NEW ORLEANS — No one wants to believe John Calipari, because there is a monkey on the back of every man who has failed to win The Big One.
And John Calipari hasn’t won The Big One.
And if Calipari thinks finishing second is good enough, then he’s coaching the wrong team in the wrong place.
On the eve of The Kentucky-Kansas Big One, he sounded like the anti-Vince Lombardi: Winning isn’t everything and it isn’t the only thing.
Except in Lexington, Ky., for better or for worse, it is.
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He has the best players and the better team, and almost every time John Wooden had the best players and the better team he won The Big One.
Calipari is not Wooden, because no one is. But Calipari should have won The Big One four years ago with Memphis but blew a nine-point lead with 2:12 left in regulation and lost to Bill Self and Kansas in overtime.
So Calipari was asked: Is there immense pressure on you?
“Nah, I was dancin’ in the breakfast room this morning, I’m fine,” Calipari said. “This isn’t about me. I’m good. My whole thing is how do I get my team to play at their best? How do we combat what Kansas is gonna do to us? That’s my whole thought process, and when this thing’s all over, we’ll look at it.”
Then Calipari interrupted the questioner as soon as he heard the word legacy.
“I’m not worried about it,” Calipari said. “If my legacy is decided on one game? It won’t be me deciding it, it’ll be everybody else. … I’m just trying to coach a game and do the best job I can for these kids.”
A little later, there was this question: Is it possible that winning would mean more to you than your (NBA-bound) marquee players?
“It means a lot to my family and my friends and people that care about me. … I’m telling you, I’m not worried about it,” Calipari said. “And here’s why: If I do right by these kids, if I make sure it’s about players first, if I make sure everything I do demanding that they do the right things, that they create good habits, demanding that they understand that you have to sacrifice for each other, it’s about us. … They will drag us where we want to go.
“Now, whether it’s [tonight] or some other time … I believe it’ll happen, but maybe it won’t. Now let me ask you something — what if it doesn’t and we’re knocking at the door all these times, and 50 of these kids go on to their professional careers, the others graduate and do well in the real world, but these 50 that go on to the NBA? We just changed 50 lives of families that cycles have changed. Now if I look back on that and I’m disappointed because I didn’t win that game … then I’m not being truthful to them. It was more about me than them. Early in my career? Yeah. I’m old now. Now it starts changing. It’s not about me, it’s about everybody else.”
He talked about his immigrant grandparents coming through Ellis Island and how blessed he is to coach at Kentucky.
“Yeah, you know, it’d be nice,” Calipari said. “But my friends and family are praying. … I’m not. If I keep doing right by the kids, good things will happen for all of us.”
The last time he got to The Big One, he didn’t call timeout to set his defense after Derrick Rose sank the second of two free throws with 10 seconds left and Kansas’ Mario Chalmers hit a 3-pointer with 2.1 seconds left to force overtime.
“I have never looked at that tape,” Calipari said. “That tape was flung out the door of the bus as we were going to the plane. So I have never looked at that tape, nor will I.”
The plan was to foul Chalmers at midcourt.
“At the end of the day we had a nine-point lead, I gotta figure something out — go shoot the free throws myself, do something — to get us out of that gym,” Calipari said, “and I didn’t.”
Good for him that he cares about his kids. Most coaches do. In Ruppville, they are looking for more tonight than a duel between Coach Self and Coach Selfless.
They are salivating for John Calipari to Win The Big One. And no matter what he says, he is too.
steve.serby@nypost.com