Want an excuse to feel warm and fuzzy about Coach Calipari?

John Calipari’s reputation as a basketball coach gets insulted on a pretty regular basis. People that stop short of calling him a “cheater” say he bends the rules to favor himself, regularly going against the spirit behind them.

I’m not going to get into defensive mode about Calipari, because those who have formed their opinions won’t be changing anytime soon. I will, though, say that I believe John Calipari is a quality person outside the world of basketball. The importance of his family to him is well known and not an act.

There is an article in the Providence Journal today about John Calipari that is further proof that he is the kind of person anyone would be lucky to call a friend, and not just because of his connections in the basketball world. You see, Calipari was in Taunton, Massachusetts this weekend for a baptism of an old friend. I encourage you to read the article, but here’s an excerpt (HT to Buzz Baker’s Twitter).

Also on the altar was Kristin Ford holding her baby, another woman, and a dark-haired man in a dark suit whose back was to me.

I didn’t think anything about it until he turned around and I saw that it was Calipari.

What exactly was going on here?

What was Calipari doing?

I knew that Jersey used to occasionally sit on the UMass bench when Calipari was there, and his son Greg was one of Calipari’s student managers for a year. I knew that he and Father Jay often made the ride to UMass in those days.

But that had been long ago and far away, more than a decade ago. And in that time Calipari has gone from a coaching star on the rise to the height of his profession, the newly named coach at Kentucky, one of the most prized jobs in all of college sports. And this was a Sunday afternoon in June, far away from his new Kentucky home.

“Kristen asked me to be one of the godparents of her child, and I wanted to be here for her,” he said.

It seems that Kristen Ford has remained in touch with Calipari, ever since meeting him when she was just a kid. A note here, a note there. And Calipari always responded.

“I wanted her to know that she made the right choice when she decided to keep the baby,” he said. “I wanted her to know that I supported that choice. And when she called me up and asked me to do this I said, ‘I’m there.’”

In many ways Calipari’s become the poster child for the contemporary college basketball coach –– polished, slick, able to talk a dog off a meat wagon. Success follows him around like an afternoon shadow, and there should be no doubt in anyone’s mind that he’s going to win big at Kentucky. He is a star in ways that would have been unimaginable when he first came to UMass, in 1988, everything all ahead of him.

But in many ways he’s never forgotten where he’s come from, and the people who helped him along the way.