Mark J. Terrill / AP

John Calipari is 253-68 in nine years at Memphis and 446-139 overall.

Calipari’s ability to lure some of the nation’s best high school players — regardless of how long they plan on sticking around — has made him an attractive candidate for years.

He’s been able to fight off temptation for nearly a decade, but the chance to makeover one of college basketball’s elite programs proved to be too much.

Athletic director Mitch Barnhart stressed the need to find a coach who can handle all that comes with coaching the Wildcats. Calipari has never met a camera he didn’t like and certainly doesn’t lack confidence — two things Gillispie struggled with during his tenure.

Kentucky received permission to speak to Calipari on Monday, less than 72 hours after Gillispie was fired. Sensing the need to make a home-run hire after the Gillispie debacle, Calipari certainly has the resume and the charm to sate a rabid fan base.

But he also has some baggage. He led Massachusetts to the Final Four in 1996 only to have the school vacate the honor when star Marcus Camby admitted to receiving gifts from a sports agent.

Though Calipari has never been sanctioned by the NCAA, he’s been unable to shed the Camby mess. His hiring could raise some eyebrows from fans still smarting from the recruiting violations during the Eddie Sutton era 20 years ago that nearly wrecked the program.

Pitino swooped in to save Kentucky after Sutton left, taking the Wildcats to three Final Fours and a national title in eight years.

Neither Gillispie nor Smith duplicated that success, but neither had the charisma nor swagger of Calipari, who now finds himself working an hour east of Pitino.

The two have a long history dating back to when Pitino recommended Calipari for the head coaching job at UMass in 1988. Pitino’s Kentucky team beat Calipari’s UMass squad in the ’96 Final Four and the two have had a testy — at least on the floor — relationship ever since.

The rivalry really began when Pitino took over at Louisville in 2001 as the Cardinals and the Tigers fought with Cincinnati and Marquette for C-USA supremacy. Those three programs left for the Big East in 2005, and Memphis has since dominated the conference.

Memphis hasn’t lost a C-USA game since 2006, and the Tigers are the only program in the country to receive either a No. 1 or No. 2 seed in the NCAA tournament in each of the last four years.

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Mark J. Terrill / AP

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