The Last Temptation of Rick Pitino

by Michael Sokolove

  “I was told during the process that I didn’t ask pointed questions. Well what does that mean exactly? I asked our staff if the recruits enjoyed themselves. What did they do? How did they like everything? I then met with their families for breakfast and asked the same questions. No, I did not ask the staff if they saw any strippers last night. I can assure you that if I asked Andre any difficult question, he would have lied to my face to avoid immediate termination.”

  There were fewer than forty residents of Billy Minardi Hall, all of them either players or in some way connected to the basketball program. The all-male residence is built for larger-than-average human beings and includes such amenities as extra-tall standup showers and queen-sized beds. Meals are prepared by a personal chef.

  Pitino said he asked around to coaches and players, past and present, and all reported that they knew nothing about the strippers in the dorm. Somehow, at least fourteen parties had taken place, but they escaped the notice of everyone who was not involved. There were strippers and escorts with young men in their late teens and early twenties, but everyone was very, very quiet.

  Pitino ascribed a high degree of cleverness to McGee, as if having parties in such a setting and keeping them quiet was on a par with complex and difficult-to-discover Wall Street malfeasance. He referred to what happened in his basketball dorm as “the greatest hidden thing I’ve ever witnessed in my lifetime.” When he asked around afterward, no one had even had a hint of the escapades. “Bernie Madoff fooled the smartest people on Wall Street, SEC, family, brokers and major hedge funds,” his letter said. “There are no questions that I asked to even give me a small clue to what was going on. Security employees, managers, assistant coaches, fellow students and most importantly, Billy Minardi’s children, and my nephews, all lived in that dorm. They were all questioned by me, and not one had any suspicion of any inappropriate activities going on in that dormitory.”

  At a press conference, Pitino suggested that an NCAA probe may have led to the death of former North Carolina State coach Jim Valvano, who died at forty-seven years old of cancer. He recalled a conversation in which Valvano told him that an ongoing NCAA investigation “broke down my immune system.”

  “And I always thought about that,” Pitino said. “It can kill you inside because you know what you stand for and believe in. So what do you do? Do you say, ‘Let me pack it in. Let me do something else in life’? Leaders lead. I plan on staying here and winning multiple championships, not just one. I plan on going to multiple Final Fours, not just one. And that’s what leaders do. They lead the players they’re coaching.”

  There were several junctures when Louisville might have broken with Pitino—when the revelations first surfaced in the fall of 2015; early in 2016, when the university’s own probe led it to “self-impose” penalties and sit out the NCAA tournament that spring; in the fall of 2016, when the NCAA released its report; or that summer of 2017, when it imposed the sanctions. But Jurich and the university administration stood by him.

  After the NCAA announced its penalties, Jurich pointed out that there was never even a hint of the parties around the time they were happening. He fell in line with Pitino’s thinking—that no one else in the program knew about the parties and that their secret nature was nothing short of miraculous. “How did social media never have one release on this?” he said when we talked in Colorado. “I look for red flags all the time . . . too much of the time, because I’m so protective of this program. But this one got by me, too.”

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  Pitino and Jurich had one big clash. It came in 2014, as Jurich was in the process of hiring a new football coach—one who had the distinction of being just about the only other coach in the NCAA as sexually scandalized as Pitino. (They also happened to have a last name that rhymed.) While he was head coach at Arkansas, Bobby Petrino crashed his motorcycle on a country highway and initially neglected to tell police he had someone riding on the back—a twenty-five-year-old former volleyball player at the university and an employee on the football staff. After details spilled out that she was the then fifty-one-year-old Petrino’s mistress, he was fired.

  Petrino was a polarizing figure on several counts, including the fact that he switched jobs frequently and sometimes abruptly, leaving employers in the lurch. The website SB Nation ran a story in 2016 with the headline “The Bobby Petrino Controversy Timeline: 15 Years of Shenanigans.”

  Petrino, however, was an acknowledged offensive genius—just the kind of football coach favored by Jurich. He won. He put fans in the seats. And he got donors excited. He had two previous stints at Louisville—as an assistant to John L. Smith and then as head coach between 2003 and 2006. He was coaching at Western Kentucky after Arkansas fired him, so a return to Louisville represented a step back into major college football.

  Pitino did not object to Petrino’s hiring on any moral basis—what he feared was that it would dredge up discussion of his own indiscretion with Karen Sypher. “Jurich showed no interest in the character of his coaches,” Tim Sullivan, the Louisville Courier-Journal sports columnist, said. “When he hired Petrino back, this was five years or so past the Karen Sypher trial. It was remembered but it wasn’t like it was in the news every day. The word was that Rick was apoplectic. He was measured in his public comments, but underneath that, he was seething. Jurich basically told him, ‘Mind your own business. I had your back when you needed it. I’ll hire who I want.’”

  A former trustee at the university who was in on the discussions over Petrino’s hiring confirms that Rick Pitino raised objections. “Yes, Rick was pissed. He thought it would all come back on him. Tom Jurich had counseled Petrino after the Arkansas thing. He told him what he had to do to get himself back in at this level. Jurich and Pitino had a meeting and Tom told him, ‘This is what I’m doing. It’s my call to make, not yours.’ Pitino is smart. He learns and grows. He apologized and made his peace with it.

  “There’s two ways to look at it. It can be argued that athletics is the bastion of liberalism and second chances. That’s not a bad thing. It’s a benign explanation. The other way to see it is that for some reason, we had two coaches of our highest-profile athletic programs with bad personal habits.”

  Said Terry Meiners, “Rick was marking his territory and trying to make it clear this was his universe. He didn’t like the mess Petrino had left behind in Arkansas. It made him uncomfortable because he felt like it was going to reflect back on him.”

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  Pitino did not go back to Porcini much after the Karen Sypher trial in 2009. His restaurant of choice became Jeff Ruby’s in downtown Louisville, a big, bustling place with a lively bar and a well-heeled clientele. It is a non–New Yorker’s idea of a buzzy New York restaurant. A pianist sits on an elevated platform above the bar, playing show tunes and popular music on a black-lacquered piano (you could count on someone just about every night requesting “New York, New York”). Pitino usually sat at a table with friends in the front room, and sometimes would finish the evening with a last glass of wine at the bar.

  He referenced his transgression at Porcini periodically, more than you would imagine—usually when his own conduct or the conduct of his program came into question. It was part of his personal narrative, his testimony, as it were, that he answered to a higher power than the NCAA. His point was clear: You couldn’t criticize him—and certainly could not render a moral judgment—because God was already doing that.

  In his letter to Louisville fans after the wins and national title were vacated, he wrote, “Over twelve years ago, I hurt my wife and family by doing some improper things. I paid a heavy price with them and The Lord. We, as a family, are closer today than ever before and my faith is stronger than at any point in my life. I’m in this game for one reason, and only for one reason: to teach young men how to reach their potential on and off the court.

  “You, our loyal Lo
uisville family, can rest assured we believe in doing the right thing and doing things that are important in the eyes of God.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  FISHING IN POLLUTED WATERS

  The relentless hum of commercial activity around NCAA sports, and the never-ending push for more and bigger deals, is part of the Sonny Vaccaro legacy. College sport is a nakedly money-seeking endeavor, and no one even bothers to pretend otherwise. It all runs on a parallel track to the games themselves, as another arena for competition and scorekeeping.

  The rationale is that everyone is in the grip of a never-ending “arms race”—a competition to erect the most gilded facilities in order to attract the highest-level recruits. Mahogany-paneled locker rooms. Extra-large, individualized shower stalls. Training facilities that match or even exceed the level of NBA and NFL franchises. Amphitheaters with stadium seating to watch game film.

  It is all self-fulfilling logic. If your facilities are dingy, top recruits will in fact walk away—if they even bother to visit at all. But once you build this kind of stuff, the implications of a couple of bad recruiting years are catastrophic. It is untenable to raise money for first-rate facilities and then attract second-rate athletes. You lose the arms race. You’re annihilated.

  The Portland Business Journal energetically covers its hometown company, Nike, and has taken a broad interest in the sources of money that flow into NCAA sports. It tracks advertising deals on campuses, which are mostly controlled by two companies, IMG College and Learfield, that pay lump sums to athletic programs for the right to sell space. One reason why commercial interests like college sports is that universities will sell just about any flat space for advertising purposes. Unlike professional franchises, which are limited by deals the leagues have cut with national advertisers, college venues are blank canvases and wide open for business.

  IMG College, which represents some seventy-five universities, embeds teams of its own employees on campuses, where they function as outside advertising agencies working from within university athletic departments. The company’s deal with UCLA authorizes it to sell “official” and “exclusive” designations such as the “official bank of UCLA athletics” and the “official water.” It can sell signage on scoreboards, video boards, press row signs, courtside signs, chair backs, basketball backboard stations, shot clocks, team entry tarpaulins, and cup holders on seats. In football, it markets space on the nets that kickers boot balls into on the sidelines.

  In addition, “miscellaneous” advertising opportunities include schedule cards, posters, ticket backs, roster cards, media guides, ticket mailer inserts, ticket envelopes, cups, coolers, towels, and water bottles. The contract prohibits IMG from selling advertising for a range of unwholesome products, including tobacco, escort services, and male enhancement supplements. (Incongruously, “female hygiene products” are also on the banned list, as if advertising for them would somehow detract from the experience of watching a college sporting event.)

  Pro football is by far the most popular sport in America (even with its declining TV ratings in recent seasons), but its viewers are not as attractive to advertisers as some might imagine. The NFL has more overall viewers, but “a less enviable demographic than college football and basketball,” says Jonathan Jensen, a sports marketing professor at the University of North Carolina. “The majority of people watching NFL games did not go to college and they have lower incomes than the college audience. They’re a less coveted consumer.”

  College football is number two in the annual popularity surveys conducted by Rich Luker, a social psychologist who has been conducting the annual ESPN Sports Poll since 1994. Next comes the NBA, and right after that (and before Major League Baseball) is college basketball. The people most interested in college sports tend to be “more educated, which means they have more disposable income,” Jensen says.

  Current college students represent another coveted demographic. They are going to earn more money than their less-educated peers—and they are at an impressionable age and just starting to establish their buying habits and brand loyalties.

  The partnerships between athletic departments and Nike, Adidas, and Under Armour represent an even bigger bargain for companies than the advertising deals. Much of the reported value of the contracts is delivered in shoes, uniforms, wristbands, and other accessories worn by student-athletes, rather than cash, thereby turning college athletes into a combination of action figures and billboards. Because of their deals with universities, Jensen said, “Nike and the other apparel companies now barely need to advertise. Their logo is on the uniforms and all over the place.

  “They have 99.9 percent brand awareness. Procter and Gamble spends $8 billion across its brands per year on advertising. Nike does not. They don’t need it. These agreements are their media buys. It saves them a tremendous amount of money.”

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  The endemic criminal and ethical scandals of college sports are connected by a straight line to the money. Teams that do not win do not excite their boosters, fill up stadiums, appear on national TV, or get into postseason play, thereby endangering the revenue stream that supports the immense infrastructure. It is the desperation for cash, every bit as much as the pursuit of victory, that causes universities to overlook all kinds of rule-breaking until it splatters out into the open. At that point, they may try to manage their problems, but they can never really address the root causes.

  The most egregious example in recent years has been Baylor University, a Southern Baptist school that plays in the highly competitive (and lucrative) Big 12 Conference. In 2003, a member of its basketball team murdered a teammate. The ensuing investigation led to revelations of drug and alcohol use on the team, payments to players, and (of course) flagrant recruiting violations.

  In 2016, it became clear that Baylor coaches and others knew about but ignored serious allegations of sexual assault by its football players, including one that led to a criminal conviction and twenty-year prison sentence. An investigation by an outside law firm hired by Baylor uncovered at least nineteen incidents of alleged sexual assaults by players that were reported by seventeen different women.

  The two Baylor scandals led to coaches, athletic directors, and university administrators losing their jobs. (Kenneth Starr, the Baylor president and former special prosecutor of President Bill Clinton, was demoted in the wake of the 2016 scandal, and then resigned.) The scandals caused Baylor’s teams to be hobbled by NCAA sanctions, but the university has not reappraised its ambitions. No one, seemingly, ever asks: Are our aspirations part of the problem? The cycle of raising money, recruiting players, and seeking bigger shoe deals and more generous corporate partners continues, presumably until the next scandal hits. And beyond.

  The same could be said of numerous NCAA programs caught in wrongdoing, including North Carolina, where for two decades athletes took advantage of a “shadow curriculum” of what were called fake classes to get grades and stay eligible. Many required no attendance and just one paper. The whole thing seemed like an obvious violation of NCAA rules and an affront to the notion of the “student-athlete.”

  But the NCAA threaded a legalistic needle to let North Carolina and its admired basketball program—where Dean Smith coached and Michael Jordan played—escape penalties. It ruled that because the sham classes were in theory available to any students who knew about them and presumably did not mind wasting their tuition money, they did not constitute impermissible benefits specifically designed for athletes. The NCAA’s reprieve for UNC came six months after the Tar Heels men’s basketball team won the national championship, their sixth.

  Even schools that are penalized experience sanctions as only a speed bump. In 2016, when Baylor introduced its new football coach, Matt Rhule, he spoke in a string of exclamation points. “We’re going to play great defense!” he proclaimed. “We’re going to have a dynamic offense! We want to be a team that makes eve
rybody proud! When you watch us play, I want you to say to yourselves, ‘That’s my team!’” He promised to build a championship team, and concluded, as he walked off the podium, by shouting the Baylor slogan: “Sic ’em Bears!”

  The values of NCAA sports percolate down to the youth level. Grassroots basketball players understand that they are involved in a commercial enterprise, not a game. It is not unusual to hear a high school player, or even a middle schooler, talk about how the “business” of basketball works, and they are not referring to the NBA. They well understand that the driving force of their sport is not fun or youth development or education. It’s money.

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  More than three hundred pre–high school boys were gathered in San Diego for the Junior Phenom Camp, a national showcase of players who had earned their way there via regional events. Most of them paid $450 to participate, which came from either their family, their youth team, a sneaker company, or some other benefactor. (I attended the camp several years ago, on assignment for the New York Times Magazine.) The stars, the highest ranked of the competitors, played for free and were flown in by the camp’s organizer. They gave the Junior Phenom Camp its luster. All the other players wanted to improve on their rankings, and they couldn’t do that unless the top kids showed up.

  The event was categorized as an “exposure camp” to distinguish it from camps whose primary mission is teaching, but the players were really performing for an audience of one: Clark Francis, the editor of the Hoop Scoop, an online tout sheet, many of whose subscribers are either college coaches or parents who want to see how their kids measure up. Francis was the first to assign national rankings to very young players, to the point that you will see on his site such notations as “our ranking of the top seven 5th graders.” To his credit, the evaluations are not pie-in-the-sky guesses—if you look through the Hoop Scoop’s past rankings of grade schoolers, you’ll find dozens of significant college and NBA players. It is evidence of his and other talent evaluators’ ability to identify hoops prodigies. Karl-Anthony Towns, now seven feet tall and one of the NBA’s best young players, first shows up on the Hoop Scoop radar as a five-foot-nine fifth grader. The Hoop Scoop identified Trae Young, one of the leading players in college basketball in 2017, as a five-foot-four sixth grader.