The Last Temptation of Rick Pitino

by Michael Sokolove

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  The Sypher trial took place nine years into Pitino’s Louisville reign, after one Final Four and two Elite Eight appearances. After its conclusion, Pitino repaid Jurich’s loyalty and the support of the university administration by doing what he does best: creating teams that amounted to more than the sum of their parts.

  The season that immediately followed the trial was solid, 25 wins against 10 losses, but the Cardinals were knocked out of the NCAA tournament by a lower-seeded opponent, Morehead State, in a first-round upset. The next season Pitino’s squad piled up 30 wins and reached the Final Four before losing to archrival Kentucky in the semifinal game.

  What came next, in 2012–13, was quintessential Pitino. He had lightly recruited players and castoffs, most of them distinctly non-NBA prospects. Peyton Siva, his point guard, was an undersized kid from Seattle of Samoan descent. (He played 24 games for the Detroit Pistons before hooking on with the Fort Wayne Mad Ants of the NBA’s development league, and then decamped for pro ball in Europe.) The other guard, Russ Smith, had such a penchant for attempting difficult plays and taking crazy shots that Pitino gave him the nickname “Russdiculous.”

  The roster included just one NBA first-round draft choice, Gorgui Dieng, a junior taken with the twenty-third pick, and a typical Pitino recruit: Coming out of high school, he picked Louisville over a small group of suitors that included Marquette and Marshall. He was a nice player, but the top teams were not knocking down his door. Pitino specialized in taking players like Dieng, “coaching them up,” as it is said in the business, and blending them with their similarly good-but-not-great teammates. It was basketball as alchemy.

  As motley as this Pitino team seemed to outsiders, it cohered from day one. The group played with such incredible togetherness and grit that they inspired devotion from those who understood the game. “The most inspirational team I’ve ever covered,” veteran basketball writer Reid Forgrave observed in a piece for CBSSports.com.

  Early in February, Notre Dame managed to defeat Louisville, 104–101, in South Bend—but it took five overtimes to finish them off. And it was the last game the Cardinals would lose.

  Pitino’s team entered the postseason as the top seed in the Midwest region and the overall No. 1 seed in the tournament. They cruised through the early rounds, routing North Carolina A&T and Colorado State, and then struggled to an 8-point victory over Oregon that felt even closer than the score indicated. “Russdiculous” Smith saved them by relentlessly driving to the hoop, and Oregon could only stop him by fouling. He scored 31 points, 12 of them on free throws.

  Louisville qualified for the Final Four two days later with a 22-point victory over Duke, a game best remembered for a gruesome lower leg fracture suffered by one of Pitino’s key subs, Kevin Ware. The game was close at halftime, with Louisville holding just a three-point lead, but their cloying defense and ferocious pursuit of loose balls and rebounds led to a 20–4 run early in the second half.

  Afterward, Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski described the experience of playing a Pitino team. “I thought we had a chance there, and then, boom,” he said. “That’s what they do to teams. They can boom you.” Oregon’s coach, Dana Altman, made a similar comment after falling in the previous game. “They get on those runs, they just multiply points, they don’t add them,” he said.

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  Pitino coached by feel. Not all coaches can do that. It takes confidence and the ability (and credentials) to withstand second-guessing and criticism. In the national semifinal game against Wichita State, at the Georgia Dome in Atlanta, Louisville emerged with a four-point victory in large part because Pitino entrusted minutes to a couple of bench players who only occasionally got playing time at key moments.

  Tim Henderson, who played high school ball at Christian Academy in Louisville, was a nonscholarship walk-on who had begged for a spot on the team by writing to Pitino—not by email, but actual letters with stamps on them. He connected on two three-point baskets in the semifinal game. Stephan Van Treese was a highly ranked prospect in his mid-teens but the top programs “all backed off,” one recruiting site said, after he struggled against his peers on the summer AAU circuit. At Indiana, his home-state school, it was said that “the likelihood of a scholarship being extended is basically non-existent.” He played ten productive minutes against Wichita and came up with three rebounds, a blocked shot, and a steal. (The six-foot-ten Van Treese would go on to have a pro career—in Japan with the Fukushima Firebonds, where he was known as the Vanilla Godzilla.) The big star of the Wichita game was a senior who came off the bench and scored 20 points, another unlikely hero—Luke Hancock, a transfer who had spent the first two years of his college career playing for George Mason.

  The victory put Louisville into the championship game against Michigan, which had all the pedigree that Pitino’s roster lacked. Two of its players, Glenn Robinson III and Tim Hardaway Jr., were the sons of former NBA players. Three of the Wolverines would be first-round picks, two of them lottery choices.

  As the game started, Pitino took his usual pose on the sideline—standing, legs spread a little, knees bent, usually one shoe on the playing surface unless the action was right in front of him. He was a point guard at the University of Massachusetts, had never put on much weight, and never looked like he didn’t still want to go out and guard somebody. He often clasped his hands behind his back, as if to prevent himself from reaching out for the ball.

  Michigan got out to a big early lead largely because one of its own little-used players, Spike Albrecht (the name sounded like it was out of juvenile sports fiction), was experiencing some kind of out-of-body experience. He averaged 1.8 points a game for the season, but by the end of the first half he had 17 points—some of which came on closely guarded three-point shots that he put up when he barely had a view of the basket.

  Pitino kept his jaw set and a couple of times a thin smile emerged. He had the look of a man who knew that he was not going to get beat by a fairy tale. Hancock, Louisville’s hero from the semifinal game, hit a couple of outside shots, the defense clamped down on Albrecht, and at halftime, a 12-point Michigan lead had shrunk to one point.

  Pitino had one more unorthodox move in him. Russ Smith had been his most indispensable player for most of the season and through the early games of the tournament. After his fierce effort in the Oregon game the previous weekend, Pitino said, “Without Russ Smith, we couldn’t win.”

  But as the second half of the national championship game began, Smith was on the bench and Hancock, usually a substitute, was on the court. Very few coaches would do that, but Smith had not played well, and Pitino knew his team needed to start the half better than it began the game.

  The best of Pitino’s teams were miserable to play against. Against Michigan, they came out in the second half double-teaming the ball, switching, swarming, chesting up against ball handlers. For most of the last 20 minutes they maintained a small lead that somehow seemed bigger. Michigan struggled to advance the ball past half-court within the allowable 10 seconds, and they had to hit some very difficult shots just to keep the game close.

  Russ Smith reentered and hit a big three-point shot. Then he drove to the basket and kicked it back to Hancock for a three-pointer. Few teams turn the screws like Pitino’s. They went ferociously after their own missed shots and in the second half were plus-12 in rebounding. Louisville prevailed, 82–76. Pitino had his second national championship, the first having come back in 1996, at Kentucky. Hancock, who scored 22 points, was named the tournament’s most outstanding player—the first substitute ever to win the award.

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  When Pitino returned home to Louisville after the championship, he fulfilled a promise he had made to his players—that he would get a tattoo if they won. He opted to have it drawn on his left shoulder blade. It was big and bold—the university’s old-E
nglish “L” emblem in red, surrounded by the words “NCAA champions” and the season record, “35–5.” In the days that followed, it seemed like just about everybody in Louisville viewed the YouTube video of a bare-chested Pitino getting inked. “It was the porn the whole town was watching,” one longtime resident called it.

  It was a glorious time for Pitino. A Thoroughbred he partly owned, Goldenscents, won the Santa Anita Derby, qualifying it to run in the Kentucky Derby a few weeks after the national title game. Purchased at auction, the horse was described in one account as if it could have been a player on his team—“a relatively small bay colt with a modest pedigree.”

  Pitino’s national title was just one chapter of a magical few months in Louisville sports—the fulfillment of Tom Jurich’s vision, except that it was beyond even what he could have imagined. In January 2013, the football team pulled off a huge upset in the Sugar Bowl, defeating No. 4–ranked Florida, which was favored by two touchdowns. The women’s basketball team made it all the way to the final game of the NCAA tournament before being defeated by Connecticut. (Jurich spent the weekend flying back and forth between the men’s and women’s games.) The baseball team advanced into the College World Series. Louisville became the first university with two Final Four teams, a winner in a BCS bowl game, and a participant in the College World Series in a single year.

  To commemorate what became known as the Year of the Cardinal, the university splurged to have a video company produce a documentary and purchased one hour of airtime for it to run on ESPNU. “It was a year of excellence,” the narrator intones at the beginning. “A destiny was realized. An impossible dream came true. . . . For the University of Louisville, it was a year like no other.”

  It was also the last great chapter of the Pitino era. In October 2015, a Louisville woman and self-described escort, Katina Powell, published a book in which she told of parties—inside the basketball dorm—where she provided women to dance for high school players being recruited by Pitino, and for some of his current players as well. She said she was paid for these services by Andre McGee, a former player for Pitino who was serving as his director of basketball operations. The dancers included Powell’s two adult daughters.

  The book was called Breaking Cardinal Rules: Basketball and the Escort Queen and written with journalist Dick Cady. “At the peak of the dormitory and off-campus entertainment more than $10,000 cash changed hands to Katina for supplying the women,” it alleged. “This does not include the hundreds of one-dollar bills thrown at the dancers. . . . Nor does it include the money paid to the women who had sex with the recruits afterward. So frequent were the escapades that Katina would later say, especially after the Cardinals won the 2012–13 NCAA championship, ‘I felt like I was part of the recruitment team. A lot of them players went to Louisville because of me.’”

  The claims were salacious, and their source, an escort with seemingly little to lose, led to understandable skepticism. But Powell’s tales were true. One of the recruits who was at the parties, and ultimately did not choose Louisville, told ESPN’s Outside the Lines, “I knew they weren’t college girls. It was crazy. It was like I was in a strip club.”

  The parties were not a onetime thing; they occurred periodically over the course of four years, between 2010 and 2014. They took place in Billy Minardi Hall, a dormitory named for Pitino’s brother-in-law and best friend, who worked for Cantor Fitzgerald and died at the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001.

  Even by the gutter standards of NCAA scandals—the serial personal and institutional misconduct that is a regular staple of sports news—this was about as bad as it gets. Sex parties involving paid escorts. In the basketball dorm. Sponsored by a key employee of the head coach’s. The revelations called into question Pitino’s leadership. He claimed not to know anything about the parties—but how did he not know that someone working right under him had such shockingly poor judgment? Was McGee really a model employee except for those four years of sex parties he arranged?

  That the parties went on where the players lived also reflected something about the culture of Louisville’s basketball program. Was there not a single player who thought to raise an objection? Or one who thought to tell Pitino directly, or at least find a way to get word to him, that there were some activities going on that didn’t seem quite right and that might not look good in the light of day if they became public? Or did the players just assume that since McGee worked closely with Pitino, their head coach knew about the parties and approved?

  The NCAA launched an investigation, and in June 2017 its Committee on Infractions issued its report. “The COI has not previously encountered a case like this,” it began, which seemed like a rare bit of wit on the part of the NCAA. “A member of the men’s basketball staff arranged on-campus striptease dances and acts of prostitution for enrolled student-athletes and prospective student-athletes, some of whom were minors, on their campus visits.”

  Louisville’s own internal investigation confirmed the truth of most of Katina Powell’s story. Where the university differed with the NCAA was that it did not believe there was a great deal of institutional blame to go around—and none that attached to Pitino. That was likely Jurich’s influence, the lesson he learned from his father: loyalty above all else.

  But that kind of backing was also what the thin-skinned Pitino demanded. He did not accept blame, he shifted it. If the university had found him at all culpable in the Strippergate affair, he would have thrown a fit. “With a few minor exceptions, [Louisville] agreed that the striptease dances and prostitution occurred,” the NCAA said. “The institution and the head men’s basketball coach did not agree that the facts established the head men’s basketball coach failed to monitor the former director of men’s basketball operations.”

  How could Pitino possibly be completely absolved of sex parties sponsored by his employee, in the basketball dorm, involving some of his players? Wasn’t that at the very least a hiring issue? An issue with his ability to communicate the values of his organization?

  The NCAA, in certain extreme cases, “vacates” victories. It is an Orwellian term and act—a way of reaching back and erasing history. Louisville’s stirring victory over Michigan on April 8, 2013, in Atlanta was vacated, along with its national championship. Luke Hancock was no longer the tournament’s most outstanding player. Kevin Ware, the substitute who broke his leg against Duke, could no longer consider himself a national champion, or at least not according to the NCAA. The title was not given over to Michigan. Instead, it was as if the game was never played. The tournament in 2013 had no champion.

  Louisville and Pitino were stripped of 123 victories earned in the four years the parties were taking place, and the NCAA ordered the university to remove any references to the wins or championships “from athletics department stationery, banners displayed in public areas and any other forum in which they may appear.”

  Pitino’s 770 career victories ranked fifteenth among all men’s Division I coaches, an impressive total, especially considering that he had gone off to coach in the NBA for six seasons. Even at sixty-five years old, he still had plenty of passion and energy left, so if he kept coaching he would have climbed the list. He likely could not have caught Mike Krzyzewski, Duke’s still-active “Coach K,” but the retired coaches in the top five—Bob Knight, Dean Smith, and Adolph Rupp—were within Pitino’s reach.

  But after the NCAA vacated his victories, Pitino fell all the way down to thirty-seventh on the all-time list—below coaches he had surpassed like Hank Iba and Phog Allen, pioneers from basketball’s early days; below UCLA’s John Wooden, the sainted Wizard of Westwood; below UNLV’s Jerry Tarkanian, who had his own famous battles with the NCAA; and also below his predecessor at Louisville, Denny Crum.

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  Pitino applies a sort of circular logic in times when he is accused of wrongdoing. He could not have broken rules because he is a pe
rson who is well known for having great respect for the rules. Everyone around him knows how he feels, because he tells them time and time again: Follow the rules. When people who work closely with him break the rules, they do not tell him about it—and in fact go to great lengths to hide their misbehaviors—because they know how angry he would be. It is therefore understandable that some bad stuff might happen on his watch without him knowing about it.

  This is not a model of crisis response you would find recommended in any leadership book—most of those tend to follow a philosophy of “the buck stops here”—but it is one that worked well for Pitino as the coach of Louisville basketball. When the NCAA announced its sanctions and stripped his teams of their victories and the 2013 national title, he was filled with umbrage, outrage, and grievance, which he expressed in a letter sent to Louisville fans. It was addressed, “Dear Friends of the ’Ville.”

  “When the news first came out in 2015,” he wrote, referring to the revelations in Katina Powell’s book, “it sunk my emotions to the lowest point anyone could possibly imagine. I write this letter to tell you and encourage you to keep your spirits high.” The NCAA, he said, had been unduly harsh and he supported the university’s decision to appeal the penalties.

  By the time the news of the sex parties broke, Andre McGee had moved on from the Louisville staff and was an assistant coach at the University of Missouri–Kansas City. He left that job in the wake of the scandal and was later reportedly driving an Uber. He has never talked publicly about the parties in Billy Minardi Hall or revealed the source of the $10,000 that was paid for the dancers. In Pitino’s letter, he laid the blame entirely on McGee, who played four seasons for him and was Louisville’s starting point guard as a senior, in 2008–09.

  “Let me clear up the following and leave no doubt that this is the truth and the only truth,” Pitino wrote. “Billy Minardi Hall was built in memory of my best friend and brother-in-law who I lost on 9/11. If I knew of anything that was going on there that would dishonor his name, that person wouldn’t be able to get out of town fast enough.