gillispie.

• Calipari has no idea why Barnhart insisted on mentioning Calipari's commitment to compliance so early during Tuesday's news conference in Lexington announcing the hire.

• Calipari needs to rebuild the Kentucky brand.

"At Kentucky, you can recruit the best of the best," he said.

• Calipari no longer has to beg television networks to set up nonconference games for him in January and February.

"We used to fight for TV, and now I don't have to fight for it anymore," Calipari said. "I'm at Kentucky now. North Carolina, Kansas, Indiana, Louisville we can have on the schedule. Ben Howland of UCLA, let's play."

• Calipari took Memphis to the title game, won an NCAA-record 38 games, recruited some of the best players in the country and was a No. 1 seed two of the past four seasons. So what can he accomplish at Kentucky that he didn't at Memphis?

"You're in a different stratosphere," Calipari said. "Not taking anything away from what we did at Memphis, because it was one of the top five programs in the country. But Kentucky's upside is even greater.

• He would never do anything to damage Rick Pitino's reputation.

• He said Patrick Patterson and Jodie Meeks should leave Kentucky if they're going to be lottery picks or high in the first round but if they're late first, which is essentially almost second round, then they should come back.

• He said all Memphis signees should honor the commitment and play for the Tigers, although the reality of that may be unlikely.

• He said the committed players aren't under the same obligation, which means DeMarcus Cousins is a free agent to possibly come to Kentucky if he can get him on a visit to Lexington in the near future.

• He said he may need three to four years to return Kentucky to the elite. He said it took four years at UMass and four at Memphis.

"Maybe at Kentucky it will take only three," Calipari said.

• He's not ruling out attrition on the current Kentucky roster, but would honor a player's request to stay if he loved Kentucky.

• He practiced the team for two days last week. He taught them the dribble-drive offense to see how they fit. He said they ran more high-low under Gillispie but wasn't disappointed with the potential for them to get his style.

"In two weeks we'll figure out if everyone is a good fit and is absolutely going to play," Calipari said of the two sessions. "If you're not [able to] then I want to be honest and tell you maybe you won't play here. I expect that some will say come to me and say I wasn't recruited to play this way."

• He said the Memphis program won't wilt without him. He said the program didn't die during various times of transition and it won't now, either.

"This program is about the city of Memphis," Calipari said. "It means so much to the community that they won't let it go down."

But he knows he's not beloved by all.

"Right now I'm a scoundrel to a lot of people there," Calipari said.

• He said he won't react to the perception that he recruits in the gray area. He said the facts don't back that up nor does the hint that his teams aren't disciplined by the way they have defended.

• He won't be a stranger on campus. He said he won't stay in his office and not interact with the other coaches or teams. He plans on attending football, baseball, women's basketball and other sporting events.

"It's not going to change," Calipari said. "I'm going to be who I am. I'm just going to be me."