The Last Temptation of Rick Pitino

by Michael Sokolove

  East Lansing was where Tugs was born and where he became his father’s next basketball project. Ball handling had been a weakness of Jason Richardson’s when he was younger, so that was something Bowen Sr. went to work on right away. “From the time he started playing, I made sure he could handle the ball with both hands,” he said. “When he was eight or nine months standing against the table, I made sure he used both hands to roll a ball around and develop that ambidexterity in both hands.”

  Jason Richardson stayed two years at Michigan State, helping lead the Spartans to a national championship in his freshman season, before setting off on a long and lucrative NBA career. He played fourteen seasons and earned $105 million in salary. Brian Bowen Sr. sometimes traveled with Richardson in his self-described role as advisor. He moved the family back to Saginaw, where he purchased a home with a full-court basketball court in the backyard and spent thousands of hours drilling his son on fundamentals.

  The court became a magnet for kids in Saginaw who were serious players. It was a place to try moves they had learned from their own basketball mentors and to test themselves against their competition for playing time on school and AAU teams. They were working, not playing, and Brian Bowen Sr. stood watch on the sideline, offering instruction and keeping the games as clean as he could. The surface was cement at first, but he tore that out and replaced it with VersaCourt, a softer, synthetic material that came in sections that fit together like puzzle pieces. “He was looking ahead even back then,” his son says. “If it would have stayed cement I would have wrecked my knees and I wouldn’t have been able to amount to anything.”

  Americans like to believe in the myth of the self-made athlete, the kid who succeeds because he just outworks everybody. But the top levels of sport are made up of those who start out with the right DNA. They are the pool of candidates for stardom—and the most focused, hardest-working, and luckiest of them rise to the top.

  One reason that basketball players are scouted at such a young age—and that evaluations of them are often right—is that the universe of human beings with the height and athleticism of elite players is limited. They are oversized people with extraordinary physical dexterity. A typical guard in the NBA is between six foot three and six foot six, and the rest of the players range on up to seven feet and beyond. If a kid looks like he’ll grow tall enough and is sufficiently quick and skilled—and seems to possess the grit and imagination that are the components of true basketball genius—he is likely to be anointed by the wise men of hoops as a future prospect.

  Brian Bowen Jr. never presented as the next LeBron James—that’s a much smaller subset—but it was apparent from even before he hit his teens that he was a college prospect and possible NBA player. Both of his parents are over six feet tall. His extended family includes not just Jason Richardson, but others who had been top high school and college athletes. His own memory is that he never struggled or experienced a time when his coordination was still catching up with his height. When he played locally, he was always the best player on the court, bigger and faster than whatever competition he faced, and he could easily weave his way past defenders on the dribble or just shoot over them. He scored 48 points in his first game in middle school.

  His game was a bit old school. He modeled it after Tracy McGrady, whose NBA career peaked before Tugs hit his teens, but he watched and rewatched the old tapes. Tugs admired McGrady’s smoothness, the way he effortlessly changed speeds, how he blew by his defenders or just glided by. He liked Carmelo Anthony, a current NBA player, for the same reasons. It was a style thing. His favorite subject in school was history, and McGrady and Anthony would have been at home in the league a couple of decades earlier, in the era of short shorts and big Afros.

  The summer after eighth grade, Bowen was invited to the CP3 Rising Stars Camp, named after the NBA star Chris Paul, and one of the stops on the circuit where a young player can make a name. “I was starting to blow up at that point,” he said, “and then I played well there and it started to get really crazy.”

  When Tugs traveled outside of Saginaw, he got a sense of his growing profile. People knew his name. There were men watching from the sidelines he didn’t know who came specifically to check him out. “You carry yourself different after you get known, hold your head a little higher,” he said. “People are looking at you, there’s expectations for you.”

  From middle school on, his peer group became the players he met at national events, others in the high school class of 2017 who projected as top recruits and future NBA first-round picks—including DeAndre Ayton, who would end up at Arizona; Marvin Bagley III, a Duke recruit; and Collin Sexton, who chose Auburn. They were all projected as one-and-done players, almost sure to bolt for the NBA after a single college season. Most evaluators did not put Tugs quite in their class, but that’s who he measured himself against.

  Bowen cracked the starting lineup at Arthur Hill High School in Saginaw as a freshman, which no one had done for years, and attracted intense attention from college coaches and the media. He played for a time for a local AAU program, Dorian’s Pride, which was headed by the aspiring basketball impresario Christian Dawkins, and later played for a more prominent team in Chicago called MeanStreets. A story from when Bowen was fifteen described him as “a long lean guard with the ability to play nearly any position on the court,” and it noted that through his cousin, Jason Richardson, he had already met LeBron James, Dwyane Wade, and other NBA stars.

  After his sophomore season, Bowen left Saginaw and enrolled at La Lumiere prep in La Porte, Indiana. Michigan’s state high school athletic board has some of the most restrictive rules in the country concerning where and when players can compete, and he wanted to be able to play in the made-for-TV games that ESPN and other commercial interests staged between the best high school teams. La Lumiere was a national power, but not what is sometimes referred to as a basketball factory, or a “pop-up basketball school”—schools created for basketball that sometimes do not even hold classes. (They outsource their academics to some nearby institution, or have their students take classes online.) Among La Lumiere’s alumni is John Roberts, the chief justice of the Supreme Court.

  Several of Bowen’s teammates at La Lumiere were the targets of top Division I programs, including a player from Australia now playing at Creighton and another at Michigan State, Jaren Jackson Jr., who in 2018 would become a first-round NBA pick. Bowen figured he had the best of both worlds. “It’s a legit school, but I was practicing every day against lottery picks.”

  * * *

  —

  If Bowen (or his father) were looking to increase his national profile and make himself an even hotter basketball stock, his transfer to La Lumiere accomplished that. But so did a couple of his other moves along the way. One was making it clear that despite his cousin’s legacy at Michigan State, and the fact that he had a long-standing scholarship offer from coach Tom Izzo, the Spartans did not have an inside track. “It’s nothing like that at all,” he said when a reporter from the Detroit Free Press suggested it was a foregone conclusion that he would follow Jason Richardson’s trail to East Lansing. He noted that the Spartans had been chasing him since “I was as small as I can be,” but he was still shopping. He seemed to enjoy narrating the story of his recruitment.

  In his junior year, he hinted that Michigan, in Ann Arbor—Michigan State and Tom Izzo’s in-state rival—was a possibility even though they had not yet offered him a scholarship. “The relationship is getting pretty close,” he said, sounding as if he were talking about his dating life. “Coach (John) Beilein likes to let his guards go. I’ve noticed that. I like to get up and down the floor really fast. That’s a high-paced team. I’m interested.”

  Just after Christmas 2016, in an interview on Zagsblog (a recruiting site run by Adam Zagoria), he broke down the attributes of the five final schools on his list and how they were courting him. Arizona: “Big-time program. Their pitch
is their style of play and the amount of guys they’ve got to the NBA at my position, so I really like that about them.” Michigan State: “Has been on me for a good portion of my life.” N.C. State: “They’ve been on me since ninth grade. They had a whole book of a plan for me. It means a lot.” Creighton: “They’ve made a big leap in their program, and they want me to come in and make a bigger impact.” Texas: “I know a couple guys down there, teammates I’ve played with. Coach (Shaka) Smart is a great guy, a great coach overall. Their pitch is that they really need a scorer, and I can bring that for them.”

  Like every player of his stature, Tugs was almost solely focused on what college program would best showcase him to the NBA and prepare him for pro success. He made the whole thing sound so wide open that many other programs, or at least their fan bases, seemed to feel they had a shot. A website called Addicted to Quack (it assiduously follows the Oregon Ducks) reported that Bowen might be headed to play basketball at Oregon. He seemed at times to be almost teasing Michigan State. “They’re just saying I’m the No. 1, 2, and 3 plan,” he said of Izzo and the Michigan State coaching staff. “I’m just the main guy that they really need or really want for next year.” He was well known in the state, and when he attended Spartans games in East Lansing the crowd chanted his name, hoping to influence his decision.

  Top high school players sometimes verbally commit in their junior year, or occasionally even earlier, though they can’t formally sign scholarship offers until November of their senior year. It’s not uncommon for them to back out of verbal commitments to “mid-majors,” schools outside the premier conferences, if an offer from a more elite program comes along. (It’s an axiom of the recruiting game that kids don’t get recruited by the top schools until they have verbally committed somewhere else.)

  But by the spring of any given year, most of the best players are formally signed. Bowen kept extending the process. The more players who committed, the more interest there was in him. He indicated he would make a decision by the end of January 2017, either in a press conference to be televised by ESPN or in a special video for the website Bleacher Report. “They’ve hit me up about it,” he said, but there was no announcement and he remained on the market.

  * * *

  —

  College recruiting for football and basketball is avidly followed, and there is money to be made from all the suspense and hype that swirls around questions over where seventeen- and eighteen-year-old athletes will choose to enroll. It is an obsession that has become an industry—and one of the countless ways in which profits are mined from young athletes. In this realm, no news or rumor is too small to publish or tweet.

  Evan Daniels, one of the country’s leading recruiting experts, sends out a blizzard of updates almost every day. A typical one: “Maros Zeliznak, a 6-11 center from Slovakia, just verbally committed to Jacksonville State, per a source.” By interviewing kids after they make their recruiting visits (“Five-star forward E. J. Montgomery recaps official visit to Duke”), Daniels serves as an information clearinghouse for college coaches, who, even as they sometimes scoff at the veracity of the information on the recruiting sites, use them as a source of information on where their targets have visited and what they may be thinking.

  In the last decade, the recruiting sites Scout.com and Rivals .com, along with SB Nation and 247Sports, which also focus heavily on recruiting, have been acquired by or merged with larger corporate partners in deals worth at least $300 million in total. Other sites, like MaxPreps, which covers high school sports in addition to just recruiting, have also been folded into bigger media companies. ESPN’s massive TV and Internet empire exhaustively covers recruiting. All the major conferences operate websites, which drive traffic and earn advertising dollars by fixating on recruiting. There are some within this business who earn money as pseudo-journalists, reporting for the websites, and also double dip by selling their scouting information directly to college coaches. (The coaches, of course, expense it to their athletic departments.)

  When Rivals was bought by Yahoo, a sports business columnist for CNBC wrote, “There is absolutely no slowdown in the interest of college/high school recruiting. The bottom line is that fans—especially in hard-core areas—can no longer afford to not know about the latest and greatest prospects their schools are recruiting. If they don’t know the recruiting game, they’ll lose at the water cooler. On National Football Signing Day, Rivals had 74 million page views.”

  By delaying his decision, Brian Bowen was serving an important service to this industry: He was providing content. What he did was more closely watched because he was still at large.

  In the big grassroots youth basketball events, the results of the games matter less than the matchups of individual prospects, which play out as duels between high-end players trying to improve or justify their rankings. It is the major reason that the quality of play is generally considered wretched on the AAU circuit—and why many of the best high school players enter college with little idea how to play team basketball.

  Bowen had solidified his stature while playing for the Chicago AAU club MeanStreets in a 2016 matchup against a team called Southern Stampede, which featured Collin Sexton, a speedy guard from suburban Atlanta who was already being projected as a possible NBA lottery pick. Sexton was four inches shorter and much quicker, and the two played different positions, but they guarded each other as dozens of college coaches watched from the bleachers. Sexton scored 33 points, but Bowen, with 19 points and seven rebounds, held his own and showed himself to be more than just a shooter. The game proved that he was a competent playmaker who could compete against a much quicker perimeter player, and it elevated his status.

  In April 2017, Tugs traveled to New York to play in the annual Jordan Brand Classic, one of the highlights of the high school all-star basketball circuit. Past MVPs of the game, which would be televised by ESPN, included NBA superstars LeBron James, Kevin Durant, Kyrie Irving, and Anthony Davis. Like so much else about high school basketball, the event was half about the sport and half about the shoes.

  During the week preceding the game, its sponsors staged a “Jordan Brand Classic Senior Night Tour,” which consisted of visits to the schools of each participating player so a banner with their name and the name of the event could be hoisted in the gymnasium. La Lumiere got two banners—Bowen’s, and one for his teammate and fellow Jordan Brand all-star Jaren Jackson Jr. Like many of the other institutions that supplied players to the Jordan Classic, La Lumiere was the type of school likely to attract future college players and NBA prospects. Whenever they walked into their practice gym, they would see the Jordan Brand banner.

  Only a handful of the twenty-four participants were not yet committed to college programs, and they got special attention from the recruiting websites during the practice sessions leading up to the game. The players were also being watched by pro scouts, and by representatives of “mock draft” websites who predict the order of future drafts. “Brian Bowen has been great all week,” Mike Schmitz of DraftExpress tweeted in the leadup to the game. “Shooting it in a variety of ways—spot-ups, off screens, one dribble pullups. Instinctual scorer.”

  His outstanding practice performances were prelude to a great game. Tugs connected on 10 of his 13 shots, including 6 of 7 of his three-point attempts, scored 26 points, and was named most valuable player of the East squad. Eric Bossi, a national basketball analyst for Rivals.com, noted the auspicious timing of Bowen’s breakout performance. “Brian Bowen having himself by far the best day I’ve seen from him at any of the various all-star game circuit activities,” he wrote, adding, “Picked a good time.” A writer for Bleacher Report wrote that the “future of college basketball was on display” at Barclays Center—he was referring to all the players—but he singled out Bowen as particularly “poised and confident.”

  The site FanRag headlined a post in late May: “Where will Brian Bowen—the last uncommitted 5-star recruit�
�land?” It pointed out that he was the last of the top twenty recruits left and that there was only one other uncommitted prospect among the top hundred. “So what’s the holdup for Tugs?” the story asked. “Simply put, no one knows.” It listed five possible landing spots—none of them Louisville—and threw in Texas as a long shot because he had lately been retweeting a lot of Longhorn players.

  One of the tropes of writing about college recruiting is for journalists to play the role of matchmakers. They look at the current roster of college teams, and perhaps the personality of the coaches and their preferred playing styles, and then opine on which players fit where. After watching him light up the scoreboard in Brooklyn, Sports Illustrated’s Luke Winn wrote of Bowen that he “could see why he’d be a great fit at Creighton.” Exactly why he belonged at a Jesuit school in Omaha, Nebraska, that rarely advances very far into the NCAA tournament—and in some years does not even make the field—was not explained.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  THE ’VILLE

  On July 28, 2010, Rick Pitino was called to the witness stand in a criminal trial at the federal courthouse in downtown Louisville. He was not the defendant, but his central role in the tawdry case was humiliating to him. Pitino was just about a decade into his stay in the city, and beloved. The wisecracking, Armani-dressed coach brought a taste of New York to Louisville, a sense that it was more than just a midsized city in Kentucky separated from Indiana by the Ohio River, and his games at the gleaming Yum Center, with its bourbon bars and luxury boxes, were as much about glitz as basketball.

  Louisville is bigger in population than several cities with NBA teams, and there had long been a hope in town that it could attract a franchise. With Pitino, that desire became less urgent. “They were our pro team,” Jonathan Blue, a former university trustee said. “The Yum Center was an NBA-like experience.”