Ignominious end for this New York coaching legend
THE STORIES were as plentiful as they were legendary, and it helped that most of them were true. No matter who you talked to, the people in and around Rick Pitino’s orbit, it would always go back to the same thing: the drive, the work ethic, the refusal to believe anything was impossible as long as you put in the hours.
His wife, Joanne, would tell the story about the two of them as high-school sweethearts, him shooting free throws, her rebounding for him, the promise of a trip to the beach whenever he was satisfied his stroke was pure, always settling for a trip to Carvel instead.
His friends in coaching would talk about 2 a.m. saloon tabletops covered with salt and pepper shakers, drawing up defenses, plotting out plays. There were endless tales of 6 a.m. staff meetings in saunas, the literal trading of sweat equity and lunch-time 5-on-5s so competitive you almost didn’t want to win if you were on the other side because the boss would make the rest of the day miserable for you.
“If you think Ricky is driven now, you should have seen him when he was 13, 14, 15 years old,” his high school coach, Pat McGunnigle, told me in 2013, a few days before Pitino led Louisville to the NCAA Tournament championship.
“You hear guys talk about a kid who’s a coach on the floor all the time, I know. But I’m telling you, when you saw that kid he was so serious, so driven, so focused, you knew he was going to be a coach. Because he already was.”
It was hard to forget any of these stories Wednesday, when it became clear this epic coaching life Pitino has been building for the better part of a half-century had come crashing down in a muddy, ugly heap. Louisville placed him on unpaid administrative leave in the wake of its involvement at the center of an unprecedented federal probe into college basketball corruption, and his firing is a forgone conclusion. No college program will touch him. His last NBA job was a fiasco. It’s over for him, at age 64.
He deserves not a whit of sympathy for any of this, because he was the one who oversaw his own doom. His career almost died before it ever got started because the NCAA kneecapped the University of Hawaii in 1975, during his first-ever assistant’s job at age 23.
He screamed his innocence then, and that became his default position thereafter, especially these past few years at Louisville. First, he was targeted in an extortion plot by an ex-lover, to whom he paid $3,000, with which she got an abortion. Then one of his assistants essentially turned into a brothel the athletic dorm Pitino named for his best friend and brother-in-law, Billy Minardi, who died on Sept. 11, 2001.
His last attempt at running this play that was as old and familiar to him as a 1-2-1-1 fullcourt press came Tuesday, when he insisted, “These allegations come as a complete shock to me.” But by then, at last, nobody was listening. And so his career ends after 770 collegiate victories and 192 more in the NBA, it crashes and burns in much the same fashion as Woody Hayes after he punched a player from Clemson in the 1978 Gator Bowl, and as Bob Knight, chased from Indiana after violating a zero-tolerance behavioral code he’d agreed to. Knight did get an anticlimactic final act at Texas Tech. That’ll never happen for Pitino.
If there is a pity to all of this, it’s realizing how unnecessary any of this was. Cheaters in college ball generally all have one common trait: they want to cut corners and bypass the dues necessary for success. They don’t trust their own talent. Pitino? It wasn’t just that he endured the long hours, he seemed to enjoy them. And he was as good a tactical coach as anyone, ever.
He willingly left college ball the first time, after a successful stint at Boston University, to essentially be Hubie Brown’s indentured servant with the Knicks. He took Providence from the dregs of the Big East to the Final Four, took the Knicks from the NBA ash heap to first place in the Atlantic Division, took Kentucky from the doorstep of the death penalty to the 1996 title.
He often said he was born to coach, and it was true: as a 15-year-old sophomore at St. Dominic High in Oyster Bay, he earned his first victory leading the students to a win over the faculty. His final win came last St. Patrick’s Day, a 78-63 win over Jacksonville State in the first round of the NCAA Tournament.
There will be no telethons for him; he made more money than just about any coach ever born, in any sport. He’ll probably wind up with a microphone in his hand somewhere. But he may also wind up on a witness stand someday soon.
And may wind up as the ultimate cautionary tale for wanting it all, and then a little bit more, because as many people who revile him today, there are still a lot who feel like the little kid in Chicago the day Shoeless Joe Jackson was kicked out of baseball: Say it ain’t so, Rick.
Say it ain’t so.