Column: Big Blue Madness continues Calimania

I wasn’t around for Beatlemania. It sure sounded like fun, though.

Hysterical fans waiting at airports, crying. Hysterical fans watching The Beatles in concert, crying.

Hysterical fans drooling over every word of print and second of broadcast with any regard to their beloved Fab Four.

Is living in Lexington right now all that different?

On March 31, some of the loudest-and-proudest UK fans — fans that would put those teenage girl Beatles fans to shame — showed up at Blue Grass Airport on a cold, rainy day, just to catch a glimpse of the man apparently pegged to lead their program back to “where it should be.”

Fans stayed at Blue Grass for hours after the sun had gone down, the rain had picked up and word had spread that new head coach John Calipari had not only signed his contract, but had done so after landing at R.J. Corman’s private airstrip in Nicholasville.

Still, many stuck around for a while, talking to each other about basketball, starting some of Rupp Arena’s favorite chants, and breathing fresh air after a short, odd, suffocating Billy Gillispie era.

That was only the start of Calimania. Once the fans claimed the air, they moved swiftly to The Final Frontier: the Internet.

On April 23, Coach Cal registered his Twitter account. Less than six months later, Cal has over 860,000 followers.

He’s the most-followed coach, pro or college, and the eighth most-followed sports figure on Twitter.

Calipari’s Twitter account has yielded hundreds of thousands to create their own Twitter account, just so they can see what their coach is up to on any given day.

And Cal’s tweets now fuel hundreds of blogs, thousands of message board posts and millions of basketball-famished fans trying to kill time in the offseason.

It seems lost in it all, but Calipari and his hysterical fans are all fueled by one thing: basketball.

Even if nothing happens at Big Blue Madness — and nothing really does — the Calimaniacs will flock to Rupp Arena on Friday to catch a first look at the new coach and 13 players that will dominate their minds and dictate their emotions and dinner plans for the next seven months.

Sure, the fans that camped out to get Madness tickets — certainly some of the elite Calimaniacs — already have seen Cal and the team up close and personal, handing out breakfast treats and staging cornhole tournaments. But the team’s true unveiling is Friday.

And fans will be — and I try not to use this word lightly — crazy.

Most will leave Rupp on Friday night without any voice to speak of. Some will even enter Rupp on Friday without a voice, having screamed it away starting chants and cheering on the team before Madness in the Hyatt next door.

Fans will bring their entire families, even the little ones born since Calipari was hired, just to say they were there on a night when nothing happens, other than a few hokey videos and a fun-but-minimal-effort dunk contest.

Why all the trouble for an event billed as a practice, though the team doesn’t even really practice?

Because these members of the Big Blue Nation, the Calimaniacs, feel they have to. And as long as Calipari is in town, energizing the troops through his inspirational tweet of the week and any other method he may employ throughout his tenure, fans will keep coming out.

If the scene at the airport this March was wild, what will it be in April if the Cats are flying back from the Final Four?

Surely fans would be hysterical while waiting for the team, maybe some will even be crying. Already, those fans would be itching for that next game and drooling over every ounce of Cats coverage available.

I guess it’s oddly fitting “John” refers to both Lennon and Calipari.

James Pennington is a journalism senior. E-mail jpennington@kykernel.com.