Mike DeCourcy

It is pure chaos here in the window booth at the Blues City Cafe. This ought to be a simple interview disguised as a Beale Street lunch, but the confusion that started when I left my digital recorder back home and had to buy a new one before speaking with Memphis coach John Calipari only escalates once the conversation begins. Calipari moves around five pink packets of Sweet'N Low on the table. He periodically looks to assistant John Robic for affirmation. He stops when the waitress brings him salad and later a plate of spicy steak. He tries to talk through periodic interruptions from his son, Bradley, who wants to go play video games at a buddy's house.

Calipari, breezing through a crash course on his dribble drive motion offense, clearly thrives on commotion.

Sure, but what about me?

Back in the fall, Calipari and the offense's originator, Vance Walberg of Pepperdine, did a full weekend clinic for basketball coaches trained to understand the entire language. At the cafe, we run out of time after 44 minutes, 22 seconds, and I wonder if some edition of that Rosetta Stone software might have helped make things decipherable.

"I know your head is spinning," Calipari says.

Well, it would help if I could see it.

The dribble drive motion offense is like the Yangtze River dolphin or a black hole in space. You know it exists in theory and maybe a few people have observed one, but the rest of us pretty much have to take their word for it. Having watched Memphis play four games in person this season, a total of perhaps 320 possessions, I've caught fewer than a dozen glimpses of the Tigers' preferred offensive scheme, a high-energy approach that involves constantly driving the ball into the heart of the defense and repeating those drives until the defense is overwhelmed and yields either a layup or an open 3-point shot. Partly out of wisdom but mostly out of fear, opponents employ every means at their disposal to prevent the undefeated Tigers from using it.

So while his son doused a couple of fried fish fillets in ketchup and busied himself cleaning the plate, I tried to wrap my brain around how it all works. If Calipari ever gets to use this offense in a game, it might just win him a national title.

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The conversion
If a dog really does resemble its master, it is surprising it took Calipari so long to discover this approach. He always has talked fast, thought fast, moved fast. A little more than a decade ago, when he was young, brash, handsome and blessed with a full head of dark hair and a last name ending in a vowel, many in the media derisively referred to him as a "Rick Pitino clone." That was laughable. Calipari's teams played slow. Having learned most of his basketball serving as a low-level staffer for Larry Brown at Kansas, and having established himself as a big-time coaching prospect under Paul Evans at Pitt, Calipari directed teams at Massachusetts that controlled the ball and guarded the lane as if it were paved with diamonds. Not Pitino basketball at all.

This worked beautifully with the rugged players Calipari recruited to UMass. His teams went 11-5 in NCAA Tournament games in the mid-1990s, reached the 1996 Final Four and helped land him a lucrative NBA job with the New Jersey Nets. However, this approach was not working as well with the less physical players he began collecting upon becoming Memphis' coach in March 2000. In his first five seasons, the Tigers won a single NCAA Tournament game.

He needed a fresh approach, something that would empower the long, athletic players the city of Memphis produces and the University of Memphis attracts. Calipari stumbled upon it by chance. When Walberg was visiting a friend who worked for the Memphis Grizzlies, the two were introduced. They talked awhile, talked some more, and next thing you knew, Calipari was trading in his fundamentalist principles for contemporary flash. Since making the switch before the 2005-06 season, Memphis is 81-8.

"Larry said to me — exaggerating a little — 'You won a thousand games playing the way we always played. Now you're listening to a junior college coach and you're going to throw all that away?' " Calipari says. "But we've been even better since."