The Last Temptation of Rick Pitino

by Michael Sokolove

  On the night of the dinner, the football stadium was in the midst of a $63 million expansion—following a $75 million renovation a decade before. Jurich had recently flown with John Schnatter (Papa John, the namesake of the stadium) to Dallas on Schnatter’s private jet, where they were given a tour of the Cowboys’ stadium by team owner Jerry Jones in order to get a better idea of how to make Louisville’s facility feel like a proper football palace.

  All along Floyd Street were the other facilities Jurich built, new or renovated stadiums for baseball, lacrosse, and track and field. A gleaming natatorium for the swimmers. The Trager Field Hockey Complex. (Anyone could build a field hockey stadium; Jurich constructed a complex.) Nearly every building carried the name of its patron, and nearly every one housed a nationally significant team—a contender for conference and NCAA championships. (Off campus, on the bank of the Ohio River, was the KFC Yum! Center, built with $238 million in public money—for the benefit of Louisville basketball.) To the extent that all of this was the university’s front porch, an advertisement for the new University of Louisville, it was a little like having to walk through a Las Vegas casino, past the slots and blackjack tables, to reach your hotel room: It let you know what was important.

  Jurich had many more acolytes than critics in Louisville, but he was blunt and given to bursts of anger, and some considered him a bully. At the very least, he was a bulldozer, a determined and relentless builder—a Robert Moses of college sport. He had a big announcement to make that night, another step forward for Louisville sports, and was waiting for the right moment to reveal it. He controlled the seating and had put himself at the head table along with Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader and a Louisville graduate; Matt Bevin, Kentucky’s governor; and Junior Bridgeman, a Louisville basketball legend turned multimillionaire businessman. They were joined by two executives of Adidas.

  The university had a new interim president, Gregory Postel, a radiologist turned administrator who had come over from the medical school. But he was seated away from the podium at a table with executives from Thornton’s, a Louisville-based gas and convenience store chain. People noticed, and they understood the message being delivered. “Jurich wanted to let him know who the motherfucking king was,” said local radio host Terry Meiners. “He relegated Postel to commoner status. When you look back on it now, it was stupid as hell.”

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  Rick Pitino, in the summer of 2017, was on the cusp of his seventeenth season as Louisville’s basketball coach. He is a New Yorker by birth, which you could still clearly hear in his accent, and a wiseass by personality type. He was often accompanied in Louisville by what Jonathan Blue, a former trustee of the university, referred to as his “Sinatra-like posse.” He kept late hours and had the energy of a man decades younger. If everyone rolled home late after a night out, it was not uncommon for Pitino to call one of his fellow celebrants at 6 a.m. the next day, with an idea to discuss, a conversation to pick back up, or just because he enjoyed being an irritant. If the person on the other end sounded groggy, he’d say, “Sorry, Rip Van Winkle. Go back to sleep.” When Pitino had a golf date on the horizon—he was an avid golfer and played for high stakes, sometimes up to $1,000 a hole—his playing mates could count on him to begin calling a day or two in advance, just to needle them for a competitive edge.

  One of his favorite expressions was, “I’m just breaking your balls.” He affected an exaggerated courtliness around women, and if he was in mixed company, he’d change it to, “I’m just breaking shoes,” which made no sense, but everybody got the joke, including, of course, the women.

  From a distance, it could seem that Pitino had lived a charmed life. His wife, Joanne, was his high school sweetheart in Bayville, New York. When they were in their teens, she rebounded for him as he practiced his shooting, and afterward, when he was satisfied he had put up enough shots, they went to the beach or out for ice cream. They have five children and eight grandchildren. But they had a son who died at six months old of congenital heart failure. Pitino’s brother-in-law and best friend, Billy Minardi, died in the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. Another brother-in-law was hit and killed by a taxi in Manhattan.

  Pitino touted his control over the Louisville basketball program, down to the smallest detail, and claimed to be aware of every morsel of information. “If one of my players has a beer in Louisville,” he once said, “I know about it.” His sense of control extended to off the court, where he took great pride in his ability to use connections and pull levers to help friends. “Rick’s the kind of person,” Terry Meiners said, “that if you told him, ‘I need 100k and a helicopter,’ he’d write you the check and say, ‘When do you need the chopper and where do you want it to land?’”

  To people who cared about college basketball, Pitino’s hiring at Louisville in 2001 was astounding—in large part because the job seemed like a couple of steps down a ladder he had already ascended. Jurich had pushed out Crum and appointed himself as a “one-man search committee” to find a replacement. He set his sights on just one candidate, Pitino, who had been a boy wonder of a head coach and was handed his first team, at Boston University, at age twenty-five. In his next college job, he led little Providence College on a miraculous run to the 1987 Final Four.

  He had not only spent time in the NBA but made stops in two of its most important markets—as head coach of the New York Knicks and head coach and president of the Boston Celtics. What made his move to Louisville truly shocking was that he had already coached in Kentucky—but in Lexington, at the University of Kentucky, which he once referred to as “Camelot” and where he had a successful eight-season run that included three Final Four appearances and a national championship. He said after accepting the Louisville job that he had been close to signing with Michigan, a more prestigious university and job. When asked what stopped him, he said, “Cowardice. I can’t get on the phone and tell Tom no. I can’t tell him this.”

  Not many people remember ever talking with the single-minded Jurich about anything but Louisville sports. He did one thing and he did it extremely well. Pitino could hold forth on wine, food, and politics. (He didn’t much advertise it in Kentucky, but he is a Democrat.) He had long enjoyed going to the track, but in Kentucky, home of Churchill Downs, Keeneland, and dozens of breeding farms, he became an aficionado. He invested in ownership shares of Thoroughbreds and had one that reached the Kentucky Derby. While he was still coaching in Lexington, he sometimes took recruits and their families to nearby Claiborne Farm to pay homage to the retired Secretariat.

  Pitino didn’t attend the 50 Yard Line Dinner. (He was the only coach at Louisville who habitually skipped it.) That August, he was within weeks of turning sixty-five, and his friends had planned a surprise party at a restaurant near his $2 million home, in a golf course community east of town. He owned a much larger house, worth about $25 million, on a private island off the coast of Miami, where his neighbors included Julio Iglesias and the investor Carl Icahn. He had tickets to go with Joanne and three other couples to an upcoming Bruno Mars concert at the Yum Center. He owned a box upstairs, but they would sit up front, in floor seats just a couple of rows from the stage.

  The first full practice with his 2017–18 squad was just a little more than a month off and he was eager to get started. For all his wide interests and urbane veneer, Pitino at his core was a basketball coach—a man who showed up for work at his $8-million-a-year-job in sneakers and a warm-up suit and with a whistle around his neck. The practice gym was where he lived, and it was not hard to make an argument that he was the best college coach of his generation—the tactical and motivational genius you would want on the sideline if you needed to win just one crucial game.

  No one who wins in college basketball does so without talented players, but Pitino succeeded with demonstrably less of them than his counterparts at other major programs. In sixteen years at the helm, he took his Louis
ville squads to three Final Fours and one national championship. Three other times, his teams fell just one game short of the Final Four. Teams that go deep into the tournament almost always have future NBA players on the roster, and Final Four mainstays like Duke, Kansas, and Kentucky have rosters perennially stocked with multiple NBA lottery picks. But during Pitino’s tenure as the Cardinals’ coach, just seven of his players were chosen in the NBA’s first round, and none were ever among the first ten picks. His highest pick, Terrence Williams, chosen eleventh overall in 2009, played sparingly in four NBA seasons before washing out of the league and signing on with a pro team in Venezuela. (The ten seasons between 2005 and 2014 encompassed Pitino’s peak years at Louisville—three Final Fours, and two seasons in which his team was stopped in the Elite Eight. In that whole decade of high achievement, he had just three first-round picks.)

  High school basketball prospects are ranked by recruiting services with a system of stars, with the best of them categorized as five-star players. Pitino landed just a handful of those players over the years. His best player in recent seasons was Donovan Mitchell, one of the top two rookies in the NBA in the 2017–18 season. But Mitchell, who plays for the Utah Jazz, was only the thirteenth pick in the NBA draft, and coming out of high school, not all the scouting services had him ranked as a five-star prospect.

  Pitino’s overall “class rankings,” the strength of his recruited players in a given year, sometimes edged into the top ten among NCAA Division I programs, but one year he was ranked as low as ninety-fourth, and another year, seventy-ninth. It is reasonable to wonder why more top players didn’t want to play for Pitino—or why their parents and coaches did not want them to—but what he accomplished with the talent he assembled was a measure of his coaching acumen.

  “There are certain people who are just born to lead, and Coach Pitino is one of them,” says Herb Sendek, a veteran head coach who was a Pitino assistant at Providence and Kentucky. “He is a brilliant communicator who through the words he chooses and his inflection is able to transmit his own self-confidence to everyone around him. I never had any doubt, as a member of his staff, that we were going to win. He could have been anything he wanted—the CEO of a company, a governor, or a high-ranking military leader.”

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  There’s not a coach in big-time college basketball whose program is totally pure. It’s not possible. But Pitino came to Louisville relatively clean, with just one blemish on his record—NCAA violations from way back in the mid-1970s when he was an assistant, and then briefly the interim head coach, at the University of Hawaii. At Louisville, though, he survived two tawdry, embarrassing scandals.

  The first one was personal in nature: a sexual assignation in a restaurant, after closing time, with a woman he had just met for the first time earlier in the same evening. The episode came to light, in great detail, after she tried to extort him and was prosecuted in federal court—with Pitino in the role of star prosecution witness.

  The second scandal was even worse because it involved his players. In what became known as “Strippergate,” a local escort revealed that one of Pitino’s assistants had paid for parties at the basketball dormitory, where she and other women, including her daughters, danced and had sex with high school kids on recruiting visits as well as with some current players. Even though the parties went on over the course of four years, Pitino insisted that he had no knowledge of them.

  Not many coaches could have emerged from the first scandal without being fired. It’s possible that Pitino is the only one who would have survived two affairs that sordid. But he was winning games and packing Yum Center to its 22,090-seat capacity. His team was the engine of the athletic department, and to a large extent, the university itself.

  The NCAA, the governing body of college sports, has a logic and lexicon all its own. It put the nude dancing performances enjoyed by Pitino’s players and recruits, and the oral sex they received, in its category of “impermissible benefits.” As Pitino prepared to coach in the fall of 2017, the consequences of Strippergate were still not fully known, and possibly serious sanctions from the NCAA still loomed.

  Like most successful sports figures, however—coaches or players—Pitino was a champion at compartmentalizing, blocking out distractions, even ones he may have been responsible for himself. He had reason to be excited about the upcoming season. His roster was stocked with talented upperclassmen as well as a rarity, a five-star recruit—Brian Bowen Jr.

  Tugs was the very last of the premium high school prospects in the class of 2017 to commit to a school, and he seemed to enjoy the speculation about where he might finally land. No one guessed Louisville, because it had not been on his list and was not among the schools Bowen traveled to in his five official visits permitted by the NCAA. The scouting services noted his fluid athleticism and sweet shooting stroke. One called him an “impact scorer,” and another labeled him “loaded with potential and upside.”

  In addition, he had some personality and style—his bleached-blond hair was meant to mimic the ’do of NFL star Odell Beckham Jr.—and a flair for drama. He figured to help the team and delight the home crowd at the Yum Center. When he finally announced his choice, one headline read: “Bowen Once Thought Headed to Michigan State or Arizona, but Louisville Comes out of Nowhere.”

  Even Pitino said he was shocked. He couldn’t believe his good fortune! In his telling, Bowen’s decision was a gift that fell from the heavens, like one of those letters informing a recipient of some large sum of money left by a distant relative. “We got lucky on this one,” he said. “They had to come in unofficially, pay for their hotel, pay for their meals. We spent zero dollars recruiting a five-star athlete who I loved when I saw him play. In my forty years of coaching, this is the luckiest I’ve been.”

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  After the entrees at the 50 Yard Line Dinner were served (suitably manly options of filet or stuffed peppers with shrimp), Jurich stood up to acknowledge Jim Murphy and Chris McGuire, the Adidas executives at his table. The university was already in business with the German-based company, which provided uniforms and other gear for its teams and annual cash payments to the athletic program. In return, Adidas got exposure for its brand every time a Louisville team played—and carte blanche entree to the university’s students, to alumni, and to greater Louisville. If you walked into the campus bookstore, you encountered racks and racks of Adidas-branded Louisville product—a sea of red hoodies, warm-up pants, T-shirts, gym bags, clothes for children and babies—before you came across an actual book. At Louisville’s airport, arriving passengers exiting the secure area walked under a giant University of Louisville banner overlaid with an Adidas logo and the slogan “It Is Here, the Future of Sport Will Be Written.”

  Apparel deals, as they’re called, are celebrated as co-branding opportunities, marriages between institutions of higher learning and sneaker companies even as they turn college athletes, who are ostensibly amateurs, into human billboards. For college sports coaches and executives, they are another way to compete and keep score. In 2016, after the University of California at Los Angles set a new standard for apparel deals, a fifteen-year, $260 million contract with Under Armour, the school’s football coach, Jim Mora Jr., said, “That resonates with a recruit or a parent. They’ll think, ‘UCLA is really becoming big, big, big time.’”

  UCLA, of course, is already a college of some note. It is ranked among the nation’s best public universities and has produced seven Nobel Prize winners over its century-long history—as well as the greatest dynasty in the annals of college sports, the ten NCAA basketball championships won by John Wooden–led teams in the 1960s and 1970s. To Mora, however, what really put the university on the map was the imprimatur of Under Armour, a Baltimore-based upstart whose founder began selling compression shorts out of the trunk of his car in 1996.

  Louisville’s existing contract with Adidas wa
s modest and not in line with its new status. It was signed before Pitino’s national championship in 2013, before the football team pulled off a huge upset in the Sugar Bowl that same year, defeating third-ranked Florida—and before the school jumped several classes and was accepted into the Atlantic Coast Conference, one of the NCAA’s “Power Five,” after years of bouncing between such low-wattage confederations as Conference USA and the Metro Conference. The new Louisville was a legitimate all-sports superpower, and it was deserving, in the calculus of college athletics, of rich deals with its corporate patrons.

  After introducing the Adidas executives, Jurich announced that the university’s contract with the company was being extended and sweetened. Adidas was signing on to sponsor Louisville athletics for another ten years in return for $160 million in cash and apparel. It was the largest contract Adidas had signed with any university, and the fourth richest in the nation, putting Louisville behind only UCLA’s Under Armour deal and Nike’s agreements with Ohio State and Texas. There were a couple of loud whoops in the crowd, and everyone rose to their feet and cheered as if the home team had just kicked a game-winning field goal.

  At a press conference on the morning after the dinner, Jurich announced the Adidas deal publicly and stressed that the close relationship between Louisville and its apparel partner was about more than money. “We’re part of the Adidas family and I certainly hope they know that they are part of the Cardinal family,” he said. “This is not something that we say, ‘We can give you some more signage. Or we can give you some more airtime. Or we can give you TV commercials.’ This is something that they are going to be a part of our life, and a way of life.”