Courtesy of Joel Pett of The Lexington Herald-Leader
Joel Pett’s cartoon in The Lexington Herald-Leader angered Kentucky fans.
To Joel Pett, the longtime editorial cartoonist at The Lexington Herald-Leader, the tempest currently roiling among Kentucky fans over his cartoon lampooning Coach John Calipari’s trophy case, is both expected and slightly depressing.
“You can draw all the cartoons you want about things like the global plight of women and it’s this kind of thing that gets people going,” Pett said in a telephone interview Tuesday.
To the Kentucky faithful, Pett is raining on their championship parade by criticizing Calipari. They would prefer to revel in the school’s first men’s basketball championship in 14 years — two lifetimes in Kentucky basketball years — rather than dwell on Calipari’s questionable ethical past, including the two vacated Final Four appearances by Calipari-coached teams at Massachusetts and Memphis that Pett references in his cartoon.
But despite all the howling, Pett believes many people in Lexington agree with him that money long ago eclipsed college sports’ integrity. He thinks that’s behind Kentucky’s proposal to play Indiana on neutral courts and no longer on campus, which Indiana turned down. Pett, an Indiana alum, said he believes playing on a neutral court would sap games of all the atmosphere that made the rivalry great.
“There will be backlash,” Pett said, adding that only one of his voice mails so far has been threatening. “But there are a lot of people who understand the point is that the program is bigger than the university, which we’ve known for a long time.”
Even if more of his feedback contains threats, Pett has a hard time getting worked up about it. He just returned from a meeting in Washington, D.C. of the Cartoonists’ Rights Network, which seeks to protect the rights of editorial cartoonists around the world threatened and intimidated for their work. Last year, Syrian cartoonist Ali Ferzat was severely beaten by Syrian forces attempting to quash dissent against the country’s president, Bashar Al-Assad.
The Cartoonists’ Rights Network votes every year on a Courage in Cartooning Award. Pett said there are far too many candidates like Ferzat.
“It takes courage not just to write and draw these cartoons, but to publish them,” Pett said. “In that context, this is just a silly, small-minded, quote-unquote controversy.”
“There will be backlash,” Pett said in a telephone interview Tuesday. “Only about half the people who say they’re going to cancel their subscription do and the ones that do will pick it back up again when basketball season starts
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