The Last Temptation of Rick Pitino

by Michael Sokolove

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  One month later, federal agents arrested James Gatto, an Adidas executive and the company’s main point of contact with the grassroots basketball scene—the incubator for top prospects—and charged him with conspiring to pay bribes to induce high school stars to sign with Adidas-sponsored universities. The investigation, conducted by the FBI and overseen by the U.S. Attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York, reached up into the very highest levels of college basketball and NCAA sports. In doing so, it reduced the vaunted program built by Tom Jurich to the status of a perp.

  Documents filed by federal prosecutors identified a focus of their inquiry as “University-6”—“a public research institution located in Kentucky with approximately 22,640 students.” A top player who signed with its basketball team late in the recruiting season, and seemingly out of the blue, was “Player-10.” The man who would coach this surprise recruit was “Coach-2.” All of this was easily and instantly decoded by journalists and others with a knowledge of college basketball and recruiting. The university was Louisville. The player, Brian Bowen Jr. The coach, Rick Pitino. Pitino has not been charged with any crime, nor has Brian Bowen Jr.

  Christian Dawkins was one of the ten individuals charged. He is alleged to have been a conduit between Adidas and Brian Bowen Jr.’s father, as well as the link to several other players and college coaches. According to the criminal complaint, Bowen chose to enroll at Louisville after Dawkins, Gatto, and others agreed to funnel $100,000 to his father.

  Dawkins’s words, captured on the FBI recordings, can be taken as something like a tutorial on the dark underworld of college recruiting. He instructs associates at various points on how to conceal payments to players or their families, sometimes by routing them through the bank accounts of the nonprofit youth teams they play for. The government alleged that Dawkins’s goal, and the aim of several others in the conspiracy, was not just to direct players to certain schools, but to put themselves in a favored position once (and if) those players reached the NBA. The bribes were down payments on future revenue. “If we take care of everybody and everything is done, we control everything,” the government quoted Dawkins as saying at one secretly recorded meeting. “You can make millions off of one kid.”

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  Twenty-four hours after the FBI and U.S. Attorney’s office announced the arrests and the dimensions of the criminal case at a press conference in Manhattan, Rick Pitino was removed as Louisville’s basketball coach. It was an abrupt, ignominious exit. He was locked out of his office and denied access to his email. A letter sent to him by the administration explained that the action was made necessary by “your conduct over a period of years” and “a pattern and practice of inappropriate behavior.” The pattern, of course, was long-standing and not exactly a secret.

  Pitino called his wife and told her to quickly pack a bag and meet him at the airport, where they would fly on a private plane to Miami. He vowed never to return to Kentucky except in the case of one eventuality—if one of his horses again qualified for the Kentucky Derby.

  Brian Bowen Jr. was immediately separated from the Louisville basketball team. As his would-be teammates began practice, under a thirty-two-year-old interim coach elevated to step in for Pitino, he pushed himself through lonely workouts in a church gym about twenty minutes north of campus. It wasn’t at all clear that Bowen Jr. ever saw any of the cash—it may have just gone to his father—or if he even knew of any deal.

  Tom Jurich, too, was fired. He had not only stood by Pitino through two previous scandals but had steadfastly defended other coaches when their jobs were under threat, including a women’s lacrosse coach accused of abusive behavior. The letter terminating Jurich said that he had failed to properly supervise coaches and engaged in “willful misconduct.” It was signed by “Gregory C. Postel, M.D.”—the interim president and the guy he had put in the cheap seats at the 50 Yard Line Dinner.

  It should be noted that the university was at that point due for a reckoning. The place, charitably, was a mess. In the previous year, its full board of trustees had been removed by Kentucky’s governor and replaced with new trustees, then reinstated when a judge said the action was not done properly, and then fired and replaced again after the governor figured out how to do it legally. An independent audit found that the upper level of the university’s administration was a swamp of self-dealing and secret payouts, with tens of millions of dollars going to dubious real estate transactions and to massive raises for insiders meant to be invisible to the public. The university’s accrediting body, the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools, was concerned enough about the institution’s inability to govern itself that it put Louisville on probation.

  Not all of the school’s problems were caused by its vaunted athletic program. But none of them were unrelated to it. The university made a big bet on sports. It doubled and tripled down. The recruiting scandal and the firing of Jurich and Pitino equated to a whole big pile of chips getting swept off the gaming table.

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  In exile in Florida, Pitino was raging and defiant. His empire was gone, his legacy stained. His teams had always scratched and clawed and were miserable to play against. They competed. Every game, right to the end. Why wouldn’t anyone do that for him?

  He looked around at other head coaches implicated in the scandal and wondered why they still had their jobs. He had not been criminally charged, and neither had any of his assistant coaches—though one of them was caught on videotape in a meeting with Dawkins in a Las Vegas hotel room. He figured it all would have passed, like other crises in his life had, if Louisville had been willing to just dig in and fight. He felt like everyone had given up while there was still time left on the clock.

  “You fire the head coach and you send a red flag to the NCAA that Louisville did some things wrong,” he said. “They told the whole country I was guilty. Everybody else in the country stayed calm and said, ‘Wait a minute. What’s all this about?’”

  CHAPTER TWO

  FOOTPRINTS

  With his ten NCAA championships in the 1960s and 1970s, his innovative methods, and his mentorship of such stars as Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Bill Walton, the late UCLA coach John Wooden is college basketball’s most revered figure. The John R. Wooden Award goes to the nation’s top player each year. The basketball court at UCLA’s iconic Pauley Pavilion is named for Wooden. In 2003, President George W. Bush honored Wooden, then ninety-two, with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor.

  But in addition to being the greatest coach in the game’s history, Wooden is the prototype for every coach since who has tried to cover himself in a cloak of deniability. On the day after he died in 2010, the Los Angeles Times wrote, “If Wooden was the father figure of UCLA basketball, Gilbert was its shadowy one.” The reference was to Sam Gilbert, a builder in Los Angeles who was close to Wooden’s players. An investigative series the paper published in 1981 called Gilbert a “one-man clearinghouse” who helped players get cars, clothes, airline tickets, scalpers’ prices for tickets, and even, on occasion, abortions for their girlfriends. A former NCAA investigator said he had looked into Gilbert’s involvement and “could have put UCLA on indefinite probation” but was told to drop his case.

  Even back when the story was published, it was not exactly news to the basketball cognoscenti—Gilbert’s relationship to the UCLA program had been an open secret—and the allegations were not startling to Wooden. The newspaper wrote that Wooden was wary of Gilbert but generally turned a blind eye. (Gilbert was indicted in 1987 on racketeering charges by prosecutors, who were not aware that he had died four days earlier. The case centered on a marijuana smuggling ring and was unrelated to his involvement with UCLA basketball.) “Maybe I had tunnel vision. I still don’t think he’s had any great impact on the basketball program,” Wooden commen
ted a half dozen years after he had retired. He seemed to argue that it may be better not to know certain things. “There’s as much crookedness as you want to find. There was something Abraham Lincoln said—he’d rather trust and be disappointed than distrust and be miserable all the time. Maybe I trusted too much.”

  The two reporters who worked on the series, Mike Littwin and Alan Greenberg, would later write, “Wooden knew about Gilbert. He knew the players were close to Gilbert. He knew they looked to Gilbert for advice. Maybe he knew more. He should have known much more. If he didn’t, it was only because he apparently chose not to look.”

  Pitino has said numerous times in the wake of his downfall that the rule-breaking uncovered by the FBI is nothing new and has been going on for years. Wooden’s career in college coaching was just ending as his started, but Pitino is enough of a historian of the game to know that it dates to the era of the storied UCLA coach—and, indeed, to well before that.

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  It is hard to imagine now, but in the years before World War II and into the early 1950s, Long Island University was a national power in college basketball, the UCLA of its era. Its team won the National Invitation Tournament, in Madison Square Garden, in 1939 and 1941, when the NIT was a far more important event than the NCAA tourney, and LIU had one winning streak of 43 games, another of 38. Its coach, Clair Bee, wrote the introduction to James Naismith’s only book on basketball, mentored a young Bobby Knight, and was an early proponent of the NBA’s 24-second shot clock. When he died in 1983, the New York Daily News sports columnist Mike Lupica wrote, “The story of the old man’s life is merely the history of basketball in this country.”

  But Bee’s career, fittingly, is also the history of basketball scandal. Three members of his 1950–51 team were convicted for conspiring with gamblers to shave points. One of them was his best player, Sherman White, that season’s consensus player of the year. The LIU captain from the previous season, Eddie Gard, helped set up the scheme, and White, who would serve nine months in prison at Rikers Island, said that point shaving had been endemic at LIU for a generation and that players were schooled on how to get the required result. “You don’t do it on offense,” he said. “You had to keep your rhythm on offense. You had to do it on defense. You had to turn your head or you had to slide and let a guy go in to make a basket.”

  First, the scandal touched other basketball powers in New York at the time—New York University, Manhattan College, and City College of New York—and then what was termed the “fix virus” swept into the Midwest and all the way to the West Coast. It hit Adolph Rupp’s famed Kentucky team, and the school shut down his program for the 1952–53 season. LIU would drop its basketball program for a half dozen years; the team never returned to national prominence.

  The judge in Sherman White’s trial, Saul Streit of the New York State Supreme Court, “blamed Bee, other coaches, and college administrators for creating a highly commercialized climate that contributed to the young men’s corruption,” wrote Dennis Gildea, a biographer of Bee. The judge made those remarks almost seventy years ago, when the level of money and commercialization in college sports was a trickle compared to what it is today. Then, as now, very little of the money ever flowed to the players. If they got anything at all it was usually not much more than pocket change—but it was enough for them to give in to the temptation and more than enough to wreck their futures.

  There are parallels between that era and almost every aspect of college sports today. The money was smaller, but the essence of the transactions—young players used as pawns in the grand schemes of their elders—was the same.

  Like today’s recruiting scandals, point shaving in the 1940s and 1950s was an open secret. Insiders knew exactly how it worked and sometimes recognized it in real time. Gildea writes of a scene after LIU defeated Bowling Green at Madison Square Garden in 1951 but let an 18-point lead dwindle to a 6-point victory, which was inside the point spread. Clair Bee met a couple of sportswriter friends at a Midtown bar afterward, their custom back then, and one of the writers said to him, “Your team just dumped a game.”

  Bee would have a second act as the author of the popular Chip Hilton series of sports books for adolescent readers—twenty-one volumes that he first started writing while still at LIU. His hero, Chip, played for a fictional team known as “State” and was always faced with some kind of moral or ethical dilemma, but he was incorruptible. Chip not only unfailingly did the right thing, but he also convinced his teammates to keep it on the up-and-up. He was the straight-arrow figure that Bee wished he had coached.

  Many considered Bee’s literary efforts to be, consciously or not, an attempt to expiate himself for his role as the coach of a dirty team. He was the model of a modern coach in his response to scandal, meaning that he presented himself as a tower of rectitude who was blindsided by his players’ wrongdoing. What he knew or should have known—or actively sought not to know—has never been clear.

  In some of the more recent point-shaving cases, gambling allegations have been interlaced with evidence of recruiting violations. And why wouldn’t that be the case? The two versions of rule-breaking occur in the same context: Players come to believe, or are convinced by others, that they deserve some of the bounty of the sport. (One of the players involved in the 1985 Tulane point-shaving case said that he had accepted $10,000 to commit to the university—given to him in cash, in a shoebox.)

  Major college basketball and football programs currently generate revenue of more than $4 billion. That is just what accrues directly to the schools and the NCAA. It does not include, to give just one example, the more than $10 billion wagered annually on the NCAA basketball tournament.

  In sentencing players involved in Arizona State’s 1994 gambling episode, the judge said, “The scandal leads to cynicism about what college sports is all about.” But you could easily make a different argument—that rule-breaking in college sports is less the cause than the consequence of long-standing and deep-seated cynicism. Cheating is what occurs when the rules are not enforced and when no one takes them seriously.

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  In the post-Wooden era, the money and benefits directed to young basketball players began to be systematized. There were still sugar daddies on the scene, well-connected boosters like Sam Gilbert, but much of the largesse directed to top prospects now had a common source: Nike and the other shoe and apparel companies. Some of it is doled out in ways that, at least technically, are permissible under NCAA guidelines—for example, the boxes of shoes and athletic gear that begin flooding into the homes of promising young players while they are still in grade school. Or the generous donations that flow to their AAU programs—to teams that are sometimes run by their fathers, uncles, relatives, or close family friends.

  There is no disagreement about who put the shoe companies in control of so many levers of the sport. That person is Sonny Vaccaro. If Wooden is the most venerated figure in the history of college basketball, Vaccaro is the most complicated. He has been at various points in his career a corrupting influence and a clarifying one. A bullshitter and a truth-teller.

  Vaccaro was born about a year before the United States entered World War II and grew up in the western Pennsylvania town of Trafford, about thirty minutes east of Pittsburgh. He was a good enough baseball player to be drafted by the Pirates. He chose to play college football, but got hurt, washed out of two college football programs, and spent a couple of decades knocking around different locales and careers. He was briefly an assistant basketball coach at Wichita State, a rock music promoter, and a card player in Las Vegas. The authors of Sole Influence, a book published in 2000 on the impact of shoe companies in basketball, described Vaccaro in Las Vegas as a “small-time sharpie.” (His younger brother Jimmy had better luck in the desert and the good sense to work for the house; he has run the sports book at several casinos, including Steve Wynn’s Mirage.)r />
  Sonny Vaccaro made his way back home and taught phys ed at his old high school. An annual all-star game he organized for the nation’s best high school basketball players, called the Dapper Dan Roundball Classic, became a big hit locally—Pittsburgh at the time didn’t have much going on, and the game packed the Civic Center each spring to capacity—and it put Vaccaro on a course to becoming a kingmaker in college recruiting. He was a salesman at heart, and he had found his product.

  In the early 1980s, he went to work for Nike, which was then a company dedicated to selling shoes to elite track and field athletes and recreational runners. The company’s founder, Phil Knight, wanted to get into the basketball business, but the sport was dominated by Converse, and had been going all the way back to World War I, when the company began producing its iconic Chuck Taylor model. Wilt Chamberlain, Bill Russell, and Jerry West wore “Chucks” when the tops were still made of canvas. When Vaccaro went to work for Nike, Magic Johnson, Larry Bird, and most of the rest of the NBA’s stars were still wearing Converse.

  Phil Knight wanted a prominent young player to become Nike’s hoops ambassador, and Vaccaro convinced him that it should be Michael Jordan—over the objections of some in the company who thought the choice should be Charles Barkley or Hakeem Olajuwon, both of whom, like Jordan, came out of college and entered the NBA in 1984.