University of Kentucky Basketball Hiring Process (Satire)

 

 

A local bootlegger who shall remain nameless has just told me that he has it on good authority, presumably the wholesaler from whom he purchases his products, that the Kentucky Bourbon Distillers Association had made an enticing offer to Mitch Barnhart and the UK Athletic Department regarding whom they should hire for their head coach vacancy. According to my source, the association had offered to provide $10Million a year in salary, $10Million a year in NIL money with related advertising jobs featuring UK players, and an unlimited annual supply of various of their libations if the university would hire either former West Virginia coach Bob Huggins or former Kentucky coach Billy Gillespie under a 5 year no fire contract. My source said that his source, apparently an official of the association, had also told him that the idea for this intriguing offer had come to him when he was visited in a dream by the ghost of former Kentucky coach Eddie Sutton who had detailed the plan in detail over cocktails in the dream which took place in the Saratoga.

University Of Kentucky Men's Basketball And The Pitfalls Of Running An NBA Training Camp

 

As we approach the end of the 2020-2021 regular college basketball season, the University of Kentucky has a record of 8-14 which is the worst record at the university for something approaching a hundred years.  Not even two former famous alcoholic coaches have done this bad at UK.  UK has only one hope of being invited to the NCAA Tournament this year and that is to win the South Eastern Conference Tournament which will require them to win three games in a row when they have only been able to do that twice this season despite once again having a team built around several of the top basketball recruits from the previous year's high school graduates.  It ain't happening!  UK will be invited to the National Invitational Tournament, also known as the Tournament Of The Also Rans.   It has been interesting this year, as the wheels fell off the wagon, and stayed off, to hear the multitude of lame excuses being made for the disaster by the fan base.  What is not interesting is to watch the program continue to fail due to the model being used to run the program.  

 

 As of today, March 1, 2021, since John Calipari came to Kentucky in 2009, his record is 338-91 for a winning percentage of .788 and he has won one national championship and been inducted into the College Basketball Hall of Fame. Simply in terms of winning percentage, that is an admirable record. But that one NCAA championship came in 2012. That was nine years ago.  Joe Hall won his single NCAA Championship in 1978 and only 7 year later, at the end of the 1984-1985 season, he resigned and retired.  Whether he simply got tired of the incessant pressure to win another championship or was forced to resign has never been public knowledge.  But, in either case, after only 7 years of not winning the second championship Joe Hall was relegated to the status of a revered elder statesman in Lexington which his record of 297-100, for a winning percentage of .748 and nearly as good as John Calipari's, deserved. Joe Hall did his .748 the hard way with primarily four year players who had some degree of loyalty to the program. Orlando "Tubby" Smith had a record of .760 at Kentucky and won one national championship the hard way with primarily four year players who had some degree of loyalty to the program. Nine years later, Tubby had not won a second championship and he too was gone. 

 

In early April of 2012, all the fans of the university were elated, literally jumping up and down, firmly convinced that in only a few years the University of Kentucky would win  enough NCAA Championships to finally equal and pass UCLA under John Wooden, one of the greatest coaches who ever lived.  When I think about this absolute hero worship of John Calipari and the system he has instilled into University of Kentucky basketball, I am reminded of the words of Art Garfunkel and Paul Simon: 

 

And the people bowed and prayed
To the neon god they made
And the sign flashed out its warning
In the words that it was forming

Before I go on, let me say clearly that I am a fan of John Calipari and his ability to coach basketball.  I am not a fan of his system which is simply to run an NBA training camp, to recruit as many players as possible who are cinches for the NBA, put as many of those players as possible into the NBA, tout that form of success as being success for the program, and to ignore the fact that the university with the most wins in NCAA basketball history is not the team with the most championships and will not be playing for one this year.  As soon as John Calipari got to the University of Kentucky, he instituted a plan based on one and done players who were locks for the NBA and ignored, for the most part, a long standing tradition at Kentucky of recruiting in state players, four year players, and players with ties to the state and the university.  That is to say he stopped recruiting players with loyalty to the program.  We often see figures about how much money the NBA has paid and is paying to those former one and done University of Kentucky basketball players.  But have you ever seen an article in the media about how even one of those players ever made a sizeable donation to the university which gave them an opportunity to play one year, ignore tradition, and move on to the NBA and the bank, actually numerous banks?  According to this article by sportswriter Dennis Varney from December 21, 2020, there are more than thirty former University of Kentucky players in the NBA.  One day later, December 22, 2020, Duke University had what was an Atlantic Coast Conference record 26 players in the NBA and has actually won two NCAA championships since John Calipari has been at Kentucky.  Villanova, which has won two championships since Calipari has been at Kentucky, had only 8 players in the NBA at the start of the 2020 season.  The bottom line of that is that NCAA national championships are not won by teams of one and done freshmen.  They are won by teams of committed, loyal players who intend to stay four years, develop skills, accept coaching, and play as a team.  

 

Most one and one players come to any university believing they are God's gift not just to basketball but to the world in general.  Most of them have been given miles and miles of leeway by high school and AAU coaches because they were stars.  Most of them believe that they, and only they, can lead a team to success.  They also tend to believe that the university which they have graced with their presence is lucky to have them, better let them have their way, and stay out of their way while they serve out a mandatory year before leaving.  Many of them view that year in much the same way they would view a jail sentence.  They do not play team ball.  They are not interested in winning unless they are the player of the game, the season, the decade, and all of history, as briefly as they view history.  They do not care about assists, blocks, or rebounds unless a person they believe is less talented than them is providing them the ball via those assists, blocks, and rebounds so they can score and look good in the press.  

University of Kentucky basketball is paying a horrible price for having an NBA training camp on campus instead of a team of loyal four year players who are committed to winning a national championship, achieving a degree, and then moving on the NBA if fate decides they should.  But, I am not saying Kentucky needs to fire John Calipari mainly for these reasons: 1) he can coach basketball as well as anyone Kentucky could likely replace him with; 2) he has an incredibly high buy out built into his contract; and, 3) just as the program can be fixed, so can Calipari and his thinking.  He is a person who has a great sense of self preservation in addition to his sense of self promotion.  What I am suggesting is that Athletic Director Mitch Barnhart have a thirty to sixty minute "Come To Jesus Meeting" with Calipari and inform him of the new, and old, focus of University of Kentucky basketball, winning national championship and that focus can be achieved by doing the following things: 1) the heart of the team every year must be five players who are committed to play four years and earn a degree; 2) those players must not be living under they idea they are one and done; 3) those players must be rated from about 25 to 100 in their high school graduating class; 4) the coaching staff may then have as many as five players each year on the team who are rated above 25 in their high school graduating class so long as they know that the experienced players will start and play most of the time especially early in the year and that playing time for anyone else will be on a strictly earned basis; 5) other slots on the team should be filled with other players with strong ties to the university and the state who are willing to do the dirty work of getting beat up in practice, fighting for playing time, and taking orders from the coaches; and, 6) every year the coaching staff must actively recruit whomever is selected as Mister Basketball in Kentucky.  

You are wondering why I brought up that last insistence about Mr. Basketball in Kentucky, I bet.  If you look at this year's roster for Western Kentucky University, they have five players on the roster who were either Mr. Basketball in Kentucky or a finalist for that award and John Calipari never recruited any of them.  At Western Kentucky this year, Taveion Hollingsworth, Dayvion McKnight, and Carson Williams were all previous Kentucky Mr. Basketball winners. Jackson Harlan was a finalist for Kentucky Mr. Basketball.  Isaiah Cozart was named Gatorade Kentucky Boys Basketball Player of the Year and a finalist for Kentucky Mr. Basketball.  All five of those players would have literally killed and died to play in Rupp Arena for four years for the University of Kentucky and were not offered that opportunity.  And this year, they defeated the University of Alabama on December 15, 2020, and probably all watched on television as the University of Kentucky lost to Alabama twice.  Right now, the most likely candidate to become Kentucky Mr. Basketball 2021 is Reed Shepherd, the son of former Kentucky player Jeff Shepherd, and there are persistent rumors in the media that Calipari has not actively recruited him.  It is long past time for Mitch Barnhart to have that "Come To Jesus Meeting" with John Calipari and put a stop the pitfalls of allowing Kentucky basketball to be nothing more or less than an NBA training camp.  

I do not fully know how seriously Kentucky basketball was damaged by losing assistant coach Kenny Payne but I firmly believe his move to the NBA was a part of the problem this year.  But that does not lessen the importance of stopping the NBA training camp focus of the program as it has been for the last decade. 

Cratis Williams And I On Traditional Appalachian Children's Games

An earlier post on "Death, Dying, and Funeral Rites In Appalachia" which I wrote about a week ago, based on some of the writing in Cratis Williams' book "Tales From Sacred Wind: Coming Of Age In Appalachia", was one of the most appealing for my readers in quite some time and I promised that I would write a more formal review of the book when I complete it which I promise I will still do.  I haven't completed the book yet but I have encountered another section in it which has prompted me to write it while it is still fresh in my mind.  At the time I wrote these two most recent posts about Cratis Williams, I neglected to mention in either of them that I had written a much earlier post called "Responses To Some Reading Of Cratis Williams" which might also be interesting to some of you.  It is a response to a small pamphlet he wrote about his most important early teacher, William H. Vaughan, who was a primary influence in leading Williams to pursue a career in academia which was not common at the time in Eastern Kentucky. 

Cratis Williams--Photo by The Williams Family

The section in discussion here is called "Appalachian Folkways: At Play" and prompted me to remember many experiences from my own childhood growing up in Knott County in Eastern Kentucky about forty years and fifty miles from Sacred Wind where Cratis Williams spent his childhood.  This section in his book is only about four pages but it contains a lot of excellent reminiscences and reminded me a great deal of my own childhood.  Admittedly, Williams grew up on a dirt road in what were still, essentially, horse and buggy days.  I grew up on Kentucky Route 7, a paved state highway,
+
 but still in one of the more remote areas of the Big Sandy River drainage which also takes in Sacred Wind.  But I grew up with a father, Ballard Hicks,  who was sixty-four when I was born and about the same age as Cratis Williams' father.  I was also strongly influenced by my maternal grandparents, Woots and Susie Hicks, who were actually a few years younger than my father.  My mother, Mellie Hicks, was roughly the same age as Cratis Williams' mother so our major cultural influences came from people  who were about the same age who had spent their lives in much the same way.  Both his grandfather and my father ran small country stores for many years.  Both our extended families were primarily subsistence farmers.  In many ways our childhoods were the same although I do admit that I probably grew up under less financial stress than he and his siblings.

In this section of his book, he talks about the games and other forms of amusement he and his siblings and classmates benefited from as children.   Many of those experiences were nearly identical to my own.  My one regret about this section of his book is that he did not write more at length on this topic.  In the days in which we grew up, there were no electrical toys and most of our recreation was comprised of games and amusements which required no money, no extensive use of physical equipment, and no store bought devices.  He discusses attempts to catch wild game as a child and I did that also as a form of amusement more than he did.  For his family, catching wild game was purely a subsistence effort.  He discusses building figure four wooden triggers to set dead falls for small animals which I never learned to do.  He also discusses setting homemade box traps for the same wild game such as opossums, ground hogs, rabbits, and raccoons which I and my peers also did but on a more limited basis.  The box traps we all used were homemade with screen wire and/or wood and I came to know them as Hoover Boxes because they had been so named during the Great Depression by my ancestors and their peers all over America.  Williams also discussed going ground hog, opossum, and racoon hunting.  My father had effectively stopped hunting due to his age by the time I was old enough to go hunting but I did hunt in a limited way as a child with other members of my family and friends. But one of my most pleasant memories of my father when I was a small child, sometime before I was six, he went on what must have been one of his last squirrel hunting trips and brought back a squirrel he had shot just as it was starting to eat a hickory nut which was locked in its mouth still.  I was never an effective shot with a rifle so I never became a shooter who could "bark" a squirrel but I did rabbit hunt sometimes and went coon hunting a few times with other local people.  For those of you who have never heard of "barking" a squirrel, it was a practice used sometimes by expert shots with a twenty-two rifle in which they would not shoot directly at a squirrel on a tree but would judge their shot so that the bullet would strike within a quarter inch or less of the animal's head and kill it with the concussion without leaving a mark on it.  By doing this, the head, in my opinion the most delicious part of a squirrel, was not harmed and you got to eat it all including the tongue and brain.  In early spring, ground hog hunting was common for nearly all boys my age.  All you needed was a dog which would chase and, if necessary, fight a ground hog which is not an easy task for a dog.  If the ground hog made it into the hole,  you could attempt to smoke it out by building a small fire in the mouth of the hole, blowing the smoke into the hole, and the animal would usually come out although sometimes it would be through a second exit from the burrow which nearly all ground dwelling animals have.  Sometimes, even without a dog, you could get a ground hog if you knew where one was denning by either stalking it from fifty yards or so away and shooting it when it came out or digging it out which could sometimes be a lot of work.  It was also common in my childhood for ground hog hunters in early spring to dig out litters of young ground hogs and bottle raise them as pets which Williams does not mention.  My grandparents, well before I was born, had a pet ground hog for several years which I have heard many stories about.  It would live at the house all spring, summer, and most of the fall and then disappear to hibernate for the winter.  For several years, this ground hog whose name I don't remember, would come waddling back home when hibernation ended in early spring.  I also knew several families on Beaver Creek who had, at various times, pet squirrels, raccoons, ground hogs, and flying squirrels.  If you caught any of these animals when they were quite young, they all made good pets.  

Cratis Williams also discussed fishing and gigging along with using either a rifle or a sledge hammer to kill fish through ice in winter.  I fished and gigged all through my childhood but I had never heard of using the concussion of hitting ice with a sledge hammer to kill fish if they were visible.  But I also rarely saw ice thick enough in winter to have done that if I had known about it.  In my opinion, global warming had already become a mild issue in the forty years between my childhood and Williams'.  Williams also discusses a game he and his peers played in the woods which they called "Fox And Hounds".  It was basically a tag or chasing game in which a group of children would choose teams of "Foxes" and "Hounds" and the "Hounds" would chase the "Foxes" and try to catch them.  In my childhood, any game of this nature had just become tag.  Williams also discusses a war game which corresponded to our "Cowboys And Indians" which he and his peers called "Colonials And Redcoats".  I and my peers had already, to a limited extent, been influenced by television and, if that game had ever existed in Knott County as it had in his native Lawrence County, it had just reverted to "Cowboys And Indians".  Williams also discussed having made homemade bows and arrows from small tree branches.  I saw some of this in my childhood and actually knew a family who had a son lose an eye to a homemade arrow which had been shot by one of his friends.  

In the two room school in which I grew up, boys in the fourth through the eighth grades were allowed to go anywhere we wanted to for the hour of lunch so long as we could return to school in time for "Books" to be called to resume class.  Most of us older boys, in that hour, would hit the woods, except for a few who had to run home to eat lunch.  We would climb, run, chase each other, and swing on grape vines which we had cut at the bottom to give us a free end but leave the grapevine still attached to the tree.  We also had a game which we called "Riding Out" young poplars.  The better climbers would climb as high as possible up a young, slim poplar tree until they reached the point where the tree began to lean and eventually get close enough to the ground for the rider to drop off or actually just step off. If you were agile and strong, you could sometimes find a stand of young poplars on a hillside and ride from tree to tree down the hill for quite a distance. But we had one event in this game which effectively put an end to it for a long while.  A neighbor boy older than me was "Riding Out" a young poplar which it turned out had a weak spot near the top.  The tree broke and he fell close to fifteen or twenty feet to the ground and was unconscious for a while.  The other boys carried him back to the school where he was laid on a long table which the first graders used for class and he eventually regained consciousness with some soreness and no long lasting damage.  I also remember one incident in which the boys who were gathering kindling for the coal stoves in the two rooms found a copper head about two or three feet long which was nearly frozen on a cold morning after having crawled out the day before in warmer weather.  They brought the poisonous snake into the classroom and laid it in front of the stove where it thawed out enough to crawl around.  Then somebody picked it up with the coal shovel and threw it back out in the cold where it became stiff again.  The teachers actually allowed us to bring it back into school a couple of times before it was eventually killed as I recall.  I am sure that if teachers in today's world ever allowed children to "Ride Out" young trees or bring poisonous snakes into school they would be immediately fired.  But not one negative word was ever said about either of these events.  To our families, it was just boys being boys.  

Cratis Williams also discusses what he calls "throwing" games which usually involved rocks and says one of his sisters was the best at those amusements. He says they often would throw rocks at lizards and sometimes actually catch sleeping lizards with a small stick and a noose made of skinned, limber tree bark.  By the time I was in school forty years later, we had baseball and basketball with an actual basketball goal on a pole in the school yard.  But our baseball game, which we and many other young Appalachians of the time called "Round Town", was played with bases made of flat rocks and a rubber ball. We rarely had any baseball gloves the rubber ball was much easier than a hard ball to catch.  In the early grades from first to fourth, we boys often played "Cowboys and Indians" in the school yard with a herd of stick horses usually cut from sumac, or "shoemake", trees as Williams and I both grew up calling sumac.  We even took this game to the point that we actually named our best stick horses.   

Interestingly, Cratis Williams does not talk about any kind of board game at all.  By the time of my childhood, we at least had checkers and I suspect he might have also.  But one of the things he reminded me of was a traditional Appalachian Folk board game which my father tried to teach me and I was not interested in enough to bother to learn it which I deeply regret.  That game was called "Fox And Geese" and apparently can be traced back to Europe well before American colonization.  Some experts claim it might actually be Medieval in origin.  The game is played on a board which can be made of anything from tanned animal skin to cardboard to a flat piece of a wide board.  The layout is a cross shaped area which is broken into five smaller areas comprised of the center section and the four wings.  There is only one "Fox" and fifteen geese.  When my father tried to teach me, he had drawn the board on a piece of a cardboard box from our little country store. His geese were white grains of corn and his fox was a red grain.

Fox And Geese Board--Photo by Masters Of Games

I have learned that there are also variations of the game with thirteen, seventeen, or twenty-two geese.  According to the website which I linked above, the game is described this way:  Fox & Geese is a game of inequality. The geese cannot capture the fox but aim, through the benefit of numbers, to hem the fox in so that he cannot move. The objective of the fox, on the other hand, is to capture geese until it becomes impossible for them to trap him. The geese start by occupying all 6 squares of one arm of the cross plus the whole first adjacent row and the two end points of the central row. The fox starts in the middle of the board.  The game of Fox & Geese is played upon a cross shaped board consisting of a 3x3 point square in the middle with four 2 x 3 point areas adjacent to each face of the central square. This makes a total of 33 points. Pieces are allowed to move from one point to another only along lines which join points. Accompanying the board, there should be a single playing piece representing the fox in black or red and 15 white playing pieces representing the geese.  According to the Masters Of Games website cited above, the game is actually considered to have been rooted in medieval times.  I don't know that a mathematician would say that this game is as complicated as chess but you can surely bet that it is more complicated than checkers.  I never learned to play it with my father and I deeply regret having been too young and dumb to have given both of us that joy.  Now, forty-nine years after my father's death, I am considering making my own board, shelling a few grains of corn, and trying to induce my wife to learn it with me.  She has also become fascinated with the game and we intend to try to play it until we get some skill.  The woman who cleans our house is about my age and also remembers the game being played by her father who was about 37 years younger than my father.  I also knew that man before his death a few years ago, visited him numerous times, and regret that I also unknowingly lost a second opportunity to learn "Fox And Geese" from someone who grew up playing it.   

Ballard Hicks, My Father--Photo by Roger D. Hicks