By Larry Vaught

LEXINGTON — Kentucky basketball has never been promoted the way John Calipari is doing, and may never be again.

Kentucky’s new coach is everywhere. And it’s far more than just recruiting.

He’s on TV. He’s on radio. He’s visiting the governor. He’s doing newspaper interviews.

Plus, he’s innovative and open to new ideas.

* The coach has suggested possibly having his first Midnight Madness at Commonwealth Stadium next year so 70,000 or more Kentucky fans can attend to get their first official look at his team.

While the idea seems a bit preposterous, don’t laugh. There’s no way Rupp Arena will hold all the Big Blue faithful that will want to be there.

“I am usually outside of the box where you just shake your head and leave and say, ‘This guy is out of his mind.’ I would like to do it on the football stadium and you get 70,000 people there and have the weather be perfect and have Ashley Judd come and Justin Timberlake and other celebrities come and you make it an hour and a half of fun,” Calipari said.

“The thing is on the players though. I don’t like doing the rapping and the dancing and all that. Look, we are going to do some drills; you are going to see them play and introduce them and that is it. It is about them, not them being stupid. It is seeing them.

“Weather wise, you put a court down and all of a sudden it might rain. There are some things that are going on. I am throwing it at the athletic department to say will it work. What happens if it is nice and then it gets bad? Can we then go down to Rupp? How do you do that? It is harder than you think, but I let everyone else deal with the hard stuff and I come up with the ideas.”

Will it work? Probably not because of the threat of stormy weather. But just floating the idea out there created a huge buzz about UK basketball.

* He’s a national coaching leader in using Twitter, the latest social networking craze, to communicate with fans. In less than three weeks, he had 25,000 fans following his tweets.

“Twitter takes me about four minutes a day,” he said.

But that’s not enough. He says UK will have a “Web page to end all Web pages” in about two weeks.

“There will be some video, some phone calls. There is no filter. Here is who I am. That is the greatest thing about this. What I have out is that they (fans) want to know and be part of it (UK basketball) and I love it,” Calipari said. “Twitter takes me about four minutes a day. The Web will have a content manager and will take me about five minutes.

“That way I can still coach and recruit. I don’t have to fund raise. I don’t have to sell tickets here. I can coach basketball.”

He can coach, but just being willing to tweet shows a connect with UK fans that former coach Billy Gillispie didn’t have and I’m really not sure either Rick Pitino or Tubby Smith would have embraced communicating like this either.

* He’s serious about wanting to have open practices, something that has not happened at UK in over 25 years.

“I want to have open practices, but I can see having 9,000 people coming. I want to make them (practices) open to the media. I have no problem with that,” he said. “As long as people are not trying to create their own image of what this program is, I have no problem. I never closed practice at Massachusetts or Memphis. We had people 75 years old walking in. We had students come in and watch. It is not brain surgery.”

* Calipari wants to eventually recruit a Chinese player to Kentucky and would like to keep at least one Chinese coach here with him this season.

“I would love to recruit a player there (in China),” Calipari, who will spend a week in China in June doing camps and clinics, said. “I am trying to set it up so their coaches can watch our clinic (at Kentucky).”

He said he’s already talked to UK president Lee Todd about helping recruit Chinese students to UK as well as potentially bringing a basketball player here because that would expand UK interest to cities like San Francisco, Chicago, Los Angeles, Seattle and New York that have large Asian populations.

“We will probably bring over 15 Chinese coaches to spend a week with us. I have done it the last two years,” he said.

* He’s going to involve former players in the program more than any coach since Joe Hall.

“I want to do a fantasy camp with former players,” the coach said.

Participants 35 and over would stay in Wildcat Lodge and get to play in Rupp Arena. He wants to have former UK  like Dan Issel and Pat Riley come to coach teams.

“We will get former players that maybe are in the league (NBA) to come back. I want to have all the guys back for this,” Calipari said.

Yet he also wants to help former players who did not finish their degree return to UK to do so. He’s already had Wayne Turner and Ron Mercer tell him they would like to do that.

“I think it is important for all of them to know we are not just asking you to do stuff for us. This whole place was built on those players. It’s going to be a players’ first deal here,” Calipari said.

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