Kristen Ford met John Calipari when she was a kid. They kept in touch over the years, and long after Calipari left New England, the coach became the godfather of Ford's baby.

AP photo / Marcio Jose Sanchez

Sometimes you never know what you will find.

Sunday was one of those times for me.

You go to a baby’s baptism in Taunton and find John Calipari, the new coach of Kentucky and one of the most high-profile college basketball coaches in the country.

What are the odds of that?

But first a little back story.

The invitation had come in the mail a month ago.

It was for a baptism for the baby of Kristen Ford.

Ford is the daughter of Ken “Jersey Red” Ford, the Fall River renaissance man, who once upon a time used to be a presence on the local sports scene, everything from Rick Pitino’s confidante to a regular caller on sports talk radio every afternoon.

In a sports world full of characters, there were few bigger than Jersey Red, so named because he grew up in New Jersey and had red hair. He once had been the cook at Pitino’s fraternity at UMass, until he began running a campus betting pool, and telling all the fraternity members to cook their own food and not bother him anymore.

By the time he started showing up around here in the early ’90s, the drinking was over, and he invariably was wearing some sort of Kentucky athletic gear, which he, of course, had gotten for free.

He was right out of Damon Runyon, partly fact and partly fiction, and loved nothing better than to go on the radio and blow up the Boston teams, much to the consternation of the listeners. He did it with Chuck Wilson, then with Scott Cordischi, then with Cordischi and Andy Gresh.

It was all wonderful theater, like the time he was introduced to Seth Hancock, then the biggest name in Kentucky horse racing.

“Seth, how far do you live from here?” he asked.

“A few miles, Jersey,” Hancock said. “Why?”

“So you have time to go home and take that ugly sweater off before the game starts. Don’t ever let Rick see you dressed like that.”

But the past few years have not been kind to Jersey Red, who has been beset by a slew of health issues, which have made him reclusive. To the point that I had not seen him in a couple of years.

So Sunday afternoon I drove to the church in Taunton.

I got there a few minutes late. On the altar was the Rev. Jay Maddock, known as Father Jay, a priest I once did a column on, back when he was in Fall River and did a lot of work for youth sports, one of the true unsung heroes.

Also on the altar was Kristin Ford holding her baby, another woman, and a dark-haired man in a dark suit whose back was to me.

I didn’t think anything about it until he turned around and I saw that it was Calipari.

What exactly was going on here?

What was Calipari doing?

I knew that Jersey used to occasionally sit on the UMass bench when Calipari was there, and his son Greg was one of Calipari’s student managers for a year. I knew that he and Father Jay often made the ride to UMass in those days.

But that had been long ago and far away, more than a decade ago. And in that time Calipari has gone from a coaching star on the rise to the height of his profession, the newly named coach at Kentucky, one of the most prized jobs in all of college sports. And this was a Sunday afternoon in June, far away from his new Kentucky home.

“Kristen asked me to be one of the godparents of her child, and I wanted to be here for her,” he said.

It seems that Kristen Ford has remained in touch with Calipari, ever since meeting him when she was just a kid. A note here, a note there. And Calipari always responded.

“I wanted her to know that she made the right choice when she decided to keep the baby,” he said. “I wanted her to know that I supported that choice. And when she called me up and asked me to do this I said, ‘I’m there.’”

In many ways Calipari’s become the poster child for the contemporary college basketball coach –– polished, slick, able to talk a dog off a meat wagon. Success follows him around like an afternoon shadow, and there should be no doubt in anyone’s mind that he’s going to win big at Kentucky. He is a star in ways that would have been unimaginable when he first came to UMass, in 1988, everything all ahead of him.

But in many ways he’s never forgotten where he’s come from, and the people who helped him along the way.

That’s one of the things that’s easy to forget in this age of coach as celebrity. Coaches like Calipari live in a world of handshakes and glad-handers. Over here, coach. Will you sign this, coach? People who often come and go like the wind, all part of the passing parade.

Then there the others.

The ones who are there after they lose. The ones who are there when everything is blowing up around them. The ones who are there when all the others have gone away.

Is it any wonder that Calipari says he has the same friends he’s always had, the ones he had before he became “Coach Cal?”

“These people were great to me,” he said, pointing both to Jersey Red and Father Jay.

“Father Jay has heard my confession in airports, bathrooms, phone booths, everywhere,” he said. “And Jersey? Jersey’s always been there for me whenever I’ve needed him, for advice counsel, as a friend, whatever. They are special people.”

So Sunday was payback.

The day John Calipari came to a church in Taunton to become a godparent to a baby named Paxson Jersey Ford.

One of those days you never know what you will find.

breynold@projo.com