Does Calipari Want to Punch Forde In the Face?

Consider this a blind item that gained sight. Jason King of Yahoo! wrote a long piece on John Calipari yesterday, and buried inside 1,900-plus words on the new Kentucky coach’s off-season -- including the vacating of Memphis’ Final Four trips and several columnists questioning his basketball ethics –- came this quote:↵↵⇥There’s [one] guy I don’t like,” Calipari said. “I know he’s a scoundrel. If I keep reading it, I’m going to punch him right in his mouth if I see him. So I’m better [off] not reading it.” ↵↵↵King took the high road in his column, moving away from who this scoundrel is and going to the more important issues of Calipari’s on-the-record response to what happened at Memphis. “There is no response,” Coach Cal told King, invoking the age-old “my friends, the people that I’m close with ... they don’t need an explanation.”↵

↵↵The people in Memphis might. And while the crux of King’s column was Calipari’s move to Kentucky, SNY’s Adam Zagoria took a different nugget from the piece, wondering which scoundrel Coach Cal wanted to slug. Zagoria, on his popular zagsblog, wrote:↵

↵↵⇥John Calipari says he wants to punch a reporter “in the mouth,” and the guess here is that he’s referring to Pat Forde of ESPN.com. Calipari and Forde have a history, and so do Cal’s daughter and Forde. Both have called him out on Twitter, arguing that he has an axe to grind with Calipari. ↵↵↵There’s probably little doubt that Calipari was, in fact, talking about Forde. It’s seems odd, though, that a reporter like Zagoria would out Forde so publicly and definitively. Emails to Forde wondering if he’d now like to punch Zagoria in the face have gone unanswered at the time of publication. If Zagoria, who is actually a great guy, now wants to punch me in the face, I totally understand.↵

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