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Posted by catmandoo (Member # 1284) on 09-09-2015, 10:48 PM:

John Calipari had plenty of success before he came to the University of Kentucky. Always the overachieving underdog, he won 445 games (with only 140 losses) and made it to seven Sweet Sixteens, five Elite Eights and two Final Fours combined coaching Massachusetts and Memphis.

But now, as he prepares to be enshrined in the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame on Friday night, Calipari wonders whether he could've gotten there without coming here.

"Kentucky changed everything for me," he said. "All coaches wait on that call from one of those schools. And when I got the call, you look and now it becomes, 'OK, you're on the biggest of stages now. How do you do now?' You were always trying to build programs from scratch. You were trying to take programs and create relevance. You were trying to coach at places that never got their due, never got the respect they deserved even though they were No. 1 in the country."

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