Mike Celizic

Unless you’re a Memphis fan, you can’t blame John Calipari. We are, most of us, little better than moths, inexorably drawn to the brightest flame. And there are few flames in college basketball brighter than the one that envelops the office of the head coach at the University of Kentucky.

How does anyone say no to that offer? It would be like the manager of the Kansas City Royals turning down the Yankees’ job because he really likes K.C., like a television anchor in Cincinnati scorning a job with network news, a state senator refusing a nomination to run for the U.S. Senate.

We can wish that coaches and athletes weren’t like the rest of us, that they would be happy to stay in the towns they’ve brought joy to and not scamper off every time a bigger job with a mammoth paycheck presented itself. But it doesn’t work that way. We all know that.

And yet Calipari will be strung up in some quarters for abandoning Memphis, where he has become the biggest thing to hit town since the blues. He’ll be pilloried for chasing the money — $2.5 million just for his signature and as much as $31.65 million for eight years of sideline histrionics.

If anything, blame the University of Kentucky officials for sending the message — no matter how unintentional — that even in these hard economic times, money is no object. In a huge bid for a big-name coach, the Wildcats are paying Calipari while still owing the last coach, Billy Gillispie, his buyout money. And they are paying Memphis $200,000, too.

It’s too bad that the big time had to come with such a big payout. Earlier this month, Kentucky’s board of governors voted to raise tuition next year 5 percent — the maximum allowed by state law. The explanation that a winning basketball program pays for itself in ticket sales and increased alumni contributions isn’t something most hard-strapped Americans want to hear.

If Calipari has any public relations sense, he’d announce that he’s going to give 10 or 20 percent of his salary to an academic endowment. It shouldn’t be that Joe Paterno is one of the only coaches who’s given a big chunk of his swag back to the university that made it all possible.

That’s probably asking too much.

Besides, if he brings the glory days back to Kentucky, the alumni and the student body won’t care what he makes. Long ago they got accustomed to winning, and that’s a taste that once acquired is impossible to kick.

And it’s impossible to blame Calipari for flying to the glitter that is Kentucky. This is one of the greatest stages — and greatest challenges — in his line of work. He reportedly said the decision to leave Memphis was the hardest of his life. On a conscious level, that’s probably true, but I’d be beyond shocked if it was on a subconscious level. Once he started making phone calls seeking guidance and talking to friends, the decision was made. He just had to justify it.

Funny, isn’t it, how so many coaches describe similar emotions and yet they all almost invariably fly to the flame? If the decisions were that difficult, you’d expect half the coaches to stay where they are and half to follow the money, but they don’t. It suggests there really isn’t a choice at all, jut a process of rationalization.

I’ve argued in similar situations before that the coach who truly wants a challenge would stay with the smaller, less famous program and build something that will last forever. That is, after all, how all great programs arose. They weren’t created from the primeval clay in the third chapter of Genesis. Someone came along and built something that then took on a life of its own.

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Michigan wasn’t special in football until Fielding Yost showed up more than a century ago and built a mighty program. Notre Dame was more obscure than George Mason until Knute Rockne built a legendary program on the foundation laid by Jesse Harper. Kentucky is a legendary basketball program because Adolph Rupp made it so. UCLA exists because of John Wooden. And so on.

In the old days, a coach found a place he liked and stayed there for decades, building the programs that others would lust to coach after they left.

It still happens, although very rarely. The prime living example is Jim Calhoun, who took over at UConn when none of the students could even find the field house, because nothing had ever happened there worth watching. When he finally retires, he’ll leave a program that will have attained legendary status.

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Memphis could have been like that — had Calipari stayed. But he didn’t. After a lifetime of coaching mid-majors — UMass, Memphis, the New Jersey Nets — he wants to taste the big time.

The Wildcats wanted Calipari. And there was no way he was turning them down.

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