TAMPA, Fla. — I touched on this story a bit last year when Kentucky met Virginia in the 2010 Elite Eight (which you can read here), so I don’t want to get into a full story about it, but I thought I would at least post some quotes regarding the relationship between UK coach John Calipari and West Virginia coach Bob Huggins since the two are playing again Saturday.As most of you know, Calipari and Huggins have been longtime friends since their early coaching careers. When Huggins had a heart attack in 2002, it was Calipari who flew to Pittsburgh to stand by Huggins’ side. Both tell a slightly different version about what happened around the time when Huggins had the heart attack, but both can agree their friendship has stood the test of time and the battles of recruiting and basketball.Here is a transcript from all things Calipari-Huggins from Friday’s news conference. They also touch on Huggins’ domination of Calipari (the West Virginia coach is 8-1 against Calipari, including last year’s Elite Eight win over the Cats).West Virginia coach Bob HugginsQ. A lot has been made of your friendship with Cal, and I’m just curious, why do you think you guys hit it off?COACH HUGGINS: I don’t know. I’m struggling to find something that I really like about him.(Laughter). No, we — he played with one of my teammates in high school. He played with Joe Fryz. I’ve known John for a long, long time, long, long, long time, and we’ve been good friends for a long time.Q. Are there more similarities than differences between you two?COACH HUGGINS: No, he dresses, I choose not to. He buys expensive suits, mine stay in the closet. No, you know, I think what Cal and I have is from the time we were young is a great passion for this game. You know, John was the ultimate camp guy. He was at Five- Star, he was at all the camps and just loved being around the game. I kind of grew up in the gym, my dad being a high school basketball coach, and so I spent countless hours in the gym.Q. Absolutely, without a doubt. Could you clear up the heart attack ambulance story?There seem to be two versions: yours and Cal’s.COACH HUGGINS: Cal wasn’t there. (Laughter). I wasn’t going to tell it. Cal likes to tell it better than I do. Of course Cal wasn’t dying and I was. (Laughter). No, they come in and they kind of scooped me up off the sidewalk there in the Pittsburgh airport and put me in an ambulance and hooked me up, started pumping some morphine in me to slow everything down, and I’m kind of in and out of consciousness. I mean, I know I’m not doing very well, youknow. So I say to the EMT, I said, “How much longer?” And I was out, and I kind of woke up, and I said, “How much longer?” And he said, “Don’t worry, I’ve never lost a patient. You know, and I said to him, “I ain’t no old lady now. I know when I’m hurting. I’m not going to make it a lot longer.” So he says, “What’s the ETA?” And they said, “I don’t know, 22 minutes or something like that.” And I heard him say, “Abort, abort, abort.” And then I passed back out.When I woke up he was a lot more serious about it. He was — he kind of put his hand on myshoulder, he said, “Coach, I’m Cal’s cousin.” Now, Cal says it his nephew, but the guy said, “I’m Cal’s cousin. We’re not going to let you die until he beats you at least once.” And that’s the story.Q. He has beat you, though.COACH HUGGINS: I know. I don’t think he had then. I don’t think he had then. But what areyou trying to say, I can die now? (Laughter).Q. You and Cal go after a lot of the same guys. I was kind of wondering when one of you gets a guy or he gets a guy, just kind of wondering if that affects or changes anything or do you guys just keep going on about it?COACH HUGGINS: If I was upset with everybody that we recruited against, I wouldn’t have any friends. Everybody beats us. No, I mean, we — I think when you have mutual respect for each other, it’s — we recruited a guy against Andy Kennedy, and AK and I are very, very close, as you know. What are you going to do? He’s a heck of a guy, he takes care of his players, he does the right things.Q. Do you like coaching against John, and more to the point, is 9 and 1, is there any point at which you can needle him about it or he can needle you?COACH HUGGINS: If you would go back and look at the games, the games have been — Imean, we’ve just been lucky, that’s all. We’ve made some shots. We beat them in Memphis one time, I think it was a tie score, and we take a shot at the end of the shot clock, and we fortunately get the offensive rebound, my guy starts dribbling it out because he thinks we’re ahead and Cal’s guy jumps over and shuts him off to keep him from dribbling the ball back out to the top of the key so there’s nobody between him and the basket so he goes and lays it in. He didn’t realize we were up by two until they called time-out. I’m like, “What are you doing, man?” He said, “Coach, I thought we were ahead. I didn’t know what was going on.” It was a tie score, we win by two.Q. You don’t needle him?COACH HUGGINS: No, we’ll probably play again the next NCAA Tournaments, so why would I do that?UK coach John CalipariQ. A lot has been made about your friendship with Huggins —COACH CALIPARI: I can’t stand Bob Huggins.Q. He said the same thing. Why do you think you guys get along, competitive people?COACH CALIPARI: Well, we’re from the same neck of the woods. I remember him when he was at Walsh College. I remember him even before that when he’d come to the Pitt fieldhouse in the old day. No one got booed like Bob. I’m not even sure he was allowed in Duquesne’s building because he screamed at B.B. Flenory very hard one game if I remember right.Joe Fryz, who was a teammate of mine, ended up going to West Virginia and was a teammate of Bob’s. So I followed West Virginia closely because of Joe. You know, and I’ve just followed his career. I can remember him at Walsh when he was getting it done, and I can remember him at camps going up to him. I was still a counselor, and talking to him. Andour paths have crossed, and obviously we’ve stayed friends, and in this profession that’s not easy.Q. I was just kind of wondering with the relationship you and Bob have, does it put anykind of extra spin on it when you guys recruit against each other? For instance, like Devin a couple years ago, Doron this last year? Obviously you guys are close, but this is kind of a different spin.COACH CALIPARI: I don’t take recruiting personal. If the families decide that they want to play for another coach, whether it’s Bob or anybody else, I move on. I don’t take a whole lot of transfers. So when kids call and say I made a mistake, I’d like to come, I never take them. You get the first round and that’s it because we’ve moved on to other guys. I’ve never yelled at a coach or a player for not coming with me, and I wish you luck and hope you do well unless we play you and I hope we smash you if we play you. With Bob or anybody, I try real hard not to take this stuff personal, move on to the next young man who really wants to play for us or me personally.Q. Can you clear up a little bit of the legend here? Coach Huggins insists he knows thestory better because, A, he was there, and two, he was the one dying, but can you clear up the ambulance-nephew story?COACH CALIPARI: He was out cold, and he tells you he remembers everything? He was out.He knew something was wrong. He sat down on the curb at the Pittsburgh airport, and the ambulance comes up, and it’s my cousin. And he goes and figures out who it is, and we’re going to have to get my cousin because you know Bob does embellish. And he said, you know, “I’m Coach Calipari’s cousin and I’m here, you’re going to be fine.” And that’s when Bob said, “Oh, my gosh, I’m not making it.” But that was the scary thing. Let me just tell you. I can’t remember where I was, but I flew back to Pittsburgh because I heard about it because it was scary. You know, because he’s such a big, tough guy, which he’s a teddy bear, I mean, he’s not, but he comes across like he wants to fight — no, he does want to fight everybody, but he comes across — but reality is here’s a guy, June was there, family was there, and he had the paddles, you know. And he’s one of those guys that now he takes care of himself,he’s doing what he’s supposed to, and it was just scary for us and him and anybody that’s a friend or a friend of his family. But his story is my cousin hasn’t beaten you yet so you’ve got to live. Is that what it is?Q. Just one more question on you and Coach Huggins. You two guys, the one thing you have in common, you both built programs out of nothing. But on the other hand, very few people are neutral when it comes to you two guys. No Switzerlands. They love you; they hate you. Some people say we love this guy and other people say we don’t like the way they do things. Are you kind of kindred spirits with Bob that way?COACH CALIPARI: Look, you guys either put a black hat on some of us and you put a white hat on some of us and I’m not going to be able to fight it. I just do my job, take care of kids, Bob does the same, graduate our kids wherever we’ve been. We’ve helped them reach their dreams and develop habits that have helped them later on in life. They’ve all stayed in touch.I mean, at the end of the day, 50 years from now, what we’ve accomplished, Bob and myself, it’s there, and when there’s no emotion to it, you look at what we’ve done in the communities we’ve been, with the athletes we’ve had, the graduation rates we’ve had, what we’ve done on those college campuses, what we’ve done to give back, and people will judge us that way.Right now I’m just trying to win another ballgame. Can we win one more? That’s all I’m worriedabout.