Gary Parrish is the well-known national college basketball writer and commentator who now works for CBS Sports. His Eye On College Basketball Podcast is producing episodes as part of a Summer Shootaround series looking at major offseason topics and points of focus. He put together an Arkansas episode last week with Kyle Tucker, a basketball writer and editor at 247Sports who is the director of college basketball content at 247. Tucker formerly worked at The Athletic, serving as the Kentucky beat writer during John Calipari’s tenure in Lexington.
The show runs 37 minutes, so there was and is a lot to think about. We’re not going to recap the whole show. You should give it a listen and absorb its many details for yourself. We’re going to spend a few articles on the show, looking at one topic at a time. In this article, we’re going to focus on a story Parrish told about his time as the Memphis basketball beat writer for the main Memphis daily paper, the Commercial-Appeal. Parrish credits that job with giving him the springboard into his current national job at CBS and the higher profile it carries.
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Parrish explained that unlike the swarm of beat writers who covered Kentucky, since that’s a blue-blood program which draws intense interest from many media markets, the Memphis beat in the pre-Kentucky times was not an overwhelming scene. Anything but, in fact. Parrish was essentially the one guy who regularly attended Calipari’s Memphis press conferences and practices. He received a lot of access. Calipari wasn’t dealing with a large bunch of writers; it was usually just Parrish, occasionally a few others.
Though Parrish and Calipari weren’t buddy-buddy, they were close in the sense that Calipari wanted to market the Memphis program and Parrish was his vehicle for doing that. In the process of trying to build Memphis as much as he could – and Calipari certainly did a magnificent job, leading the Tigers within an eyelash of the 2008 national championship – Calipari was focused on maximizing time.
Parrish relayed the simple but telling story of Calipari allowing Parrish to ask questions to him while he was in the shower, on the other side of the curtain four feet away. Calipari thought he might as well knock down an interview while showering so that he could maximize the amount of time he had available for that day. It’s a look inside the mind of a coach who wasn’t so self-conscious that he couldn’t or wouldn’t save a handful of minutes if the opportunity presented itself. It’s no wonder Calipari grew into the Hall of Fame coach he is.
