New Kentucky basketball coach John Calipari spent so much time traveling the state to spread the gospel of his Wildcat team the last two months, he felt as if he were running for political office. Now that preseason practice has begun, the man hired to revive one of the country's most successful programs is back in his element."I told everyone to clear my schedule and let me coach basketball," Calipari said Thursday at the Southeastern Conference basketball media summit. "It's what I want to do and it's why I've come here."
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Calipari took teams from Massachusetts (1996) and Memphis (2008) to the Final Four and has averaged 26 wins over 17 college seasons. He adds coaching star power to a league that has sagged nationally the last two seasons and gives hope to a Kentucky team that bounced coach Billy Gillispie last spring after missing the NCAA tournament for the first time in 18 years.
Armed with returning all-conference forward Patrick Patterson and reinforced with a talented freshman class, analysts have made Kentucky the preseason favorite to win the SEC. Some see the Wildcats as legitimate championship contenders.
"It's nice that they respect the program and the players but we've got to create our own happiness and we can't buy into what anybody else says," Calipari said. "I call that drinking the poison."
Among Calipari's observations:
•On the difference between the first hectic months at Kentucky and his early days in Memphis: "(In Memphis) I didn't have 890,000 Twitter followers and I didn't have 60,000 on Facebook who know everything that I do. There I traveled the city. Here I travel the state."
•On how quickly the Wildcats are taking to his dribble-drive offense and pressure defense: "It's like coaching Martians. You're talking to young players who have never defended. Offensively, it's a total change from what they've ever done. I have to keep yelling at them to shoot the ball."
•On his offensive schemes: "Everybody talks about the dribble-drive but it's Princeton on steroids. All five guys are moving. Instead of Princeton's pass, pass, we're going to score 50, we're trying to score 90. But it's the same idea."
•On his defensive philosophy: "We should lead the nation in blocked shots. If we don't, we're not getting after it. Defense takes great discipline and great trust "
Calipari said it was possible freshmen guards John Wall and Eric Bledsoe and forward DeMarcus Cousins might all start. Wall was one of the nation's most hotly recruited players and is projected as a lottery pick should he declare for the NBA draft next season. He follows Derrick Rose and Tyreke Evans in Calipari's line of premier point guards, both of whom left for the NBA after one season at Memphis.
"Derrick Rose prepared me for Tyreke Evans who has prepared me for John Wall," Calipari said. "John right now is probably farther along than they were."
Asked if he had adjusted to the notoriety and adulation that follows the man who coaches Kentucky, Calipari cautioned patience.
"We haven't lost yet," he said. "The minute we lose a game, they're going to question the dribble drive. It's kind of like they've been sad for awhile and now they feel hope so they're going nuts."
Big 12:
Short-term, Bill Self said Thursday, a rocky offseason did Kansas' basketball program and its image little good.
Long-term, the Jayhawks' coach said it may make a gifted team — likely to open the season No. 1 — better.
"Unfortunately, it was a distraction we had to deal with. Fortunately, it was a distraction we dealt with before the season started," Self said during the Big 12 Conference's season preview in Kansas City, Mo. "… If anything, we'll be more disciplined. We'll be more responsible. And if you have that combination along with good players, I think that can make for some fun.
"I see it as being a positive over time."
With two national player-of-the-year candidates in point guard Sherron Collins and center Cole Aldrich, the return of every other player of note from a 27-win team and one of the nation's most celebrated recruits in guard Xavier Henry, Kansas is a unanimous pick to win the Big 12.
That promise was clouded, however, by a series of off-the-court incidents: a midsummer flap over comments by Henry's father, fighting between several players and members of KU's football team and a driving-under-the-influence charge against junior guard Brady Morningstar.
Morningstar, the Jayhawks' most accurate three-point shooter, is suspended from first-semester games. Prosecutors agreed Thursday to dismiss the charges if he stays trouble-free for the next year.
Self said the mini-run of trouble should chasten his players, move them to steer clear of the next chance of trouble.
"I don't thin this is going to be a high-maintenance team," he said. "And I think it'll (require) less maintenance after what we've been through than what it would have been if we hadn't gone through that."
Home and home?
The state's Huskies and Bulldogs are at it again. Washington wants to renew its heated, high-profile rivalry with Gonzaga — at Seattle's KeyArena. Gonzaga says no way, not unless the games are played on each school's campus
Bulldogs athletic director Mike Roth said Wednesday night from Spokane that while he thinks renewing the cross-state series that began in 1910 but has been dormant since December 2006 is a good thing for the state and the Northwest, "it is a series that should be equitable for botSecrets, comedian Chris Rock declares slyly, are bad for the human spirit. That's why he's gleefully talking out of school in his new documentary, Good Hair, which has some people rolling in the aisles and others rolling their eyes.
In Good Hair, Rock sets out to explore the historically fraught concept of "good hair," which for African Americans burdened by the twin legacies of slavery and racism has traditionally been defined as hair more like white people's. Do black women, he wonders, spend countless hours and hundreds of dollars in hair salons to make their hair straighter and silkier because they want to lookwhite?
In following his search for answers, the movie manages to be at once funny, fascinating and heartbreaking. But it also has spurred unprecedented conversations among whites and blacks about … hair.
HER STORY: What did our reporter's om say when she went natural?
VIDEO: Watch the 'Good Hair' trailer
"When it comes to hair, we're still living in segregated America," says Lori Tharps, 37, a Temple University journalism professor and co-author with Ayana Byrd, 35, a Glamour magazine editor, of Hair Story: Untangling the Roots of Black Hair in America. "The hair salon on Saturdays is right up there with church on Sundays as the most segregated place in America."
White people don't know much about black people's hair, and blacks don't want to talk about it, or at least not with whites, they say. Thus the secrecy about hair.
And that's the way it always has been — until Good Hair, which opened in select cities two weeks ago and goes wide today. Now everybody is talking — on Oprah, on Tyra, on Today, in Essence magazine, in scores of workplaces and salons, in numerous Internet blogs and around countless virtual water coolers as Rock travels the country promoting and defending the movie.
"Secrets will rot the soul," Rock says. "They're good for no one. Unless you're planning a surprise party or something."
'Old-school journalism'
Surprise, surprise — Rock, 44, has turned out to be a pretty good reporter, in addition to being a comedian/actor/awards-show host. Who knew the guy wanted to be Edward R. Murrow? He's thinking of doing more documentaries.
"I miss old-school journalism," he says. "Nobody plays anything down the middle anymore.
Rock says he was surprised by what he found out about hair. "I knew women wanted to be beautiful, but I didn't know the lengths they would go to, the time they would spend — and not complain about it," he says. "In fact, they appear to look forward to it."
As the movie opens, Rock says in the voice-over that he decided to investigate the meaning of good hair after his little daughter asked him one day, "Daddy, why don't I have good hair?" Now where did she get that idea?
So he visits hair salons, where women get their heads slathered with toxic goop (known as "creamy crack") to "relax," or straighten, their hair. He watches as they sit for hours getting their hair braided or a "weave" of hair extensions that can cost $1,000. He helps a scientist demonstrate what the relaxer chemicals can do to an aluminum can (it's not pretty), observes a wacky hair show contest and travels to India to see where the hair in extensions comes from. (Indian women shave their heads and donate their hair in a religious ritual; the hair is later sold by Asian-owned companies.)
He interviews black women (including actresses Nia Long, Raven-Symoné and Tracie Thoms) about their funny/painful hair stories. He interviews black men about their funny/painful experiences of sex with women with weaves. (Don't touch the hair!) To make a satiric point that no one wants black people's hair, he gathers some up and tries to peddle it on the streets of Los Angeles — and gets no takers. All this is framed by a hairstyling competition, a Las Vegas-style show for hair, held twice a year in Atlanta by the Bronner Bros., a leading black hair products company.
Pressure to conform
For many white people, Good Hair will be revelatory as well as entertaining. For many black people, it's not news; what is new is that Rock is talking about it — in a movie aimed at the mainstream.
"Some people are saying: 'You're putting all of our business into the street. Why are you pulling the curtain back?' " says Chris-Tia Donaldson, 30, a Chicago lawyer and author of Thank God I'm Natural — The Ultimate Guide to Caring for and Maintaining Natural Hair, aimed at black women or mothers of black children who want to go natural. "The deeper issue continues to be glossed over, which is why do minority women in America feel so much pressure to conform to a mainstream standard of beauty that is hard to attain?"
Derek J, 27, an Atlanta stylist who is in the movie as the winner of the hairstyling competition, says some of his clients who have seen the movie or heard about it are upset. "They're saying he's attacking black women and their hair choices, but he's not," he says. "I tell them go see (the movie) because I'm in it!"
Jason Griggers, 40, another Atlanta stylist in the movie, who is white, hopes the movie will help break down walls between races.
"More dialogue is better than no dialogue," he says. "When I started (going to Bronner Bros.), there was only a tiny handful of white people there, and now it's much more integrated."
Some reviewers say Good Hair is the best thing Rock has ever done; critics of the movie complain he failed to provide any context for women's hair choices. For instance, there's a movement among black women to let their hair go "natural," but Rock doesn't address that. Nor does he point out that women of all races and ethnicities have issues with their hair and try to change it.
"I feel like I'm living O.J. all over again," says Tharps, sighing. "The mainstream media are saying it's fantastic, it's groundbreaking, it's a wonderful picture into African-American culture. On the Internet, opinion ranges from it didn't go far enough to pure anger and 'I'm never watching Chris Rock again because he made black women a laughingstock.' "
Getting it out there
But even those who have issues with Good Hair aren't condemning the film entirely, and they hesitate to dis Rock himself because, well, everybody loves Chris. He is applauded for at least raising the subject. "I love that there's a film dedicated to hair; I just wish there had been more context," says Byrd.
Alynda Wheat, a senior writer for Entertainment Weekly, wrote a column about where Rock went wrong ("Reason 2: $1,000 at the salon? Get real."). She says Rock deserves credit for "introducing a conversation that's so important, it reached the White House," home to two black women, Michelle Obama and her mother, Marian Robinson, who wear straightened hair, and girls Malia and Sasha, who don't.
But Wheat rejects the notion that hair choice these days is a political statement or a sign of racial insecurity. "I have absolutely no desire to be white, and no one I know sits down in a stylist's chair because they want to be white," she says. "If you're going to educate people about something, it should be representative of a larger whole than just some actresses or one crazy shop where a weave costs $1,000."
Rock responds that the only thing he's attacking is the alarming practice of putting toxic relaxer chemicals on toddlers' hair. He says that the movie isn't about what white women do with their hair and that he personally thinks all hair is good hair. He doesn't believe he's spilling the beans by talking about hair.
"Is it really a secret?" he asks. "These products are sold at any drugstore. You can walk by any beauty parlor and look through the window, and it's all being done out in the open."
But he has been on Oprah twice, the first time to promote the film, the second time to respond to critics of the film. Mikki Taylor, beauty and cover editor for Essence, which put Long and Good Hair on its November cover, gathered a roundtable of black women, including Long, to talk about hair and self-esteem. She says it's a "good thing" that everybody is talking about the subject, but the old concept of "good hair" is antiquated and no longer relevant to most black women, especially young women.
"Good hair now is healthy hair," she says. "When will our hair cease to be political? Every other group of women can do what they want with their hair, and it's not seen as making a statement. We're over that, and we wish everyone else would be over it, too."
Someday, Byrd says, little black girls are going to be able to decide that whatever they want to do with their hair is the same as deciding what kind of earrings to put on or what dress to wear.
"The point is not to say hair is good or bad, it's to say that once we work through the history behind our hair, we can get to a place where it can just be hair." h schools. I have always believed it is a game best played on the two campuses."
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