The oversized portraits line the hallway of the newly renovated men's basketball office at the University of Memphis, beneath the track lighting. Like the state-of-the-art multimedia room that head coach John Calipari plans to install, the team's run of national television appearances, and pre-season jaunts to seductive sites like Maui and Cancun, they're meant to help impress recruits into signing with the Tigers. Similar Walls of Fame are commonplace in college athletics, except that these former players are clothed in a different kind of Memphis uniform: a cap and gown. To earn a place, graduation is mandatory. "You don't walk," Calipari says firmly, "you don't get on."

Calipari the educator? He has been called many things during his seven-season tenure at Memphis, but rarely that. Yet despite consecutive Elite Eight appearances and 33-victory seasons, Calipari wants to crow about his program's rising graduation rate, which is some three times higher than the university's. He touts an alliance with FedEx, which slots Tigers who probably aren't headed for pro ball into an extensive unpaid internship program. And he finds it no coincidence that, for all but his two-and-a-half season stint with the NBA's New Jersey Nets, he has spent his head-coaching career at public institutions populated by students of little privilege.

"Why did I go coach at two schools where most of the students are the first generation educated in their family?" he asks. "I don't know, but in my family, my sister and I were the first to get a college education. So maybe the empathy of that. To create hope in the minds of people who grew up like me. It's not that I expect them to be physicists or whatever – but maybe their children will be. That's what gets me going. We've created hope."

Along the way, Calipari has created hope for Memphis basketball fans, who find their team ranked first in the country by some experts. What's left is convincing his players that national championships aren't only meant for the elite. "Just because we don't have Duke, North Carolina, Kentucky or UCLA on our jerseys doesn't mean that we don't deserve to win," he says. "It's not the jerseys, it's the human beings inside them. Will they come together, will they sacrifice, will they do the things you have to in order to win? Because it can happen here. The last two years, we've gone 66-8. We were running uphill when we got here. We're not running uphill anymore."

* * *

Calipari's success in Memphis is hardly surprising to anyone who follows basketball. The surprise on the cusp of his eighth season with the Tigers is that he's still here. The 48-year-old has coached all of three teams over two decades, yet the perception lingers that he's an itinerant with one foot perpetually out the door, the kind of coach who applies for every job and listens to every offer.

When he arrived in Memphis as an NBA coach-in-exile in 2000, many Memphians assumed he was biding his time for his next big opportunity. Part of the problem was Memphis itself, which can't seem to reconcile a widespread civic inferiority complex with its latent ambition. "Some Memphians see the place as the next Atlanta," a former Commercial Appeal reporter once cracked. "The rest consider it a waste of good farmland."

Even some boosters couldn't understand why one of the most successful coaches of his generation, a man whose Massachusetts teams went 146-26 over the last five years of his tenure, including a climactic 35-2 and Final Four appearance, would pull his wife and three children from the Eastern seaboard to set down roots in the Mid-South. "We were asked many times, 'Why would you come here?'" says Calipari, who was raised in a small town outside Pittsburgh. "And my wife and I were like, 'Jeez, it's pretty nice here. Why does everybody here say this?' It's like the city thinks it doesn't deserve success."

But it wasn't only Memphis. Calipari seemed to all the world a second coming of Rick Pitino: another glib, ambitious Italian-American from the northeast with NBA [ital]bona fides[end] and plenty of suitors. Both left New England schools for NBA opportunities in the New York area and seemed set on the fast track. Later, Pitino abandoned Kentucky for a second shot at the pros in Boston. Worse, he returned to college coaching at arch-rival Louisville. Wouldn't Calipari similarly jilt the Tigers? Surely he had bigger aims than coaching a team in a non-BCS conference, with home-and-homes against the likes of Rice and Marshall weighing down its strength-of-schedule, and a 1973 visit to the NCAA finals as its most significant achievement.

It didn't help that Calipari's mentor, Larry Brown, is the ultimate itinerant: a man who changes jobs with the same frequency as the rest of us buy shoes. "My wife calls Larry the most self-disciplined human being she has ever been around," insists Calipari, who learned his trade on Brown's Kansas staff in 1984-85. "He shows up every day, never bored with coaching, never intimidated by it." While most of Calipari's peers abandoned him after he was fired in New Jersey early in the 1998 season (despite winning 43 games and a playoff berth the year before), Brown – then with the 76ers – not only kept calling, he eventually hired Calipari as an assistant. "He built up my self-esteem as a coach," Calipari says. "He built me back to where I was ready to go coach again."

From Philadelphia, Calipari landed in Memphis. And despite a recent dalliance with North Carolina State and reports linking him to Arkansas and Kentucky, he's still here. He, his wife Ellen, and their two daughters and a son have integrated themselves into the community in a way that a transient coach wouldn't have bothered to do. Charities have been started, associations joined, and friends made on a level well beyond the cursory. It's telling, too, that instead of living in an East Memphis mansion like others of his income bracket, he has remained close to campus, only a few blocks away from neighborhoods that can be described as dodgy at best. "Behind East High School, about three blocks from my house, you have demographics like three kids and a mother, $4,800 annual income," he says, incredulous that such poverty could exist, let alone just around the corner. "$4,800? What? How can you live on that?"

Calipari's income is at the other extreme. A raise last April brings his total annual compensation to more than $1.8 million, just a notch below the industry leaders. If he stays at Memphis through March, 2010, he'll collect a $2.5 annuity. At this point, it's hard to imagine he'd do better in the NBA.

Beyond that, his emotional approach to coaching and a heightened sense of community makes him suited to do exactly what he has done: settle in for long runs building programs from foundering to national-class. All successful coaches are competitive, and many wear their intensity on their sleeves, but Calipari's ability to inspire young players ranks on the level of, yes, Pitino and Brown.

"I get him on him all the time because I want him to sit down and behave a little bit," says Brown, "but he is real, there's no question about that. The kids know that he cares, so they allow him to be emotional." If anything, pro coaching was too corporate for Calipari, pro players too mercenary, the pro season too densely packed. "You couldn't suffer," he says. "I want to suffer after a loss. I want to make sure that I'm sick about losing. In the NBA, there's no time to do that. It's on to the next game."

Like Brown, too, Calipari has won at unlikely places. Massachusetts when he arrived was an Atlantic 10 doormat offering little beyond the memory of Julius Erving's acrobatics. The Nets ranked with the Clippers as one of the NBA's most pathetic franchises. And since that championship-game loss, Memphis boasted only a brief stretch of mid-'80s glory under Dana Kirk, whose unseemly reign ultimately destroyed the program's credibility. In the years that followed, the school watched a once-powerful conference disintegrate around it. Nostalgic Tiger fans often forget that the position Calipari inherited had far less potential for national glory than Kirk did while battling Louisville, Virginia Tech, South Carolina and Cincinnati for Metro Conference honors.

Fortunately, Calipari had been there before. "When I started at UMass, we were selling recruits a dream, a vision, our enthusiasm," Calipari says. "We're saying, 'We're hoping to do this' – and then the other guy walks in and says 'We've taken 10 guys like you, and here's what we've done.'" Somehow, he managed to land enough talent that he was soon selling results, including the better part of two seasons ranked first in the nation. Much the same has happened here. "At the end of this year we'll have maybe eight of our guys in the NBA, and we've graduated 14 of 17," he says. "All of a sudden, you're either getting to the NBA or getting a degree. We're on national television as much as anyone. We win as many games as anyone."

The challenge is keeping a Conference USA program at championship-caliber level. Calipari acknowledges that he wasn't prepared to lose recruits before their freshman seasons. From the start at Memphis, he was able to attract top high-schoolers, but not a cadre of talented replacements behind them, as Duke or Kansas might have done. "You sign a kid, and all of a sudden he says – in June – 'I'm going pro,'" he says. "And when that kid is Amare Stoudemire, what do you do?"

He has adjusted. By spreading playing time over eight or nine players, Calipari has kept his blue-chippers fresh for tournament runs. Somehow, he's able to convince them that half a game is enough to impress NBA scouts. "It's points per minute, rebounds per minute," he says. "Rodney Carney played 36 minutes a game for us his junior year and really had no NBA team saying, 'I want this guy.' As a senior, he plays 26 minutes a game – eight games I didn't even start him! – and averages about the same number of points. And he's the 16th pick. We've been able to jump on that a little bit. Now it's our mantra. We say, 'Nobody needs to play 40 minutes a game.'"

As in recent years, Calipari has again augmented that powder-puff conference schedule – Conference USA landed exactly one NCAA berth last season: Memphis, which ran the league table – with formidable inter-sectional games, including Gonzaga, Arizona, Tennessee, Georgetown, USC and Oklahoma. Winning those would likely get the Tigers a No. 1 seed in the NCAA Tournament, Calipari knows, and set expectations for them to reach the Final Four for the first time in a generation.

* * *

It took time, but Calipari has found a red-sauce Italian restaurant in Memphis that reminds him of food back home. It's Conte's, downtown on Madison, and he eats there whenever he wants to feel like John from Moon Township, Pa., again, and not the most important sports personality in Memphis (an entire NBA franchise notwithstanding.) At 48, Calipari's hair is still dark and his demeanor is still youthful, a product of his restless energy. He talks in rapid-fire paragraphs, one reason he's so good on radio and television, and his slickness can come off as phony, the basketball coach as used-car-salesman, until you realize how painfully honest – and, occasionally, politically incorrect – his opinions tend to be.

On this August evening, it hasn't been long since Wake Forest coach Skip Prosser – another Pittsburgh-area product – suffered a heart attack and died. Calipari, less than a decade Prosser's junior and cut from much the same mold, can't help but take stock.

He'd seen Prosser shortly before, a fly-by sighting during the chaotic summer season that sends top coaches careering across the country from one high-school tournament to another, pushing themselves even harder than they do during the school year. Now he wonders about the toll the travel and intensity have taken on his life. "Erin was cheated," he says, motioning to his 20-year-old daughter daintily eating cannoli across the table. "She was one year old when I got the UMass job. And for the next five years, I was a basketball coach trying to absolutely survive. I was 24/7. It was just stupid. We need to have a way around it. It isn't normal."

But he's also starting to compute what all those recruiting trips and late-night film sessions have netted him. "Who have I affected in a positive way?" he asks. "What have I screwed up in different relationships?"

There's no escaping the fact that the hot, young coach of the early '90s hasn't won a national championship. He insists he'll be fine if he never wins, but even as he invokes John Chaney and Gene Keady as two superior coaches who never made a Final Four, the glint in his eyes tells you he's aiming higher. "To do well in March means that, as a coach, I did what I was supposed to," he says. "It means I had them inspired, fresh. I gave us the best opportunity to do something special. If that meant winning a national title one year, I'd be ecstatic. Obviously, to this point it hasn't."

For a city that has gained little national acclaim since Elvis, winning would be a paradigm-changing event. It might even alter the mindset of that peculiar class of civic curmudgeons here that Calipari has dubbed "The Miserables." "If we did something crazy here and won, I can't even imagine what it would do," he says. "Would a championship bring the pride that we deserve here? It would sure help."

A national championship would catapult the Tigers to a higher plane, and remove any lingering enticement for him to leave. There he'd sit, the coach who resurrected Memphis basketball, banished The Miserables, sent the vast majority of his seniors out with a degree, and won a title along the way. But even if it doesn't come, even if he leaves Memphis tomorrow, he will leave a program immeasurably better than he found, and not just in wins and losses. The Wall of Fame is testament to that. "A lot of guys coaching now aren't in it for the right reasons," Brown says. "I think John is. He's gotten better and better at understanding his responsibilities as he's gone on."

Calipari may have grown, but he insists that as a coach he hasn't changed. "We play the hardest schedule we can," he says, "we do whatever we can to get on television and get some exposure, and we graduate the kids." All in all, not a bad legacy to leave.

 
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