The Last Temptation of Rick Pitino

by Michael Sokolove

  What if you decide it’s not a good idea to have eighteen-year-olds, just out of their parents’ houses for the first time, drawing big paychecks, living in luxury and driving around campus in Bentleys—so you hold their money in escrow? But that seems awfully paternalistic. What if an athlete needs the money now to take care of a family living in poverty? Does the NCAA decide to what extent their standard of living should be raised? For example, you can pay the rent and keep the heat on (but show us the bills), but the house in the better neighborhood with the pool in the backyard has to wait?

  One obvious fix is to allow NCAA athletes to earn money from their likenesses, through endorsements, or even autograph signing—if they have the market value that allows it. It could be like an off-campus job. (And probably an off-season one.) If their families needed money, it would be one way to provide it. If the NCAA really wants athletes to stay in school, it might eliminate one big reason for leaving—that a kid’s family is broke and he is eager to help them out.

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  By not paying players, big athletic departments have tens of millions of dollars to spread around—the spoils of uncompensated labor. A study by the Chronicle of Higher Education found that less than 1 percent of it goes to academic programs. Most of it stays in the sports program, and a big chunk of that pays salaries that are almost insanely generous—and not just to the football and men’s basketball coaches. It is not unusual for coaches in baseball, volleyball, swimming, and a whole range of other nonrevenue sports in the Power Five conferences to make $250,000 and up, and that’s not including their car allowances, a range of other benefits, and their bonuses for winning championships.

  Louisville is one of the best examples of how college sports executives choose to spend their largesse. In 2016, Tom Jurich gave Dan McDonnell, his baseball coach since 2007, a ten-year, $10.6-million contract extension. It was a raise of $325,000 a year. Its length gave him job security beyond any manager in Major League Baseball. Even more surprising, his annual salary is greater than that of several big-league managers.

  McDonnell, who previously was an assistant coach at the Citadel and Ole Miss, said after his new deal was unveiled, “God has blessed this program.” He added that he had not even had to ask for a raise. “Tom is not the type you have to knock on the door and ask for things. He’s one step ahead.” Said Jurich, “He’s earned it with a capital ‘E.’” After McDonnell left the press conference, he said, “I still think he’s underpaid.”

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  With all that has happened at Louisville, it would make sense for the school’s leadership to take a year or two and reassess its approach to athletics. Not to shut everything down, but to reimagine its central place at the institution and to think about whether it might make sense for it to be a quieter, more modest, and less money-centered force.

  But it’s impossible. The beast must be fed. Attendance for football needs to be juiced back up to justify the expense of the latest expansion of the stadium. In Louisville’s first post-Pitino year, the crowds at the Yum Center dropped sharply. That has to be fixed and the leaseholders of the suites must be coaxed to renew. There’s a baseball coach to pay and a whole lot of other big salaries and car allowances to fund.

  Restaurants and bars in downtown Louisville count on business before and after games at the Yum Center. Hotels fill up on football weekends—and they get thousands of room nights from the teams and their families who come to Louisville for the conference and NCAA tournaments that take place at the venues on Floyd Street. And not least, there’s the competition from other big-time programs. Louisville did not ascend into the Atlantic Coast Conference in order to be a doormat. There’s no time to rethink any of it. The machine needs to keep on running.

  After Jurich was dismissed, Vince Tyra, a Louisville financier and son of a legendary U. of L. basketball player, was named interim athletic director; six months later, he was given the job on a permanent basis. Following the 2018 basketball season, he had a decision to make about the young interim coach who had stepped in for Pitino—David Padgett, who by all accounts had done an admirable job under extremely difficult circumstances.

  Padgett, thirty-two years old, had served the kind of extensive apprenticeship that Jordan Fair, who came right from high school to his job at Louisville, did not. Padgett played for Pitino and then, after competing professionally in Europe for a year, came back to campus as the team’s assistant strength coach. He left to serve as an assistant coach at Indiana University–Purdue University Indianapolis (known as IUPUI) for three years, and then returned as Pitino’s assistant video coordinator, and later his director of operations, before finally being promoted to an assistant coaching position.

  When the scandal hit and Pitino was fired, along with Fair and fellow assistant Kenny Johnson, Padgett was the last man standing. Whatever had occurred, it had not touched him. He was clean. He took over just as practice was set to begin, settled his shaken players, and led them to a 22–14 record, though they did not make the field of the NCAA tournament. Opposing coaches, his own players, and the university administration praised the poise and the class that he showed. But there was never really a chance that he was going to be kept on.

  “We all owe a debt of gratitude to David,” Tyra said in announcing that Padgett was done. In explaining why he was making a change, Tyra said, “We need an elite coach.”

  And that, of course, had everything to do with money and virtually nothing to do with Padgett’s integrity, his qualities as a role model, or even his coaching ability. When I talked with Tyra, he said his first task after taking over for Jurich had been to “quarantine” the basketball program and make sure its problem did not infect the whole athletic department. Padgett had taken care of that for him. His players stayed clear of any scandal. Thrown into a difficult situation, and put under a public spotlight, they competed honorably and never complained. By all appearances, they were model student-athletes.

  But just as Jurich hired Pitino to excite the fan base, Tyra recruited and landed Chris Mack, an accomplished coach at Xavier in Cincinnati, to bring some buzz back to the Yum Center. Mack’s team had been awarded a No. 1 seed in the 2018 NCAA tournament, a significant achievement for a team outside one of the Power Five conferences, though they were upset in the second round. He was what’s known as a “hot coach.” Lots of schools wanted to hire him.

  When I reminded Tyra of why Jurich went after Pitino so aggressively—to build excitement and generate revenue—he said, “I had the same sentiments as Tom on that front.”

  Mack will earn $4 million a year at Louisville, but because he was still under contract at his former job, the U. of L. also had to pay for his $2.9 million buyout at Xavier. Mack would be taxed on that, so Louisville also agreed to make a “gross-up” payment to him to cover it—raising the cost of extracting their new coach from his previous commitment to an estimated $4.5 million.

  Incredibly, it was revealed that the money would be taken from liquidated endowment funds—the same practice that the forensic audit criticized.

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  At the heart of the NCAA is not just hypocrisy, but a central mythology. As fans, we want and perhaps need to believe we are watching something more admirable than pro sport: athletes who are playing for some pure love of the game and for their schools.

  Otherwise, what’s the allure of March Madness? It’s not the best basketball in the world. College players, even the best of them, commit more senseless turnovers than NBA players do. They miss more foul shots and brick more open jumpers. Major college basketball is akin to Triple A baseball but with more pageantry and better marketing—or the NBA’s G League, its developmental circuit, which draws modest crowds in cities like Canton, Ohio; Sioux Falls, Iowa; and Reno, Nevada.

  NCAA players and their parents invest in the mythology—or at the very least, in the fic
tion of amateur basketball. They play along, to an extent, while taking a hard-eyed view of the marketplace. They see that their sons have market value. If money is offered, they take it. Not every family, but lots of them.

  But with grassroots basketball now a focus of law enforcement, young players and their families have been interviewed by the FBI. They’ve sat in interrogation rooms, surrounded by agents. None have been charged, but they have felt the threat.

  Nothing is more likely to break the bond between African American families and the NCAA than law officers rummaging around in grassroots basketball and criminalizing what were previously, at most, NCAA violations. Parents of African American sons already feel plenty of fear that their boys may suffer from heavy-handed police enforcement.

  “The most significant thing is that the dialogue has been opened up,” David Robinson said after the NCAA commission released its report. But the arrests and the pure filth and hypocrisy exposed by the FBI seem to call for more urgent solutions than an ongoing dialogue. And there are more potent and prominent voices speaking out about overturning some of the NCAA’s central assumptions.

  At MIT’s Sloan Sports Athletics Conference in 2018, former president Barack Obama, a lifelong and knowledgeable basketball fan, called on the NBA to “create a well-structured” developmental league, “so that the NCAA is not serving as a farm system for the NBA, with a bunch of kids who are unpaid but are under enormous financial pressure.” LeBron James is not only the NBA’s best player, but its most influential. After the federal charges were announced, he blasted the NCAA as “corrupt” and strongly hinted that he would not be in favor of his son, LeBron Jr., who is thirteen years old and one of the top-rated players in his age group, playing college basketball.

  It is not a good omen for the NCAA to have turned Obama and LeBron against it, and their voices may have already emboldened others. After the end of the 2018 season, Wendell Carter, a six-foot-ten forward, was one of four Duke freshmen to renounce his remaining three years of NCAA eligibility and enter the NBA draft. His mother, Kylia Carter, said that while he had enjoyed his one season at Duke, the NCAA system was indefensible. Speaking to the Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics, she said, “When you remove all the bling and the bells and the sneakers and all that, you’ve paid for a child to come to your school to do what you wanted them to do for you, for free, and you made a lot of money when he did that, and you’ve got all these rules in place that say he cannot share in any of that. The only other time when labor does not get paid but yet someone else gets profits and the labor is black and the profit is white, is in slavery.”

  Right after the conclusion of the NCAA tournament, as her son was still weighing whether to turn pro, she said, “If you look at the pros and the cons, college basketball is a big con.”

  It is hard to argue otherwise while the entire enterprise, dedicated to the gospel of amateurism, serves to enrich adults within it. The Justice Department may believe that college basketball needs to be cleaned up, and that their case sends that message. But the sport, as it currently exists, cannot be cleansed just by sweeping up around the corners. It has to be transformed into something that preserves the glory of the competition but does not exploit the players.

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  In past college basketball scandals, it has almost always been the young players who suffer the harshest consequences. In a sense, that would have to be the case. They had careers in front of them, while the hustlers who tempted them into trouble are in most cases small-time mooks with little to lose. “If taking $700 was wrong, then I was guilty,” Ralph Beard, a Kentucky player in the late 1940s, told the New York Times in 2005, two years before his death.

  Beard was a member of the U.S. team in the 1948 Olympics, and played two years in the NBA before he was banned for life. He acknowledged taking money from gambling interests, but told George Vecsey of the Times, “I was totally innocent of influencing games. I never had two dimes to rub together. My mother cleaned six apartments so we could have one to live in. I took the money, and that was it.”

  Connie Hawkins grew up in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn in the 1940s and 1950s and achieved the status of New York playground legend while he was still in his mid-teens. Larry Brown, a Hall of Fame coach and contemporary of Hawkins in Brooklyn, said of him, “He was Julius before Julius. He was Elgin before Elgin. He was Michael before Michael,” referring to Julius Erving, Elgin Baylor, and Michael Jordan. “He was simply the greatest individual player I have ever seen.”

  Hawkins was never indicted or even directly implicated, but it was said that he introduced other players to a game fixer—an allegation he denied, and that evidence which came out later indicated was probably not true. Nevertheless, the University of Iowa, where he was a freshman and had yet to even play a game, sent him home, and he spent the first part of his professional career playing for the Globetrotters and in the old American Basketball Association.

  Hawkins had plenty of talent left when he was let into the NBA at age twenty-seven, enough to score 44 points and grab 20 rebounds in a game during his rookie season with the Phoenix Suns. He averaged more than 20 points a game in his first three years in the NBA, but then quickly trailed off, even though he would hang on for another four seasons.

  He was elected to basketball’s Hall of Fame in 1992, which was more an acknowledgment of the injustice done to him than of the body of his work. The first half of his career was stolen from him.

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  Brian Bowen Jr.’s lawyer, Jason Setchen, traveled to Louisville periodically to talk to officials in the athletic department and try, unsuccessfully, to get them to let Bowen play or at least to practice with the team, and also to lend some emotional support to his client. One evening, Tugs sat in Setchen’s hotel room and talked about his first-semester college experience. He was trying to keep as low a profile as possible and just go to class and get good grades, so he could move on to some other school if that became necessary.

  He thought people sometimes looked at him like he was the one who brought Pitino down, which he found uncomfortable. He was easily recognizable with his six-foot-seven frame and Odell Beckham–style strip of bleached-blond hair, which Setchen suggested he consider changing up. “He has that crazy hair,” Setchen said. “I’ve tried to say something like, ‘You’d be a little less conspicuous with a more normal haircut,’ but it’s no use.” Having lost so much else, he wasn’t willing to give up his trademark look.

  That night, Tugs talked about his relationship with Christian Dawkins. He said he had leaned on him to help navigate the thicket of recruiting because Dawkins seemed like a reliable, plugged-in guy from back home in Saginaw. He was a safe harbor, someone he could ask, “‘Is this a trustworthy guy?’ Anytime I need to ask anything, whether it’s just about a coach or about the team, just anything at all, that’s a guy I could go to.” If the government allegations are true, he said, “I’m really mad, you know, at him. For putting me in this position.”

  Bowen was allowed to go to Louisville basketball games, but he stayed away. He did not want to be a spectacle—the kid who ended Pitino’s reign—or a distraction to the players he still considered his teammates. The TV cameras would surely find him if he showed up at the Yum Center, and all the bloggers on the basketball sites would have a field day. His picture would end up on the front page of the Courier-Journal sports section.

  He was living in Billy Minardi Hall, the dorm named for Pitino’s late brother-in-law (and the site of the stripper parties). “I stay back in my room and watch the games on TV,” he said. “My teammates have been supportive. They’re cool with me. I’ve got to stay strong for my parents. Everybody has my back. My supporting cast is great.”

  He had walked over to the hotel with his parents, who were still living in Louisville. They were waiting downstairs for him. On the subject of his father, Tu
gs was muted. He seemed shocked, sad, and riven by a mix of complicated emotions he could not yet come to terms with. It’s not like anyone could have warned him that his father was someone to avoid on the recruiting trail. He was his dad’s project, and the whole thing had worked beautifully, all the way up to the point when he was about to emerge into major college basketball, just one step from the ultimate destination of the NBA.

  Tugs had cared so much about becoming a player with a national reputation. Now he had one, but it was soiled. Even if he made it to the NBA, he would forever be known as the player at the center of a scandal.

  He did not want to think that his father took money, and said he would not directly address it with him. “I don’t want to know anything about it,” he said. “I just want to see what happens with all the outcomes and everything. I’ve let him know, you know, I’m very upset as far as not being able to play and everything, but as far as, you know, the investigation and all that. I just brush past that.”

  Just before Thanksgiving, Louisville announced that Bowen would never be allowed to play for them. They were cutting ties and moving on. “Brian has been a responsible young man for the institution since he enrolled,” Vince Tyra, the athletic director, said. “He has endeared himself to his teammates and the men’s basketball staff with a positive attitude during a very difficult period.”

  In December 2017, having completed his fall semester at Louisville, Bowen transferred to the University of South Carolina, which awarded him a basketball scholarship—an indication that administrators there believed his account that he was not personally involved in any payoffs. Unlike at Louisville, he was allowed to practice with the team. “I can tell you, after being around him for three months, he’s an unbelievable kid,” his coach at South Carolina, Frank Martin, said.