Kentucky, Louisville end rhetoric, and tip it off

Associated Press

NEW ORLEANS

Kentucky coach John Calipari likes to say there are no rivalry games at this point in the season.

Try telling that to the Bluegrass State, where basketball’s version of the civil war — Kentucky vs. Louisville, winner plays for the NCAA title — has so divided the small state that senior citizens have come to fisticuffs.

“The fans take it as, whoever loses, it’s their funeral, really,” Louisville senior guard Chris Smith said. “It’s really cut-throat, I would say.”

It’s the fifth time top-seeded Kentucky (36-2) and fourth-seeded Louisville (30-9) have met in the NCAA tournament. They split the previous four meetings.

“It all started with the racial lines in Kentucky,” Louisville coach Rick Pitino said of the rivalry. “Now [it’s] no longer racially motivated. It’s just pure hatred.”

It’s a given that Louisville and Kentucky would be rivals, their campuses a mere 70 miles apart in a state where basketball is king. To hear fans of both schools tell it, however, the programs might as well be on different planets.

Kentucky is a college basketball blue blood, its seven national titles second only to UCLA, while Louisville has a nice little tradition going with two national titles.

Big Blue counts most of the state among its fan base, too, while Louisville isn’t necessarily even No. 1 in its own city.

In fact, about the only thing the two schools have in common is Pitino, who led the Wildcats to one national title and two other Final Four appearances in eight years at Kentucky.

Forget that engendering any warm-and-fuzzy goodwill with the Kentucky folks, however. Now that Pitino isn’t theirs, Kentucky fans hate him, too.

But the bad blood has been simmering for generations.

Kentucky never scheduled in-state schools under coach Adolph Rupp, and former assistant Joe B. Hall dutifully followed suit when he took over as coach. Gov. John Y. Brown stepped in following their matchup in the 1983 NCAA Mideast Regional finals, now known around the state as The Dream Game, and told the schools to start playing each other.

Try as they do to rise above the nitpicking, even UK coach John Calipari and Pitino can’t resist the fray.

Both coaches were reminded Friday about a comment Calipari made back in October about Kentucky’s uniqueness, which sure sounded like it was a slap at Louisville.

“There’s no other state, none, that’s as connected to their basketball program as this one,” Calipari said then. “Because those other states have other programs.”

Asked about that exact comment Friday, Calipari said, “I didn’t say that,” explaining that what he meant was Kentucky fans are scattered across every inch of the state while Cardinals fans are more concentrated in and around Louisville.

“We sleep with the enemy in Louisville,” Pitino acknowledged.