LEXINGTON, Ky. – Erin Calipari is on her way to explain what it was like growing up in the enormous shadow of her famous father, Hall of Fame coach John Calipari, and how maybe she’s finally outrun it now that she runs her own neuroscience research lab at Vanderbilt University. Then she whips into the parking lot behind the wheel of the Coach Cal-mobile, a custom black-and-blue Ford Mustang with his autograph painted on one side.
Advertisement
“I know,” she says, laughing at the absurdity of this contradiction. “Narcissistic much? Who drives a car with their name on it?”
To be fair, she’s in town on this February day to give a lecture at the University of Kentucky and doesn’t have her own vehicle. The only available loaner in her parents’ driveway happens to be a pretty sweet ride given to them by a local dealership. And who’s she kidding anyway? There’s no escaping her father’s name and fame here. When she calls Central Bank with a question about her checking account and gets put on hold, the recorded message is startling: “This is John Calipari …”
“Why are you everywhere, Dad?” she says, shaking her head and rolling her eyes. “It is a strange, strange thing.”
But a helpful thing at times, too, like when you get a bad report card in high school and your always-in-demand father conveniently owns an autograph machine – yes, really – that you can slide a Sharpie into and a piece of paper under and voila! “It’s funny the teachers never caught on that Mom signed all the good stuff and Dad only signed when I was in trouble,” she says. “And by the way, he really signs most of his own autographs. I don’t know where he got that machine or why, but I think it was primarily used for my school papers.”
These surreal perks of having a millionaire dad, however, are offset by the challenges of having a father who is also one of the most polarizing figures in sports. Navigating your early social interactions – Do these kids really like me or are they just trying to sneak a peek at Coach Cal’s house? – and trying to block out the noise of his many detractors is no small feat while trying to establish your own identity. So Erin, the oldest of Calipari’s three children, pushed back.
“She did not want to be thought of as moving up because of him,” says Ellen, the family matriarch. “When she started applying to colleges, he’s like, ‘I can help you.’ She wanted nothing to do with that. And if she’d gotten in somewhere and found out he had something to do with it, she would not have wanted to go there. She’s always been fighting to be her own person, which just makes you even prouder.”
Advertisement
John Calipari has long said his dream is that someday, because of their own accomplishments, people will think of him as his kids’ dad instead of viewing them as his children. “In the science realm, we’re already there,” Erin says with a chuckle. “Most of my fellow nerds in the lab don’t have any idea who he is.”
The Calipari family story is an American Dream in four acts. John’s grandfather was an Italian immigrant who toiled in a coal mine. His dad was an airport baggage handler. He is a basketball coach, although that’s really underselling it considering his new 10-year, $86 million contract. And now one of his daughters is Dr. Erin Calipari, running the Calipari Lab at Vanderbilt, managing a team of researchers who are looking for areas in the brain that could be targeted with medications to curb drug addiction. Megan, the middle child, went to culinary school and now runs her own plant-based bakery business, Earthly Provisions. Brad, the baby, walked onto his dad’s team and graduated from UK in three years.
As Father’s Day gifts go, the above paragraph ain’t bad. But here’s another one: However much they’ve all tried to blaze their own trail – Brad actually tattooed the words “Earned Not Given” across his chest – Calipari’s kids ultimately do understand what a precious gift he’s given them. The gift of possibility.
“There’s no way in hell if he didn’t have the job he does that I would be here,” Erin admits. “What he did is amazing. He didn’t have anything, he had to fight for everything, and then he got it and it opened so many doors for me that he could never have anticipated. It opened up opportunities and we had to make the best of them, but they’re opportunities my dad didn’t have. He had to have student loans to go to school. When you have to take out loans, there are schools that get ruled out really quickly. My parents could not be cheaper, but they paid for my college education, and that’s the biggest thing they could’ve done.”
Erin went to the University of Massachusetts (where she played basketball), then got her doctorate at Wake Forest. Now at just 32 years old, she’s “like a decade younger than anyone else at my career stage.” And while, yes, her father put UMass on the map years before she enrolled, and yes, there’s a Calipari Room at the library there because her family donated a bunch of money, no, she doesn’t believe his name has vaulted her into such rare scientific air.
Advertisement
“My dad came to my dissertation defense, where I was using all this analytical chemistry and explaining this very complicated work on drug addiction, and he came up to me afterward and was like, ‘The only word I understood was cocaine. I’m going to tweet that!’ I was like, ‘Please do not tweet that,’ ” Erin says. “Most of my colleagues have parents who are PhDs or MDs or at the very least have some sort of graduate degree, but I don’t. So you come in as an outsider, not knowing how this world works. Look, I’m very privileged, but that doesn’t always translate in my field. There’s a political system you don’t understand at all. You’re like, ‘OK, this isn’t fair, because I have no idea what I’m supposed to say.’ ”
But this is where being Coach Cal’s kid did help Erin rise rapidly among her more pedigreed peers. When he burst onto the college basketball scene as a brash young coach at UMass in the early 1990s, his success (and a great deal of the vitriol toward him from others in the profession) was partially a byproduct of bucking the establishment. He said and did things that ruffled feathers, some of it expressly for that purpose: to let the old guard know there was a new kid on the block.
“When you don’t know how the system is supposed to work, you carve your own path, and if you do well, you stand out,” Erin says. “As a first-generation scientist, I never knew what I was supposed to be thinking, so it kind of liberated me to think a different way. Half the time it fails, and that’s OK. It either hasn’t been done because it just doesn’t work or it hasn’t been done because nobody else thought of it.”
(Left to right) John, Erin and Ellen Calipari. (Courtesy Erin Calipari)John Calipari has been working those unseen angles for three decades. Leaning on one-and-done talent to restock the roster every year used to be beneath the blue bloods in the sport – pearls don’t clutch themselves, after all – until Calipari won a national title with a bunch of young guns in 2012 and Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski quickly adopted that same approach and won the 2015 title with it.
“It’s really a trait he passed on,” Ellen says. “Erin is very much like John and always has been. Gotta be first, fastest, best. And don’t get in my way. She just has that same drive that he does, and I know he’s very proud of it.”
An inherited fighting spirit has frequently come in handy for Erin, Megan and Brad. Being Cal’s kids wasn’t always a walk in the park when they were young. He got fired by the New Jersey Nets while Erin was in grade school. His programs faced NCAA scrutiny at UMass before that and Memphis after. Megan was in school at Memphis when he left town for the Kentucky job and quickly transferred as the abuse piled up. She came to UK but bolted after an uncomfortable semester of stares and whispers. “It was harder for her,” Ellen says. “She needed to get away from everything.” Then Brad came along and welcomed the kind of hate you’d expect while playing for your famous father. He’s now weighing graduate transfer options.
“It’s really hard to be in my dad’s shadow, because he’s not just a basketball coach – he’s like a thing,” Erin says. “Your whole childhood, you’re trying to be an individual and figure out who you are as a person, but most people just go, ‘Oh, you’re his daughter!’ And it’s also weird because when something happens to him, that translates to you. If someone hates your dad, they hate you, and you’re like, ‘But you’ve never met me.’ In most social interactions, there are two people who don’t know each other and they learn about each other to form opinions. For us, they already have some ideas because of who my dad is, and not everybody paints the most beautiful picture of him.”
Advertisement
He might be ready to move on now, but for three years, Brad leaned into it. When opposing student sections made posters and unleashed chants mocking him and his father during pregame warm-ups on the road, he just grinned. When Kentucky fans griped that he wasn’t wearing team-issued gear on the bench during a redshirt season, he wore increasingly outrageous fashions – including a couple of T-shirts with taunting slogans.
Brad played three seasons at Kentucky for his father, John. (Brad Losness/USA Today Sports)“Brad is my favorite,” Erin says. “He just doesn’t care. He is who he is. When you get tortured your entire childhood for things you can’t control, you just stop caring. People are like, ‘Your dad sucks!’ and at some point you start to meet the kind of people who would say a thing like that to a kid and realize, ‘I don’t really want to be friends with you anyway.’ ”
There is one Brad-related topic, however, on which Erin agrees with the haters.
“Oh man, that tattoo,” she says. “Megan is this huge hippie, so she’s all, ‘Live your best life, Brad!’ But I’m like, ‘Seriously? You are going to regret this. I look forward to seeing the coverup job you’re going to do in 10 years.’ He doesn’t care. Seriously, I cannot tell you how little he cares what any of us think.”
Well, that’s not entirely true.
Asked before last season what drives him, Brad didn’t hesitate: “Really just to prove to that I’m built for this and I can do it, and that none of this was just given to me like a handout,” he said. “I think that was one of my dad’s goals, just to have all his kids understand that it takes a lot of hard work. Like Erin, she’s not the most brilliant girl in the world. Some people have that natural smart ability, but she had to really work at that.”
Erin might revoke his favorite-sibling status if what he said wasn’t so spot-on. Sure, there have been nice houses and luxury vacations and autograph machines and suped-up sports cars with her dad’s name on them along the way, but you can’t trade all those things – or leverage your father’s fame – in exchange for the keys to your own neuroscience laboratory and a meaningful role in the war on opioid addiction.
Advertisement
“You want your kids to be independent. You want them to have all the opportunities in the world, but you don’t want to give them so much that they can’t do things themselves. I see that a lot in my job,” she says. “In a school like Vanderbilt, there are the kids who worked really hard and then there are the kids whose parents really set them up to succeed. And not that those kids aren’t smart, but there’s a difference in the tenacity and motivation of those kids who feel like they don’t belong, the kids that are trying to show you, ‘I got here my way.’ That’s how my dad did it, and I think that example is the greatest gift he’s given us.”
(Top photo: Courtesy of Erin Calipari)
ncG1vNJzZmismJqutbTLnquim16YvK57kGlpcWhla3xzfJByZmluX2aBcMDHnmSpp6eav267xWamqaifp8G2usitsGabkaG2sa3Roqpmm5ieuaW%2BxKdkoZmmmnqzwc1mnaunnWK1qr%2BMrJ%2BanJ%2BserW7jKmsq6ulmnq1tMSiqWanp6N6pb7EmqSsZw%3D%3D