The Last Temptation of Rick Pitino

by Michael Sokolove

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  In each of Pitino’s last three years, the basketball program turned a profit of about $30 million, far and away the highest of any college team. They played in an NBA-sized arena with NBA-like amenities. By contrast, the NBA’s thirty teams averaged only about $17 million in net income in 2017, and nine of them are said to have lost money. (If they did not pay their players, of course, every NBA team would be profitable, wildly so.) A handful of NBA coaches earn more than the $7.8 million that Pitino was making, including the highest paid, San Antonio’s Gregg Popovich, at $11 million. But the vast majority make substantially less and are in the $2 million to $5 million range.

  In a 2016 article, ESPN investigative journalist Paula Lavigne wrote about the other uses that universities find for sports revenue: “Powered by multimillion-dollar media rights contracts and rising ticket-sales revenue, the richest schools have spent aggressively: on private jets, on campus perks like barber shops and bowling alleys, on biometric gadgets for athletes, and on five-star hotel stays during travel. They’ve also hired a plethora of athletic department support staffers who earn six-figure salaries and sometimes have obscure job titles such as ‘horticulturalist’ and ‘museum curator.’”

  Columnist Tim Sullivan of the Louisville Courier-Journal has been a close observer of the University of Louisville’s athletic department. “They don’t want to make a profit,” he said. “The goal is to have fabulous facilities, elite coaches, championship teams, and lose a dime.”

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  College basketball’s underworld, consisting of agents, runners, shoe companies, and shady coaches, is not a corrective to the contradictions of the NCAA’s gospel of amateurism. It is exploitation piled on top of exploitation.

  First of all, the money—even if it reaches the athletes—is a pittance compared to what is generated by the games. Based on Louisville’s $45.6 million in basketball revenue in 2017, and the NBA’s union-bargained formula of paying the players roughly half the team’s take, each of its thirteen scholarship players was worth an average of about $1.7 million a year. As a five-star recruit and likely starter, you could argue that Bowen should have been paid more.

  The court documents indicate that of the $100,000 promised to Brian Bowen Sr., just $19,500 seems to have been delivered at the time the FBI made its arrests and the scheme came to a halt. Considering the struggles that Dawkins and company experienced in raising money for the payoffs, it’s not clear if they ever would have been able to fully fund the $100,000 promise.

  That the defendants seem to have been buying players on the cheap, however, is not the most odious aspect of the criminal case. There are indications that Dawkins and others were using young athletes as bargaining chips, by attempting to direct current high school prospects to particular college teams in return for access to their current players. The goal was to have an inside track on managing the business affairs of players who were soon to jump to the NBA.

  As he traveled the country, Dawkins was in the habit of emailing back to his employer, Andy Miller, and to others at the ASM sports agency. The emails were obtained from the prosecution by defense lawyers as part of the discovery process. Some of them were viewed as well by Pete Thamel and Pat Forde of Yahoo News, whose reporting since September 2017 has led much of the daily coverage of the unfolding scandal. Their story on the emails refers to them as “a diary of the basketball black market.”

  In one August 2016 email, with the subject line “morning update,” Dawkins wrote to agent Andrew Vye that Lauri Markkanen, a talented seven-foot forward from Finland who was soon to start his freshman season at Arizona, had not yet settled on an agent. (Since he was a college player, NCAA rules would technically have prohibited him from signing or accepting benefits from an agent.) He suggested that Vye reach out to the Arizona coaching staff and dangle Brian Bowen Jr., then about to enter his senior year of high school, as bait. If he sent Bowen to them, he hoped that they would persuade Markkanen to sign with Miller’s agency. “The kid that they want from me is Brian Bowen,” he said, adding, “Arizona will do pretty much whatever we ask of them right now, until my kid decides on a school.”

  He emailed Andy Miller that he was also in contact with assistant coaches at two other schools to see if he could get some of their players for the agency in return for Bowen. “Trying to close the deal on Brian Bowen for Michigan State,” he said. “Trying to do a trade deal for Gary Harris, Miles Bridges, etc.” And in a separate email to Miller: “Trying to close the deal on Brian Bowen for Indiana. I told him if we can work together and if he can push for us to get Thomas Bryant and OG Anunoby two projected first rounders from IU this year we can work something out.”

  The emails may help explain why Bowen waited until the last possible moment before he committed. To the extent that Dawkins was running his recruitment, the longer it went on, the more he could use him as bait to get access to college coaches and their current rosters.

  Other emails that Dawkins sent touted his connections to various coaches, current NCAA players, high school kids, and their families. Several of the emails were expense requests—for reimbursements for a $400 ATM withdrawal labeled as an “advance” for the mother of a top high schooler, and for meals or hotel rooms for players and their families. After attending a Nike Skills camp, Dawkins sent back expenses as well as performance reviews for four players whom he labeled “our guys.”

  There is probably a zero chance that Dawkins was telling the truth about every scheme he had in progress and every coach and family he had in his pocket. It is in his personality to promise the world and figure it out later—to use one relationship to make another. It’s the nature of his line of work. He may have invented some of his associations and embellished others. In some of the emails, he may just have been sending along accounts of supposed business meals in order to cheat on his expenses.

  When the cases get to trial, jurors will have to sort it out. Is Dawkins a reliable narrator? They will determine the consequences for those who have been charged. None of them are head coaches—even though the names of several at high-profile programs are mentioned in the secretly recorded conversations. Some of the defense attorneys have wondered how they evaded prosecution. “This is like Enron, except if they only charged the secretaries,” Dawkins’s attorney, Steve Haney, said.

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  Tom Konchalski would attend a second court appearance for Jim Gatto and expected to sit through every day of his trial. “I want to be of support,” he said. He had known Gatto a long time, and the sixty-five-year-old Pitino even longer, from when Pitino was in his early twenties and just starting to make his bones in the coaching profession.

  Konchalski believed that both of them were caught up in a climate of moral rot. But he did not absolve Pitino, who for many years, he said, embodied the spirit of a proper basketball man. No one was better on the practice court. No one cared more about seeing the game played correctly, down to the smallest details. The assistant coaches he hired approached the game the same way, and if a kid, for example, set a screen incorrectly—not at the proper angle—they were on him just as fast as he was. And everybody stayed in the gym until the screen was set correctly. And until every other player on the court understood the way they were supposed to do it.

  Herb Sendek, now the coach at Santa Clara, his fourth head coaching job, remembers working for Pitino as a graduate assistant at Providence, an apprenticeship role, and early on attending a staff meeting in which Pitino was seeking input on how they should defend the four corners offense, the stalling tactic employed before the shot clock came to college basketball. “He got upset with me because I didn’t have any good answers,” Sendek said. “Even though it was my first year and we hadn’t even started practice yet, he expected me to contribute, significantly. In all honesty, I was not prepared to, but he held me to the highest standard and expected me to do thing
s. I thought, ‘This guy is unreasonable. How can he expect me to do that?’ But it made me grow faster.”

  As his assistants mature and are ready for the next step, Sendek said, “He goes to the wall to get you a job.”

  Pitino is proud of the young coaches he hired and trained, and his “coaching tree”—the assistants who have gone on to top jobs in the NCAA and NBA—is as impressive as any in basketball. Mike Balado came on to Pitino’s staff in 2013. It was his eighth job as a college assistant coach, along a career path that began at junior colleges and Division II schools, but hooking on with Pitino elevated him to a different level. When he was hired as head coach at Arkansas State in 2017, the school’s athletic director talked about how fortunate the program was to attract someone from Pitino’s staff, calling it “a great tribute to our emerging brand.”

  Over the course of Pitino’s long career, the profession has moved in a new direction. One common expression now is that the outcomes of NCAA tournament games are determined by “who wins in July”—meaning which coaches get the best take of players from the big summer tournaments in Las Vegas and elsewhere.

  Head coaches hire assistants who are recruiters first, some of whom came straight out of the grassroots scene, where the quality of basketball is notoriously bad. The coaches tend not to be teachers of the game. They are at home in Christian Dawkins’s world, and their job is to sign players.

  “Pitino’s credo was no shortcuts,” Konchalski said. “But then he started bringing in coaches without the same qualifications of those he used to hire. They were recruiters first and coaches second. Maybe he felt it’s something he had to do to stay competitive. I can’t say. But we all get in trouble when we sin against our nature.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  “I FEEL IT WAS AN ASSASSINATION”

  Even as prosecutors were still laying out the charges that morning in New York, calls went out among Pitino’s friends. One would say to another: Are you watching? No? Then you better turn your TV on.

  Those who tuned in knew instantly what they were witnessing: the end of the Pitino era. Considering what he had already survived—two sex scandals, one involving him directly and the other his team—they recognized it as his third strike. Pitino did not. His outsized competitive drive always made him believe he could “win” at anything, prevail even when others saw that the game was over.

  Pitino was summoned to the office of Greg Postel, the university’s interim president. The meeting lasted no more than five minutes. He went back to his office to find that the locks on the door had been changed, as had the locks at the offices of two of his assistant coaches, Jordan Fair and Kenny Johnson. He could not retrieve his personal belongings. He called his wife, Joanne, and told her to quickly gather a few things and meet him at the airport. They almost immediately put their house on the market and it sold in two weeks.

  Their charter flight landed in Florida and they took a car to their home on Indian Creek Island, off the coast of Miami. Pitino liked the finer things, and this house, purchased when he was with the Celtics, was his greatest indulgence. A speck of land in Biscayne Bay, the private island has thirty-five residences, all with waterfront views, arranged around a golf and country club. Pitino’s 12,000-square-foot Mediterranean-style house, on a 1.25-acre lot, had ten bedrooms, ten bathrooms, a gym, a four-car garage, and a motor court. His neighbors included not just Julio Iglesias and Carl Icahn, but also the billionaire car dealer and art collector Norman Braman, who once owned the Philadelphia Eagles. Beyoncé and Jay-Z were former neighbors. Forbes magazine referred to the community as a “billionaire’s bunker” protected by a private police force that patrols “via boat, jeep and jet ski 24 hours a day.”

  From the outside looking in, the island enclave may seem like an ideal place to decamp after a professional and personal blow, but Pitino was agitated and angry. He had lived according to the demands of his job and the rhythms of the basketball seasons, and now all of that was disrupted without warning. “His head was a calendar,” his friend Terry Meiners, the Louisville radio host, said. “He’d say, ‘I’ll meet you at a certain bar on 65th and Lexington,’ and give you a date and time, and he wouldn’t write it down, but you’d show up six weeks later and he was sitting right there. For forty years every one of his days was spoken for, but now he’s a balloon in the wind. He’s unemployed and unemployable in college basketball.”

  People worried about him. They called and texted. About a month after he was fired, Pitino took a trip to Southern California to hang out at Del Mar racetrack and watch the Breeders Cup, and a handful of friends joined him. The trip, Meiners said, “filled his dance card for a few days, but after that, he was back in the same place. I don’t think he had any idea what to do with himself.”

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  I talked on the phone to Pitino in mid-January. He was at his house on Indian Creek Island. I asked how he was spending his days. “I think that anytime you get assassinated you like to rest in peace,” he replied. “That’s the way I look at it. I’m resting in peace. I feel it was an assassination by lots of different venues. I’m not a bitter or a revengeful person. I’ve never been fired before. I have some ill feelings toward certain people and I think a lot of people would understand why. That’s life. I don’t have self-pity. A lot of people have it a lot worse.”

  He said he was doing a lot of reading. He was playing golf and going out on his boat. “I’m quite busy,” he said. “I’m also in the midst of selling a house and buying a house.” He was buying in Fort Lauderdale and giving up the Indian Creek Island estate. It felt too big. As one of the island’s more modest properties, it was on the market for $24 million.

  He said he did not understand the FBI’s interest in college basketball when it seemed to him they had more important things to investigate, and besides, he believed that what they discovered was what a lot of people already knew. “In every industry, the legal industry, Wall Street, any business, there is always a small percentage of people that doesn’t do things the right way. This has been going on in college. The NCAA is having its committee,” he said derisively, referring to a blue-ribbon “Commission on College Basketball” appointed by NCAA president Mark Emmert in the wake of the federal charges. Its members included former secretary of state Condoleezza Rice and former NCAA and NBA greats David Robinson and Grant Hill.

  In Pitino’s view, everything in the federal case has been in clear view for a long time. “Why now? I told them the AAU was too involved. You have to have a camp,” he said, meaning the NCAA should sponsor its own events for high school prospects rather than leaving it to the sneaker companies. “They knew the problems.”

  Pitino has spent most of his life connected to the NCAA, and his association with it and college basketball has made him a rich man. But he now routinely refers to the organization as “a joke.” He does not respect the penalties the NCAA imposed for past infractions relating to his team. The current federal case, he believes, involves behaviors that have been going on for decades—though not in his programs.

  The problems in his program at Louisville, he said, occurred because people he hired did exactly what he had told them not to do. He had specified red lines that could not be crossed, and they either did not hear him or just ignored his warnings—to catastrophic effect. The basketball program was devastated, the athletic department thrown into chaos, the university humiliated. In the business world, to have subordinates who cause such enormous damage is a marker of poor leadership, and executives get fired for it. Pitino does not see it that way. He believes he had hired well over the course of his career, brilliantly, but was done in by just a couple of mistakes.

  “You have to understand. I have had over thirty assistant coaches become head coaches, pro and college.” He ticked off several of his accomplished former assistants: Frank Vogel, coach of the NBA’s Orlando Magic. “He was my student manager and then an assistant.” B
rett Brown, the Philadelphia 76ers head coach, who played for him way back at Boston University. Billy Donovan, his former player point guard at Providence, winner of two NCAA titles as coach at Florida and now head man for the NBA’s Oklahoma City Thunder. Ralph Willard, who had been his assistant with the New York Knicks and at two college stops and had coached three NCAA teams of his own. “There’s twenty-seven others. I have to take full accountability for hiring two guys who were taught to do it the right way and they did it the wrong way. I take full responsibility in that regard.”

  In the letter notifying Pitino that he was fired, one of the stated reasons was that he had welcomed Christian Dawkins to campus without notifying the university that a sports agent was on the premises. Because Dawkins was “someone known to have acted as an ‘agent’ for athletes, the basketball staff should have notified Athletics Compliance,” the letter states. “No notification was provided.”

  Dawkins was a widely known figure on the recruiting circuit, from his teenage years as a tournament promoter and recruiting guru, to his role drumming up business for International Management Advisors, the Cleveland firm headed by LeBron James’s former financial advisor, and later as the enterprising and energetic runner for high-profile NBA agent Andy Miller. But Pitino said he was not among those who were familiar with Dawkins’s business activities. He only remembered him from having been involved with the recruitment of one of his former players. “I didn’t know him,” he said. “He texted me like five years back about this kid Jaylen Johnson.” Pitino said he knew Andy Miller, but “I never knew [Dawkins] worked for Andy Miller.”

  As Pitino described it, he and the Bowens had both made their own separate calculation that led Brian Bowen Jr. on a path to Louisville. Bowen wanted playing time, and Arizona, one of the schools on his list, had several players who decided to return rather than go to the NBA. Pitino had lost a key player to the NBA and had a spot to fill. “With Arizona, [Allonzo] Trier and the other kids were staying,” Pitino said. “I thought, well, I’ve seen him once, and Donovan Mitchell”—a Louisville player from the previous season—“is going pro, so we’ll bring him in and talk. He was a choirboy. The kid was quiet and respectful.”