The Last Temptation of Rick Pitino

by Michael Sokolove

  The defendant in the trial was Karen Cunagin Sypher, a blond former model. She was charged with trying to extort cash, cars, and a house from Pitino after they had sex in a restaurant banquette after closing time. He was the victim—and the star prosecution witness.

  Pitino took the stand in a slim-fitting dark blue suit, white shirt, and red tie. He was without his usual pocket square. His wife, Joanne, was not in the courtroom. As he began his testimony, the prosecutor, assistant U.S. attorney Marisa Ford, asked him to state his profession, and after that formality, invited him to brag a little. It was her way of lifting him back onto his pedestal even as he sat in the witness box. “And you have met with a fair amount of success as a basketball coach, is that correct? . . . We may have members of the jury who are not basketball fans.”

  Pitino responded, “Well, the greatest thing about college basketball is you all start with the same dream. You all start, whether you’re ranked No. 1 or ranked No. 300, you all have the same dream—that’s to make the NCAA tournament at the end of the year. . . . It’s called March Madness. It’s what we all dream about and look forward to.”

  He explained how the tournament works—sixty-eight teams, a series of single-elimination games, all culminating on the third weekend with just four survivors.

  “You’ve been to the Final Four?”

  “Five times,” Pitino answered.

  * * *

  —

  Louisville is a notably gracious place, a smallish big city—population 616,000, twenty-ninth largest in the nation—that cherishes its traditions without seeming hidebound. Many of the buildings downtown still bear the engraved markings of what they once were: foundries, tobacco warehouses, confectioners, feed stores, pharmacies, and other long-gone establishments. The economy is driven now by Louisville-based Humana and other health care companies, two Ford plants on the city’s periphery, a big United Parcel Service hub at the airport, Yum! Brands’ (KFC, Taco Bell, and Pizza Hut) corporate headquarters, and a tourist industry invigorated by a new interest in bourbon. The Kentucky Derby at Churchill Downs is not just an event in May but a season unto itself, and not long after New Year’s, a certain set of Louisville women begins shopping for dresses and hats. (The months before the Derby are also said to be high season for plastic surgery and Botox.)

  There is an informal Catholic elite in Louisville, of which many of the men attended St. Xavier High School, known as “St. X.”; a Protestant old-money crowd that gathers at the exclusive Louisville Country Club; and a not insubstantial Jewish population with roots in bourbon and retail.

  The city has a complicated racial history. It was one of the nation’s largest slave-trading hubs, and Kentucky was a so-called slave-growing state, where children born into slavery were sold to planters in the Deep South. By many historical accounts, Louisville is where the phrase “sold down the river”—it refers to slaves being auctioned and sent down the Ohio to where it meets the Mississippi near Cairo, Illinois, and then on south toward New Orleans—originated.

  Kentucky, however, declared itself neutral at the beginning of the Civil War and Louisville itself was a Union stronghold. In the years that followed, the city was more racially progressive than the rest of Kentucky and—in relative terms only—more benign than much of the South. Long before Jim Crow laws were overturned elsewhere, black residents of Louisville could shop in downtown department stores. (They were not allowed to try on clothes.) The streetcars were integrated from early in the twentieth century. Louisville’s mayors and other power brokers have tended to be white liberals. Muhammad Ali, born Cassius Clay in one of the city’s historically black neighborhoods, kept a residence in Louisville until his death and remains a great point of pride for the city.

  The University of Louisville has long been an essential part of the city’s fabric. It began as a struggling seminary in 1798 and later added a medical school and law school, which also struggled. Early in the twentieth century, it became more of a complete university, adding courses of study in the sciences and liberal arts, but until 1970 it remained a “municipal” institution rather than part of Kentucky’s higher education system. Because it was not a state school, segregation laws did not apply in the same way, and the U. of L. integrated before the state’s flagship university in Lexington, as did its basketball team.

  Under longtime coach Bernard Hickman, Louisville brought on its first black players in 1962, a decade before Adolph Rupp, Kentucky’s legendary coach, recruited his first (and only) black player. A couple of years later, Louisville landed prized recruit Wes Unseld, whose family members were pillars of the city’s African American community going back several generations. Unseld’s late brother, George, became a longtime city councilman, and there is an Unseld Boulevard in Louisville.

  The university’s mission was to educate the working-class daughters and sons of Louisville, white and black, and if the campus was ugly and unalluring it didn’t matter as much because few of its students could afford room and board. They lived at home and fit their studies around the jobs they worked to pay their tuition.

  The term “commuter school” is often used as a pejorative, with little regard for the importance that such institutions have played in Louisville and other American cities. When these schools transform themselves and “elevate” the quality of their incoming students while adding campus amenities—well-appointed dormitories with suites and kitchens; workout facilities for students that are the equivalent of high-end health clubs; dining facilities with vegan and gluten-free menus—and after tuitions go up commensurately, it is never clear what happens to the students these institutions used to serve. That, however, became the new goal at Louisville—to move on from its past and become a reborn institution, one that was recognized nationally.

  Pitino lent the U. of L. his style and swagger, and those qualities conveyed to greater Louisville. Tom Jurich, as he did with every asset he assembled, maximized Pitino’s impact. He multiplied it. The new stadiums and arenas, the wealthy donors who put up the money, the national profile of U. of L. sports, the unassailable status of the athletic department within the university—all of it was built on Pitino’s celebrity and Jurich’s smarts.

  Jurich reaped the benefits of Pitino’s coaching genius and magnetic personality. In return, the coach got everything he wanted: The resources he needed to build a team. The big salary. And the benefit of the doubt, always. When Pitino stepped out of line, or when his program fell into disgrace, Jurich turned a blind eye. The whole city did.

  Jurich and the university’s entrepreneurial president through most of his tenure, James Ramsey, revolutionized the U. of L. A depressing campus became much more attractive, even lively, especially after dark, when it used to be deserted. Louisville became a destination that students chose, rather than one that was their only option.

  Jerry Abramson served five terms as Louisville’s mayor between 1986 and 2011 and was involved in nearly every aspect of the changes the university brought to south Louisville. “Ramsey got the private sector to build dorms,” he said. “Freshmen had to live on campus. He wanted commercial activity—restaurants and retail and bars—and all that came to fruition. He also attracted an entering freshman class with higher ACT and SAT scores. For the first nine or ten years, he was a superstar. He did it all right.”

  The university attained more of a national reputation, and, perhaps even more remarkably, it became an emblem of civic pride, even among well-heeled Louisvillians. They still may not have wanted to send their kids there—academic standards never did rise to any great heights—but they became dues-paying members of Cardinal Nation.

  * * *

  —

  It is hard to overstate the power Jurich had in Louisville—he was on any short list of its most powerful citizens, just a notch below Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell. It is wrong to think he was involved in a cynical pursuit at Louisville. Jurich was a true believer
in the centrality of sports at the U. of L., or on any college campus. His job, as he understood it, was to bring excitement and a sense of unity to campus, raise increasingly large sums of money, and expand the physical and psychic footprint of sports. All good things would come from that. He didn’t question it.

  The Jurichs raised their children in Louisville; all four graduated from the university, and three were varsity athletes. After he was dismissed, Tom and Terrilynn Jurich retreated with their chocolate Lab to their lakeside home in Steamboat Springs, Colorado, at the base of 6,900-foot Mount Werner. The fastidiously restored downtown—a few blocks of brick storefronts, brewhouses, and bistros—was about a mile away. Jurich, sixty-one, was on the slopes every other day, which was as much as his knees would permit, and Terrilynn, the former Miss Wyoming, threw herself into cross-country skiing.

  At dinner one night at a restaurant in town, they clasped hands and said grace. Tom Jurich had a couple of beers, his wife a glass of red wine. “I’m sorry,” Terrilynn said at one point during dinner as she cried softly. “We really haven’t talked to anybody about this. But Louisville was our home. It’s where our family grew up together and it was very painful to have to leave.”

  Being an athletic director is not a job that many people aspire to from a young age. It wouldn’t make sense. There are fewer than four hundred of them at the Division I level, and far fewer at the top tier. Tom Jurich was a multisport high school athlete, a college football player, and then very briefly a placekicker in the NFL. He played one game for the New Orleans Saints in 1978, missed all three of his field goal tries (two of them from close range), and was immediately released, never to play in the league again.

  Jurich was raised in Southern California, but after his exit from the NFL, he returned to Flagstaff, Arizona, where he had played football at Northern Arizona. He sold real estate and dabbled in a couple of other business ventures while helping out his alma mater with fund-raising. At twenty-nine years old, and much to his surprise, he was offered a job as the university’s athletic director. “There was no such thing as a revenue sport there,” he said. The basketball team drew crowds of about 6,000; the football team sometimes filled its 15,000-seat stadium. (The football program, however, was an incubator for future NFL coaches—Andy Reid, Brad Childress, and Marty Mornhinweg passed through Northern Arizona during Jurich’s time.)

  After eight years, Jurich left Flagstaff to become athletic director at Colorado State. The job was a step up, and its location, in Fort Collins, was not far from Terrilynn’s parents in Wyoming. In 1997, when Louisville approached him, he had no intention at first of even listening. He had never lived east of Colorado. He had been to Ohio a few times to visit relatives, and to New York just once. The job itself was unalluring in the extreme. “The athletic facilities were horrific,” he said. “It was a commuter school and virtually no one lived on campus. The football team had just gone 1–10. The basketball team was 12–20. Women’s sports didn’t exist. We had a swim team, but we barely had chlorine to put in the pool. It was all bad. Every friend I had in the business said I was making a mistake. They perceived it as a step down, and to be honest, I had turned down better jobs.”

  But Louisville was persistent. They offered a long-term deal (because of state law in Colorado, Jurich was working a contract that had to be renewed annually) that would just about double his salary. The Jurichs had a young family and it seemed irresponsible not to listen. (Their two sons were Jurich’s from a first marriage, but he had custody from the time they were young.) Once he relented and agreed that they would visit the campus, he and his wife had already decided he would accept the job.

  Louisville at the time was under threat of being kicked out of Conference USA, a mix of geographically and culturally misaligned public and private institutions that included Cincinnati, Marquette, Tulane, Southern Mississippi, Houston, South Florida, and DePaul. Its failure to comply with Title IX gender equity standards was an issue, low attendance was a problem, and nothing about Louisville’s sports program added luster to the conference. Jurich’s credibility, more than any other factor, kept them from being ousted. Athletic directors at the other schools in the conference believed him when he said he could set Louisville on a better course.

  College coaches preach to their teams about the value of loyalty and steadfastness, but at the upper levels of the NCAA, universities run from conference to conference, chasing richer TV deals. It’s a game of mergers and acquisitions—of running out on your partners before they run out on you—and Jurich knew how to play it. He got Louisville into the old Big East Conference, “and that was a magical spot for us,” he said, because the conference was largely an assemblage of other city schools, including Georgetown, Pitt, and Cincinnati. But the Big East splintered, and he needed to look elsewhere. The Cardinals moved to the American Athletic Conference but stayed for just one year. When Maryland, a member of the Atlantic Coast Conference, bolted for the Big Ten, Jurich saw an opening. “That’s when I pounced,” he said.

  “Most people would say the greatest moment in Louisville sports history was getting into the ACC, but that’s not what I think,” Jurich said. “It was the day we didn’t get kicked out of Conference USA. Where were we going to go from there? You have nowhere to go. You’re done.”

  * * *

  —

  Above all, Jurich understood college sports as entertainment. To resurrect Louisville’s moribund football program, he brought in an offensive-minded coach named John L. Smith, whose motto was “first team to 50 wins.” But when Smith said he would win the conference within three years, even Jurich didn’t believe him. His response, as he recalls it, was, “Are you on drugs?”

  In Smith’s first year, the team suffered two bad losses to open the season, and then went on the road to play Illinois—not a good team, but still a member of the powerful Big Ten Conference. The Cardinals won in a romp, 35–9, which Jurich considered “the most shocking thing I’ve ever seen.” From a one-victory season the previous year, Louisville went on to finish with a 7–5 record and a bowl game appearance. That it was just the Motor City Bowl in Detroit did not make it any less miraculous. In three separate games, the Cardinals scored more than 60 points. The last home game of the previous season had drawn an announced crowd of 12,850 (people who were there said it was less); John L. Smith’s “basketball on grass” style attracted crowds of 40,000-plus. An expansion of the football stadium, already under way when Jurich arrived, suddenly made sense.

  Even revived, Louisville football was hardly on a par with Notre Dame, Michigan, or other traditional powers, and it was not going to get any of the prominent time slots on the weekend schedule of televised football. Jurich figured out a solution. “Louisville came to us and said, ‘We’ll play anyone, anywhere, anytime,’” Mark Shapiro, a former head of programming and production at ESPN, told the New York Times in 2013. The Cardinals became a staple on Tuesday nights, an otherwise slack time in sports programming. “It was a programmer’s dream,” Shapiro said. “We already had NFL on Sunday nights, NHL and MLB on multiple nights, Thursday night college football. We were all filled up. So I said, ‘How about Tuesday nights?’ They seized it, and over time their results have been spectacular.”

  Louisville’s midweek slot on ESPN also served as a recruiting tool. The top high school prospects want to be on TV and will not even consider a program that is not regularly featured on national broadcasts. Stefan LeFors, a high school player in Louisiana, had no interest in Louisville and only a passing familiarity with them until he watched them win an exciting overtime game against Army. “That was the only reason Louisville was on my list,” he said. He reached out to the coaches and ended up as a two-year starter at quarterback.

  Jurich’s next task was to fix the basketball program, which was in some ways more difficult—and certainly more delicate. Unlike football, basketball at Louisville had a rich tradition, but it was embodied by a coach
who was still on the scene: Denny Crum, a former assistant to John Wooden at UCLA who led the Cardinals to national championships in 1980 and 1986. Crum was entering his twenty-seventh season when Jurich arrived in 1997, and his program was stagnant at best; it made the NCAA tournament most years but rarely advanced far. In the 2000–2001 season, the team bottomed out with a 12–19 record, and many of the losses, including a 34-point blowout at home to Charlotte, were not even close.

  Jurich decided he needed to replace Crum, who had 675 career victories, but the two engaged in a weeks-long standoff, a “battle of wills,” as one account called it at the time, as the coach resisted stepping down and Jurich hesitated to fire him. Crum finally retired, accepting a $2 million buyout and $5 million to work as a university consultant over the next fifteen years. (That figure would go up considerably over time, as did just about every other athletic department salary and expense.)

  In selecting a new basketball coach, Jurich focused, as always, on generating buzz and big money. The hiring of Smith to coach football was a step in the right direction, but the athletic department’s finances were still dire. “With Coach Crum, I thought we were going south,” he said. “We had to make a change, but I had to think big, and I felt like I wanted to replace a Hall of Fame coach with a Hall of Fame coach. In our blue state,” he continued—blue being a reference not to politics, but to the state’s majority preference for University of Kentucky basketball—“Rick Pitino was Elvis. I thought with him, we could sell out our fan base.”

  In particular, Jurich needed to win back longtime season-ticket holders who had dropped away and well-heeled donors who were no longer giving. At the time, there did not seem to be any ethical concerns about Pitino other than a little-remembered report involving NCAA violations going back to his time at Hawaii in the mid-1970s. The NCAA found that Pitino had provided round-trip airfare for a player between New York and Honolulu, arranged for some players to receive cars in exchange for season tickets, and gave out coupons for free food at McDonald’s. (The last benefit, free McDonald’s food, is almost a parody of the picayune violations that NCAA critics find so objectionable.)