Orlando Antigua was once a Kentucky recruiting target. How close was he to being a Cat?

Nearly two decades before he first joined the Kentucky basketball program as an assistant coach tasked with delivering the nation’s top recruits, Orlando Antigua was a UK prospect himself.

And if things had worked out a little differently, he might’ve been a Wildcat back then.

Antigua finished his high school career as one of the top recruits in the 1991 class and a second-team Parade All-American out of St. Raymond High School for Boys in the Bronx.

Following his junior season, he emerged as a UK recruiting target.

The Cats’ courtship of Antigua was so serious that the program’s second-year head coach — Rick Pitino — traveled to New York for an in-home visit. Pitino, a New York native, had pulled star recruit Jamal Mashburn out of the city for his 1990 class and would later add another New Yorker — top center prospect Andre Riddick — to his 1991 group.

Antigua — a 6-foot-6 forward at the time — had played AAU ball with both Mashburn and Riddick on the New York Gauchos, and he recalled being excited by the Kentucky interest.

The program was still under probation — a result of the scandal toward the end of head coach Eddie Sutton’s tenure with the Wildcats — when Antigua emerged as a serious Kentucky target, but the signs of recovery were already there.

“That staff had done a great job in terms of promoting the program and the school and understanding that they were getting ready to come out of that probation and they were ready to take the next steps to try and get Kentucky back to its heights,” Antigua told the Herald-Leader in a preseason interview.

The visit with Pitino also made an impression.

“It was great. It was exciting. It was challenging,” Antigua recalled. “I was excited to try and come to see campus and see what it was all about. I knew they had gotten Jamal and he had just gotten there. They were starting to get Kentucky back going.”

The Cats went 14-14 in Pitino’s first year, then improved to 22-6 the following season, finishing with a No. 9 national ranking and the best record in the SEC (though the Cats couldn’t be considered league champions due to the probation status).

Before that season really got started, however, Antigua had committed elsewhere.

“I was getting ready to set a visit to come, and Aminu Timberlake took the last scholarship,” he said.

Timberlake — a 6-9 forward from Chicago with a similar national recruiting ranking as Antigua — was one of the Wildcats’ guests for Midnight Madness leading into the 1990-91 season. He committed to Kentucky three days after that event, taking the scholarship that would have been set aside for Antigua, who never made it to Lexington for a visit.

“And so I went and visited Wake Forest instead of coming to Kentucky,” Antigua said.

Recruiting analyst Bob Gibbons referred to Timberlake as one of the best shot-blockers in the class at the time. And Pitino was in desperate need of frontcourt players as he tried to rebuild the UK program. The Madness presentation was enough to get Timberlake to jump at the chance.

“I never attended anything like that or saw anything like that. You know?” he told the Herald-Leader at the time of his commitment. “… I didn’t want the opportunity to pass. If someone else signs, that means that’s no spot for me. I wanted to seize the opportunity.”

Antigua picks Pittsburgh

A month later, Antigua committed to Pittsburgh. He said he also visited Rutgers — seen as Pitt’s top competition for his pledge — and Wake Forest, while Florida was also on his final list.

“Pitt was far enough from New York but close enough that I could get back,” Antigua said. “And it had a city feel. They also had two other guys from New York on the team that I knew. And it was in the Big East.”

Antigua had also received national attention during his time in high school after being shot in the head at age 15, a bystander watching a dispute in front of an electronics store. That incident was mentioned in just about every article related to his recruitment, though he returned to the basketball court quickly and obviously developed into a nationally renowned player.

“He’s a winner — that’s the bottom line,” recruiting analyst Tom Konchalski said when Antigua committed to Pitt. “He’s very mobile, he’s very athletic and he has an appetite for the game, which is something that is hard to teach. He improves any program he comes into.”

Antigua ended up scoring 930 points, grabbing 409 rebounds and shot 38.6 percent from 3-point range in four seasons with the Panthers. An early highlight: tallying nine points, eight rebounds and four blocks in an 85-67 upset of Kentucky in Rupp Arena as a freshman.

Timberlake, the player who took the scholarship that could have gone to Antigua, had two points in five minutes that night. He scored 38 points in 39 games for Kentucky before transferring to Southern Illinois after two seasons with the Wildcats.

Antigua played seven years with the Harlem Globetrotters before getting into coaching.

He coached against Pitino while an assistant at Pitt, Memphis and Kentucky, but he said the early 1990s recruitment has never come up in conversation.

“Just ultimate respect for him as a coach,” Antigua said of Pitino, now the head coach at St. John’s.

Antigua also crossed paths with another Hall of Fame coach as a high schooler.

During his senior year at St. Raymond’s, a young John Calipari — early in his tenure as UMass coach — visited the school in search of talent. Antigua recalled exchanging hellos with the 31-year-old coach, but he was too far down the road in his own recruitment by that point, and Calipari was still in the early stages of building UMass into the program it would become a few years later. He ended up signing one of Antigua’s younger teammates, Dana Dingle, a key player in Calipari’s best Minutemen teams.

Fast forward to 2008, and the basketball worlds of Antigua and Calipari collided again.

Calipari was in search of a new assistant at Memphis following the departure of Chuck Martin, who had accepted the Marist head coaching position. Martin was a few years older than Antigua and a fellow St. Raymond’s alumnus. He put in a good word on his way out, and Calipari — a proud Pittsburgh-area native who began his own coaching career as a Pitt assistant — ultimately hired Antigua, who had just spent his first two seasons as a college coach in the same position at Pitt.

Antigua left Pitt for Memphis, spent one season there, and then came with Calipari to Kentucky.

“When I got to Pittsburgh, I wound up meeting and knowing a lot of the people that he grew up with and knew him and all that stuff,” Antigua said. “It was six degrees of separation, and a lot of the people that he knew well knew me well. And knew me as a player.”

Antigua left the Wildcats in 2014 to become the head coach at South Florida, later served on the coaching staff at Illinois and returned to UK as Calipari’s top assistant before the 2021-22 season.

Now, Calipari, Antigua and Martin — in his first season as a UK assistant coach — are all together, technically for the first time, in Lexington.

And another signing period starts this week with the three renowned recruiters looking to bolster Kentucky’s lineups of the future.

Next game

Texas A&M-Commerce at No. 16 Kentucky

When: 7 p.m. Friday

TV: SEC Network+

Radio: WLAP-AM 630, WBUL-FM 98.1

Records: Texas A&M Commerce 0-1, Kentucky 1-0

Series: First meeting

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