The Last Temptation of Rick Pitino

by Michael Sokolove

  But the NCAA also found that Pitino and the head coach at the time, Bruce O’Neill, provided false information to investigators and ordered the two men to be disassociated from the program, at a point after they had already left. The New York Times unearthed details of the episode when Pitino was under consideration for the Kentucky head coaching job in 1989. He could have responded that he had made mistakes as a young coach years back, but, typically, he insisted that he had done nothing wrong. “There’s no one in this business with more integrity than Rick Pitino,’’ he said. “I’m going to make my mistakes as a coach—every coach is going to make mistakes. But one thing you won’t have to worry about is cheating with Rick Pitino. It didn’t happen in Hawaii as far as I’m concerned.”

  When the reporter followed up, Pitino held firm. “I was a graduate assistant. I didn’t make any mistakes, I don’t care what anybody says.”

  The incident did not deter Kentucky, and by the time Louisville began recruiting him, it was twenty-five years in the past. Common friends in Louisville connected Jurich with Pitino, who was temporarily out of a job, having resigned as the coach of the Boston Celtics the previous season. Pitino was not one to want to sit around, but when Jurich flew down to Miami to meet with him in the spring of 2001, he was no more eager to come to Louisville than Jurich had been a few years earlier. “I made my pitch, but he rejected me,” Jurich said. “It went on for three weeks and he rejected me three different times.”

  Pitino thought the fans at Kentucky would hate him and those at Louisville, his former rival, would never embrace him. (He was right on the first count.) He couldn’t wrap his mind around returning to college coaching ninety miles from Lexington. But he considered himself a turnaround artist, like a CEO who revives failing companies, and Jurich persuaded him to view the Louisville job that way. “My vision to him was we can turn this thing around.” Jurich also sensed, correctly, that after life in the NBA cities of New York and Boston, Joanne Pitino was eager to return to quieter surroundings.

  Rick Pitino would come to feel the same way. Louisville suited him. “It’s the finest place I’ve lived, because it incorporates everything that I want in my life,” he said in 2013. “I like good restaurants. I like the Thoroughbred industry. I like very little traffic because I grew up with traffic. So it offers me everything that I want in my life, and then, if I want an amenity, I go to New York or I go to Miami, where I have residences.”

  In their sixteen years together, Pitino and Jurich were business associates but never friends. Jurich grew up almost within sight of the Santa Anita racetrack in Arcadia, California (his high school shared a parking lot with it), so a love of Thoroughbred racing was one thing they did share. But Jurich could not remember them ever having dinner alone. “He had his own set of friends,” he said. “I stay with my wife and family.”

  The Pitino who was a creature of the night was no secret in Louisville, but Jurich says he had no direct knowledge and not much interest in that aspect of his coach. “People see Rick as the guy in Armani suits. I saw him as a different person. To me, he was the guy in a sweatsuit, in the gym with his players.”

  Jurich’s father was an executive with Transamerica, and he drilled into him that an effective leader hires good people and supports them. “I have been criticized for being too loyal,” he said, “but I can’t be disloyal. It’s not in my DNA.”

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  The episode at the heart of the Karen Sypher affair occurred seven years before the trial, in 2003, at a favorite haunt of Pitino’s, an Italian restaurant called Porcini a couple of miles from his home. He had just hired a new assistant coach, former NBA player Reggie Theus, and to celebrate he put together a golf outing with Theus and a couple of friends. They played at a local country club in the afternoon, agreeing that the losers would buy dinner, and then met that evening at the restaurant.

  Pitino had what he described as a designated driver with him, a noncoaching member of his basketball staff, and the table drank several bottles of wine. According to his testimony, when dinner was over he moved to the corner of the bar to talk with some friends. Karen Sypher, who was then forty-three years old, approached. (Her last name then was her maiden name, Cunagin.) Pitino, then fifty, had never met her before. She asked if he could wish her son a happy birthday, which he did, adding, “Study hard in school.”

  The restaurant was clearing out and Pitino believed Sypher had left, but she came back later and edged next to him at the bar. She told him she was a big Louisville basketball fan. He was drinking a glass of wine. “I ordered a drink for her and she started rubbing on my leg,” he testified.

  As this was going on, his friends melted away, leaving him with a woman he had just met. It seemed like the kind of moment where they may have had an idea of what might, or would, happen next. They were giving Coach Pitino his space.

  When the last of the other patrons had left, the owner of the restaurant walked over and said, “Coach, I’m going to head home. You’ll finish your drink and leave?” Pitino said that would be fine, and the owner said, “Okay, go out the side door,” indicating that it would lock behind him.

  According to Pitino’s testimony, after they found themselves alone, Sypher said to him, “Why don’t we finish our drinks over there?” as she looked in the direction of a banquette. “We did and then some unfortunate things happened.”

  He said he had too much to drink to drive but was otherwise “totally coherent.”

  “Did you have sex?” the prosecutor asked.

  “Yes, very briefly.”

  The details of the case were sordid almost beyond words. It reflected poorly on Pitino, but on the other hand, his response to the attempted extortion showed his competitive instincts. As mortifying as it all was, he was determined not to lose. Someone had tried to get the best of him, and rather than surrender to it, he went to law enforcement.

  On the witness stand, he explained why the sexual encounter was so brief. “She opened my pants and asked if I had a condom and I said no, I don’t carry condoms with me.” She joked that she was very fertile, to the point that when her ex-husband even just looked at her, she got pregnant. “And I got very scared at that point,” Pitino testified. “Our encounter lasted less than fifteen seconds. . . . We talked a little bit. I pulled my pants up and we left a short time afterwards.”

  Under cross-examination by Sypher’s lawyer, James Earhart, he was pressed for more detail. “I immediately pulled out,” Pitino said.

  “You did not ejaculate, then?” the lawyer asked him.

  “I did,” he said. “Down my leg.”

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  Beyond the incident itself, the trial revealed something about the world Pitino inhabited, and it provided a window into his day-to-day life. He was a wealthy, powerful, and busy man, and he had people around him who saw to his needs and, when necessary, carried out some difficult tasks.

  About three weeks after their encounter, he testified that he got a call from Sypher, who told him she had missed her period. He said he did not think the baby could possibly be his, but when she asked for $3,000, he provided it. He then arranged for an employee of Louisville basketball, his equipment manager, to drive her to Cincinnati, where she got an abortion. In court, Pitino insisted he believed the $3,000 was to pay for her health insurance and not specifically for an abortion.

  Pitino’s equipment manager was Tim Sypher. He had worked for Pitino going back to when he was coaching the Boston Celtics. His role was what in politics is called a “body man.” He spent time with Pitino, drove him, ran errands, took care of business. Tim Sypher got to know the former Karen Cunagin on the drive to Cincinnati and back. They began dating. Eventually they married, and she became Karen Sypher. (The two gave new meaning to the phrase “meet cute.”)

  It was not until six years later that Pitino began getting threatening messages on hi
s cell phone. A male voice alleged that Pitino had raped Karen Sypher and said that the allegation, if made public, would harm his public image. (The Syphers were having marital problems and the voice on the messages was not Tim Sypher’s, but a male associate of Karen Sypher’s, according to testimony at the trial.)

  Pitino suspected that Karen Sypher was behind the threats, and said to her husband, “You need to get your wife and we need to talk.” They met soon after that, and a few days later, according to the criminal complaint, Pitino received the first of a series of written messages from her, demanding college tuition for her children, two cars, a paid-off house, and $3,000 a month. She wrote, “If all is accepted, I will protect Rick Pitino’s name for life.” An attorney working for Sypher later elevated the demand to $10 million.

  Sypher’s son, then twenty, was one of the people who attempted to negotiate a settlement from Pitino. When he raised the rape allegation, Pitino testified, he told him, “I can assure you, son, that never happened.”

  On cross-examination, Sypher’s lawyer questioned why Pitino did not immediately call law enforcement rather than try to deal with it himself, which he did for about a month. It was a season in which his team fell just one game short of advancing to the Final Four, and the phone messages and demands had started in late February, on the eve of the annual event he had told the jury about—March Madness. “I don’t think you understand what was going on in my life at that point,” he answered. “We were trying to win a championship, and I was trying to coach this team to a championship.”

  Pitino’s back-and-forth with Sypher’s lawyer was contentious. “No, I did not pay for the abortion,” he testified, adding that he did not believe the procedure cost $3,000.

  “We’re going to banter over this?” Earhart said.

  “We are,” Pitino replied.

  He testified that he had “deep regret” for embarrassing and humiliating the university and his family. “Ignorance on my part led up to it,” he said. “I’m a married man and I never should have put myself in that situation.”

  Pitino was known for his pithy press conferences, and some fans looked forward to his postgame badinage with the media almost as much as the games themselves. Once, as he was talking, a smartphone that had been placed on the podium by a reporter to record him began to ring. He picked it up. “Hello?” he said. “Yes . . . Where do you want to meet for a drink? . . . Who’s we?” He put it down and said, “Some people want to have a drink with you, Bob, and they said they want to meet at Jeff Ruby’s.” His press conference after the Sypher affair became public was uncharacteristically somber. After the news broke, he said, “I went home to comfort my wife because this has been pure hell for her.” But he also took pains to assure the team’s fans, known as Cardinal Nation, that the program would not be damaged. “We will continue to bring in great players,” he said. “We will continue to run this program with great integrity.”

  Sypher was convicted and did serious prison time—six and a half years, some of it in an eight-by-ten-foot cell, with a roommate, at the Marianna prison camp in Florida. She was denied early release by Charles Simpson III, the federal judge who presided over her trial, and served her full term. When he sentenced her initially, Simpson, who got his undergraduate and law degrees at the University of Louisville, said Sypher’s crimes were “brazen, driven by sheer greed and desire for money, and for a lifestyle which the defendant must have desired.”

  Jurich considered Pitino’s lapse with Karen Sypher to be a private affair. And considering Pitino’s income, he reasoned that he could have paid to silence her but did the right thing by going to law enforcement. (That may not be the case since her last demand was for $10 million.) “She was on a mission to get him,” Jurich said after the trial. “It’s been very taxing because he loves his family. He knows he let them down that night.”

  In one sense, Pitino prevailed. He did not cave to extortion, and Sypher paid a heavy price. But he suffered permanent damage. It was her trial, but it was his reputation and legacy at stake, and the image of a fifty-year-old man with his pants down in a restaurant booth is everlasting.

  Around the time of the trial, Mike Lupica, the New York Daily News columnist, referred to the Sypher affair as a “shabby mess” and wrote, “It is why for all the games he has won at Louisville and will continue to win, Pitino is through there, sooner rather than later.”

  Pitino was through in one sense, in that the old image of Rick Pitino—the mentor-coach, leader of young men, and inculcator of off-court values—was dead. That was a role for someone else to play. Pitino had lost his claim to it. But the university’s leadership was not as bothered as Lupica seemed to imagine they would be. They were happy to keep him.

  His mission was clarified after the Sypher affair. From that point on, it was only about winning games, generating revenue, and entertaining greater Louisville.

  Those, of course, were Pitino’s primary objectives from the start—and the same is true of every coach in every revenue-producing sport at every university in the nation that plays big-time sports. Win. Entertain. Put asses in the seats. Make money. Everything else is secondary. It’s possible you’ll get fired for something that happens on the periphery. The surer thing is that you won’t stay in the job very long just for being a straitlaced Boy Scout if you can’t compete at the top of the conference, fill the arena, and get into postseason play.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  ABSOLUTIONS

  It is easy to lose sight of what a genius of a coach Pitino has been. When a sports legacy is sullied, it has the effect of erasing memories and moments.

  Pitino was a master of motivation, game preparation, and in-game tactics. If you asked anyone inside college basketball what coach they would choose to win just one game—not necessarily a program builder or leader of young men, but the guy to get a victory when it was most needed—Pitino would be at or near the top of any list. There’s a quote attributed to the late football coach Bum Phillips about Alabama’s legendary Paul Bryant—“He can take his’n and beat your’n, and then he can turn around and take your’n and beat his’n”—and you could say the same about Pitino. If the talent levels were equal, he was probably going to win.

  Pitino’s first Final Four team, Providence College in 1987, established his bona fides because he had so little to work with. There are some 4,500 Division I basketball players at any given time, and Pitino’s point guard, Billy Donovan, now the head coach of the NBA’s Oklahoma City Thunder, would have been way down on the list of the ones you would want to build a Final Four team around. He was overweight and out of shape when Pitino arrived before his junior year. He had averaged less than three points a game over his first two seasons and wanted to transfer. Pitino called around to other coaches to try to find him a spot, and then had to inform Donovan that no one else wanted to offer him a scholarship, so he might as well stay.

  But Pitino liked Donovan’s skills and said that if he worked on his fitness, he could earn playing time. He also suggested he learn to take a jump shot. (Donovan had been getting just a couple of inches off the ground on his attempts—almost like he was taking an old-fashioned set shot.) “Coach was brutally honest, and Billy embraced his message,” Herb Sendek, an assistant to Pitino at Providence, recalls. “There’s never been a player before or since who transformed himself like Billy did.”

  In his first year with Pitino, the newly svelte Donovan played 30 minutes a game and averaged 15 points, and Providence won 17 games, a big improvement over the previous season but not enough to make the NCAA tournament. They did make it to the semifinals of the National Invitation Tournament.

  The following season, 1986–87, was the first year of the three-point shot in college basketball. Most coaches scorned it as a gimmick and let their players attempt only a handful of them a game. Pitino embraced the new rule as an equalizer—a way for an undersized, moderately talented team to overachieve.
In doing so, he established the model for the Cinderella Final Four teams that followed—from Butler to George Mason to Virginia Commonwealth—all of them with small but skilled players who spaced the floor and took copious numbers of three-point shots. Providence that season attempted nearly three times as many three-pointers as its opponents. Donovan alone launched seven a game, connecting on 40 percent of them.

  Pitino figured out the geometry of the modern game before anyone else—space the floor with shooters—and its new math. A team that connected on even 35 percent of its three-point attempts was better off than one that traditionally “worked the ball in” closer to the hoop and took two-pointers, especially if those two-point attempts were closely guarded, or out near the new three-point line where you might as well take a step back beyond the arc and let it fly.

  This was not the way that Pitino’s teams always played in the years that followed—the team was uncharacteristically weak defensively—but it was the way that his Providence team needed to play. The Friars went on an astounding late-season charge before getting stopped one game short of the NCAA title game by Syracuse, led by future NBA all-star Derrick Coleman. It was Pitino’s last game at Providence. Over the next two decades, he would bounce between the NBA and college basketball, from the Knicks, to Kentucky, and and on to the Celtics before landing at Louisville.