The Last Temptation of Rick Pitino

by Michael Sokolove

  In a blog post, he retreated to his usual defense when he felt challenged. He could not be judged by mortals because God was already judging him. “That trustee would be better served trying to get a dysfunctional board on some form of a team,” he wrote. “I’ll make a suggestion to the person I have not met: Let God judge and get out of your glass house.”

  Larry Benz, then chairman of the board, came to Pitino’s defense. “We join our athletic director, Tom Jurich, in our complete support of him.”

  An emphasis on athletics at a university—which always equates to the revenue sports of football and men’s basketball—by its very nature tilts the conversation toward men. They know the sports intimately. They read the recruiting blogs. They have the strong opinions on coaching strategies, and if an official makes a poor call during a game, they are the ones most likely to shout their displeasure—even if they are in the president’s box and splash their bourbon while doing so. (The bar’s open; you can always get a refill.)

  At its most extreme, the focus on sports boils over into misogyny. Bingham got hate emails from Louisville sports fans, some of them crude in nature. Feeling under siege, she privately told Pitino she regretted her remarks—and, in fact, she had meant to direct her fire more at Ramsey and to issues involving the governance of the university. The Courier-Journal considered her communication with the basketball coach worthy of a story, headlining it, “Bingham Apologizes to Pitino for Comments.”

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  The unraveling of the Ramsey-Jurich-Pitino regime at Louisville occurred in stages. It was a slow-motion, chaotic drama that featured the daylighting of the university’s tangled and troubling finances, which were, by design, nearly indecipherable. A new Kentucky governor in 2016 fired the university’s entire board of trustees, was ordered to reinstate them by a judge, and then, after figuring out how to do it legally, fired them again and appointed a new board. Emily Bingham and her allies were among the board members replaced. At the same time, James Ramsey, the longtime president, was swept out after Governor Matt Bevin requested and received his resignation.

  A constant throughout all the twists and turns was the backbiting and backstabbing among people who were once allies. John Schnatter, the founder of Papa John’s, was a key figure in the intrigue. Referred to by almost everyone in town as “Papa John,” Schnatter lives in the Louisville suburb of Anchorage on an estate that makes Pitino’s mansion on Indian Creek Island seem like a starter home. The main house is 40,000 square feet, not including the twenty-two-car underground garage. The sixteen-acre grounds include man-made ponds and a three-hole golf course. (“Who would’ve imagined pizza could build this?” Mitt Romney marveled at a political fund-raiser Schnatter hosted for him. “This is really something. Don’t you love this country?”)

  Schnatter contributed an initial $5 million for the naming rights of Papa John’s Cardinal Stadium, which some considered a bargain after the program soared to national prominence. But he had contributed millions in the intervening years and had never let on, at least publicly, that he was anything but a gung-ho booster of Jurich, Pitino, and Louisville sports. It was Schnatter who shuttled Jurich and other university officials to Dallas for a tour of AT&T Stadium, the Cowboys’ football palace, in his private plane.

  Schnatter was a member of the newest iteration of the board of trustees, and in the spring of 2017, he abruptly went on a diatribe against the athletic department. “The athletics thing scares me,” he said at a board meeting. “Until you fix athletics, you cannot fix this university.”

  The website Insider Louisville, which closely covers the city and university, asked, “What’s Papa Cooking?” There were many theories around town. One had to do with an argument that Schnatter and Pitino had in the parking lot at Valhalla, a golf club where they both belonged, supposedly over one of them not wanting to pay on a bet.

  When anyone took a shot at Pitino, or he felt they had, he would not say their name. That’s how Emily Bingham earned the sobriquet “that lady.” After Schnatter turned on him and Louisville sports, Pitino henceforth referred to him as “the pizza guy.” Sometimes he amended that and just called him “pizza boy.”

  Whatever Schnatter’s motivations were—and however unlikely it was that the right-wing pizza magnate would end up on the side of Emily Bingham and her friends—he was not wrong to be alarmed about the state of affairs at the U. of L. (Schnatter is close with prominent conservative donors Charles and David Koch, and has combined with them to fund free enterprise institutes at both Louisville and the University of Kentucky.) His swings were big and wild at times, but mostly on point. He asked why the football stadium was being expanded yet again while attendance at games was falling. He said there was a “perception problem” with big spending for sports while faculty salaries were stagnant. He shifted his giving from athletics to academics and was not among the donors to the latest enhancements of Papa John’s Cardinal Stadium.

  In June 2017, a few months after Schnatter went public with his criticism—and three months before the FBI’s investigation of college basketball brought down Rick Pitino and Tom Jurich—a long-awaited forensic audit of the university, ordered by the state, was completed. It revealed a situation at the U. of L. that, in the current vernacular, could best be described as a shit show.

  The audit was dense and not easy to digest, but its conclusions were not complicated: The university was like a household living beyond its means. Its ambitions and taste for luxury exceeded its available resources. To make ends meet, it was dipping into its endowment to cover a range of expenditures, including operating expenses and salaries, and members of the administration had gone to great lengths to conceal some of the most questionable spending.

  What most everyone had considered a golden age for the University of Louisville suddenly looked a lot different. When the audit’s findings were made public, Greg Postel, the interim president, said, “This report should answer many questions about the past and close the door on a sad chapter in the university’s history.”

  The audit’s main finding was that up to 10 percent of the university’s $790 million endowment had been liquidated and that the university was dipping into it at a rate that could eventually exhaust the whole fund. Some of the money went to questionable real estate endeavors and to investments in poorly performing start-up companies.

  The athletic department featured prominently in the report. The president’s office was purchasing about $800,000 in season tickets annually for football and men’s basketball games and using endowment funds to do so. The “ticket purchases contributed to the ULF [University of Louisville Foundation] liquidation of pool assets,” the report said, meaning the spending down of its endowment. Some of the seats were given as gifts to prospective donors. The president’s office supposedly sold some of them, but there were no records of the sales or indications that they ever brought in any money.

  Endowment funds were used to buy a golf course for the university’s men’s and women’s teams. They were used to pay portions of Jurich’s deferred compensation, and to fund his “gross-ups”—the paying of his taxes. The foundation had engaged in some complex transactions with the University of Louisville Athletic Association (the funding arm of the athletic department) in which it seemed to get the short end of the deal. In one such case, the report said, “the foundation spent $15.1 million on ULAA’s behalf for which it received $11.6 million in consideration.”

  The questionable spending on sports was part of a larger, university-wide trend. The auditors uncovered a 2012 memo from the foundation’s investment advisor warning that if the foundation continued its current practices, “There is a non-trivial chance that the endowment could cease to exist within the next 20 years.”

  Most of the nearly three-hundred-page document was dry, as one would expect in a report prepared by accountants and dealing with intricate financial machinations, but there were c
omic passages having to do with efforts to keep certain transactions and expenditures out of public view. An assistant to Ramsey wrote the foundation’s lawyer about some of the deferred compensation deals. “How can we keep these . . . from being subject to ORR?”—meaning open records requests. “I am certain Dr. Ramsey does not want any of these to end up in the hands of the C-J [Louisville Courier-Journal].” In her emails, she expressed concerns that the limited liability companies, or LLCs, created to pay certain expenditures might be too easily discovered by reporters and considered changing them “into something more obscure that would be difficult to find.”

  One such LLC is named Minerva. She proposed taking most of the vowels out of its name, and wrote, “We all need to worry. . . . We should try to find something that all of us can remember. What about MNRVA.LLC?”

  The foundation lawyer, apparently unconvinced that excising the vowels was advisable (or, alternatively, that it provided the sufficient subterfuge), wanted to give it more thought. He responded, “Let’s noodle on it.”

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  After the audit was released, a story in the online edition of the Courier-Journal was headlined, “Audit Vindicates Former U of L Trustees Once Derided as ‘Elitist’ and ‘the Chardonnay Crowd.’”

  There was a strong sense that after a couple of decades on the rise, the university had embarrassed itself, and it went beyond the audit. The previous year, pictures had emerged from a Mexican-themed Halloween party hosted by Ramsey for his staff. He was dressed in a multicolored poncho and sombrero, and others were similarly attired, with some of them also wearing fake mustaches.

  The photos harked back to an earlier era at U. of L., when such a dumb party idea might have seemed in keeping with its downmarket image. Nobody would have cared—or for that matter, even noticed. But the new U. of L. had higher aspirations, and the photos were not in accordance with them. The university apologized in a statement addressed to “Hispanic/Latino Faculty, Staff and Students,” and pledged to “institute immediate training on diversity and racial equality issues.” (And even that was embarrassing. Did U. of L. administrators really need diversity training to know not to dress up as fake Mexicans?)

  A far more serious problem than bad publicity over the Halloween party was that the U. of L.’s accrediting body, the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools, took the extraordinary step of placing it on probation in January 2017. The association made a judgment that the university was in chaos. The move by Governor Bevin to fire the trustees—and to ask for the resignation of Ramsey—was particularly disturbing to the accrediting board, which was alarmed that the institution was being run by a political figure rather than a board of trustees and its academic leadership.

  It said that if the U. of L. did not come into compliance, “removal from membership” was an option—which would have made its diplomas worthless. No one really thought that that extreme measure would take place—and the probation was lifted twelve months later—but still, to be sanctioned by its accreditor was a terrible mark against the institution. The release of the audit was another. Three months after that, in the fall of 2017, the FBI announced its charges, and Pitino and Jurich were put on leave, then fired.

  The Chronicle of Higher Education wrote, “The last 24 months have seen a seemingly nonstop flood of abysmal headlines for the University of Louisville. It’s endured multiple investigations of several stripes, it’s faced an intense vacuum of leadership, and its very accreditation seems under threat. The news on Wednesday—that the basketball coach, Rick Pitino, and the athletic director, Tom Jurich, had been placed on administrative leave after another high-profile scandal—was just the cherry on top.”

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  Jurich gave Louisville, the city and the school, more than it ever expected. The front porch on Floyd Street. Entry into the blueblood Atlantic Coast Conference. The sense of being a pro town even without a professional franchise. Everything was tops, even the dance team, the Ladybirds, champions of the National Cheerleading Association in nine of the last ten years and three-time winners of the Hip Hop national title. They are not an NCAA sport, but he took them in under the umbrella of his athletic department because they represented excellence.

  There is a great deal of support left for Jurich in Louisville—a sense that he pulled off some kind of miracle and that without him things will return to normal. Jim Patterson, a big donor whose name is on the baseball stadium (he contributed $3 million of the $11.2 million cost), urged interim president Greg Postel to spare Jurich after the recruiting scandal hit. “We are flying at 40,000 feet,” he wrote to him. “Does it make sense to turn the engines off now?” Another donor, Max Baumgardner, an eighty-eight-year-old former pilot who made a fortune as an investor, revoked his $6.3 million bequest to U. of L. athletics and redirected the money elsewhere in the university, including to a program in the school of music (the Max Baumgardner Endowed Fund for Excellence in Jazz Studies).

  There was an absurd aspect to the letter sent to Jurich informing him he was fired. It made it seem like the university, two decades into his tenure, had just discovered the nature of his management style. The letter from Postel to Jurich said that he had engaged in “willful misconduct,” brought disrepute to the university, and engaged in “divisive leadership, unprofessional conduct, and a lack of collegiality best characterized as intimidation and bullying that extends from the student government to the university’s senior leadership.” (The letter informing Pitino of his dismissal had the same quality. “This notice arises out of your conduct over a period of years,” it said, as if that had just come to their attention.)

  One element of Jurich’s alleged misconduct was that he did not properly supervise coaches, but everyone in town knew about his unwavering loyalty to his coaches—and not just the famous ones like Pitino. In 2013, the Courier-Journal reported on a women’s lacrosse coach described as “an abusive taskmaster” who ran her team amid a culture of fear. Among the allegations against her was that she ordered a player with a torn anterior cruciate ligament in her knee to do 250 push-ups in an airport terminal as punishment, kicked another player off the team on a road trip and left her behind, and told two teammates to sign a contract pledging they would no longer speak to each other. The athletic department’s spokesman responded after the story that there was “no next step planned” for the coach, and she stayed on for another four years. She was dismissed about a month after Jurich left.

  In May 2018, the university changed course and settled with Jurich. It gave him $7.2 million, plus medical coverage and twenty years of prime tickets to U. of L. football and men’s basketball games. It retreated from the position that he had been fired for cause and said he had retired.

  In Steamboat Springs, before the agreement, Jurich talked about his sense of feeling betrayed. Three of his children remained in Louisville. His son Mark, whom he considered “the best young fund-raiser in the NCAA,” had recently been dismissed from his job in Louisville’s athletic department. A two-time all-American baseball player at Louisville, he was told he was not welcome to attend baseball games at Patterson Stadium, according to Jurich.

  Tom Jurich worked extraordinarily long hours—there were really no waking hours that he was not working—because wherever he went, he was representing and selling the U. of L. He figured that even with his high salary, the university got a bargain. When he started at Louisville, the entire budget of the athletic department was about $14 million. By the time he left, it had reached $104.5 million.

  “I was a B student, but I understand people,” he said. “They all knew that I thought big. That’s what they hired me to do. Nobody, the whole time I was there, ever expressed to me—sports is getting too big. How could I have known? I did what they hired me to do. I gave them what they wanted.”

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  In contrast to Jurich, Rick Pitino thoroughl
y wore out his welcome in Louisville. Fans who had taken great pleasure from his teams, and who delighted in his swagger and wit, knew he had to go. Even his close friends used the phrase “third strike.” People were tired of him.

  The only one who did not realize it was Pitino himself. He insisted that he knew nothing about any side deals or money changing hands relating to the recruitment of Brian Bowen Jr.—just as he had known nothing about the escorts in the basketball dorm over the course of four years. He was an innocent. Forty years after he entered the fraternity of college basketball coaching, things still happened that were invisible to him, that he could not even imagine.

  He blamed the escorts scandal solely on the staff member who set up the parties. “Did one person do some scurrilous things? I believe so,” he said. “He knew better and was taught better by his parents and me.” After news broke of the federal government’s recruiting investigation and Louisville’s featured role in it, he talked about all the great assistant coaches he had hired—and his utter bewilderment over what his young assistant coach Jordan Fair could have been up to in the hotel-room meeting with Christian Dawkins. “I’m not going to hang him out to dry,” he said. “Whatever he did, it was a wrong move.”

  Living in Florida, with no job for the first time in his adult life, Pitino was college basketball’s King Lear. Fuming and petulant, he failed to grasp that it didn’t matter anymore what he did or did or did not know. Two catastrophic scandals had occurred on his watch, and they followed his own personal humiliation—the one-nighter with Karen Sypher, and his narration of it, in excruciating detail, under oath in federal court. No one, not even Rick Pitino, was going to survive a third fiasco.

  In March 2018, one of Pitino’s thoroughbreds, Coach Rocks, won a big race in Florida that qualified her to run in the annual Kentucky Oaks, an event for fillies that takes place the day before the Kentucky Derby at Churchill Downs. “With a determined surge” down the stretch, BloodHorse magazine reported, “Coach Rocks achieved what many believed was a lost cause—she made it possible for Rick Pitino to win another championship in Louisville.”