It is surprising that Pitino—the streetwise New Yorker, immersed in basketball recruiting for four decades, already deeply skeptical about the irregularities that occur right under the nose of the NCAA—would not have gotten a certain feeling from Dawkins when they were in the same room together. That he would not have known the business Dawkins was in, or at least suspected it. But he insists he did not. He took Dawkins’s presence at face value—that he was a family friend who had just come along to help.
He did not understand the FBI’s interest in college basketball, considering the other pressing matters on its docket. “What is that?” he said. “We’re paying for this? I’m a New Yorker. I lost my best friend and brother-in-law in 9/11. What is the FBI doing messing around college basketball and indicting assistant coaches?” (Self-serving as his thoughts may be, others in both the media and the legal community have raised the same question.)
Pitino said that he had passed a polygraph test arranged by his legal team. “I immediately took a lie detector test. By an ex-FBI agent. He asked me two questions. ‘Did you have any knowledge of any payments by Adidas to the Bowen family? Did you have any knowledge of illegal activities or money funneling to players?’ I passed that.”
He did not understand why the unusual trajectory of Bowen’s recruitment should reflect on his own methods or integrity. “Here’s the story with Bowen. I said at the press conference, I had a player fall in my lap. What idiotic coach would do that and say that if a guy was getting paid money?”
At that press conference in the spring of 2017, he said, “It’s funny how it works out. Sometimes there’s no explanation. The family said, ‘We know what you’re all about.’ That’s really refreshing for us to hear. We’ve been through a lot of torment.”
He said then that he considered Bowen the type of person who could help his program recover from past controversies. “Let’s get guys like that, who are very humble, but confident in their abilities,” he said, describing what attracted him to Bowen. “When adversity hits you really gotta make sure it doesn’t affect moving forward. You learn from the past. You don’t live in it.”
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Pitino filed two lawsuits. The first was against the University of Louisville Athletic Association, a related entity of the school that was technically his employer, claiming that his dismissal violated the terms of his contract. He had been fired “for cause,” it said, without legitimate cause. It asks: If Pitino was involved in payoffs or arranging for them, why isn’t his voice caught on the wiretaps and why isn’t he captured on video in any of the meetings?
The lawsuit summarized the federal criminal case—that Adidas allegedly had conspired to funnel money to the families of high school players to Adidas-sponsored schools—and noted that one of those named, Bowen, had in fact enrolled at Louisville. But it said that he had nothing to do with any exchanges of money. “Coach Pitino had no part—active, passive, or through willful ignorance—in the conspiracy described in the Complaint,” the suit said. “Coach Pitino never has had any part . . . in any effort . . . to pay any recruit, or any family member of a recruit, or anyone else on a recruit’s behalf, as an inducement to attend the University of Louisville.”
Pitino’s lawyer, Steve Pence, a former lieutenant governor of Kentucky, points out in the lawsuit that while Pitino’s name comes up in conversations among Dawkins and other defendants, Pitino himself is not present on any of the recordings. The defendants “bragged” about influence with him they did not have, it says. A claim by Dawkins that he talked to Pitino and asked him to make a call to Jim Gatto in order to secure money from Adidas for Bowen “lacks all credibility” because if that conversation had taken place, it should have been captured on the wiretap of Dawkins’s phone—and the government “surely would have said so.”
The FBI, though, also has records of calls between Pitino and Gatto (though apparently not recordings of their conversations)—and in documents, the government alleges that Pitino agreed to ask the shoe company to provide more money for Dawkins. Pence has characterized the conversations as entirely innocent in nature. Pitino at one point said that the subject of at least one of the calls involved a dispute regarding an endorsement contract between Adidas and one of his former players, Terry Rozier, now of the Boston Celtics. (Rozier had worn Nikes in some games, and Pitino said he was interceding on his former player’s behalf to prevent his Adidas contract from being canceled.)
Pitino’s lawsuit argues that, as opposed to participating in schemes that violated NCAA rules, he was a stickler for running a clean program. “He drilled compliance into his coaches and assistants at every meeting,” his complaint says. “He met with his coaches and assistants frequently and kept well informed about their activities.”
Pitino did not ask for his job back. He sought “the full unpaid balance” of his contract—$35 million—or what he would have earned for coaching to the end date of his deal in June 2026.
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Pitino’s second lawsuit was filed against Adidas and is notable for its blunt language in describing the motivations of shoe companies in putting big dollars into college athletics. He profited from that money for many years. To the extent that his players were being turned into human billboards, it was to his benefit. Before Louisville signed its much more lucrative deal with Adidas in 2017, Pitino received 98 percent of the cash from the old contract, or approximately $1.5 million a year over the previous five years.
When athletic director Tom Jurich announced the new ten-year, $160 million extension, his emphasis was on the close relationship between the school and the company—a feeling of “family,” as he put it. The apparel companies like to stress the performance advantages of their products—as if, for example, an Adidas shoe, jersey, or wristband might help eke out a victory over an inferiorly outfitted athlete at a Nike school. It is silly, of course, but it gives executives something to talk about other than their real strategies. In 2015, when Indiana extended its deal with Adidas, Chris McGuire, the company’s senior director of sports marketing, said, “We’ve worked closely with the Hoosiers to bring our best and most innovative footwear, apparel, and accessories to all men’s and women’s sports. We’ve enjoyed a successful partnership with Indiana and look forward to continuing to collaborate to help their athletes perform at the highest level.”
Pitino may be an imperfect and unlikely messenger, but his lawsuit cuts through all the corporate happy talk and gets to the crux of what the contracts are about. “It was and is in Adidas’s interest to have the schools that Adidas outfits succeed, especially because high-profile television coverage of championship events would show athletes wearing Adidas products,” his complaint reads. “It is likewise and was in Adidas’s interest for top athletes to attend the schools that Adidas outfits, because that would increase the chance of those teams’ success. And it was in Adidas’s long-term interest to build relationships with recruits early in their careers to influence them to sign contracts with Adidas once they became professional athletes.” The suit says that Adidas knew the NCAA rules but realized that “violating these regulations could benefit them financially.”
The legal language does nothing to obscure the clear point being made: Adidas and the other apparel companies are in the business of pimping out athletes, as it might be said on the street. Throw some money their way. Dress them up, put them in front of the public, and reap the benefits.
In response, Adidas asked the judge to either dismiss Pitino’s lawsuit or move it to arbitration. It refers to the FBI investigation and states, “Although Pitino claims he had no involvement with any conspiracy to direct payments to the basketball player’s family, the criminal complaint includes allegations suggesting that he was both aware of and supported the scheme.” An oddity of both of the lawsuits filed by Pitino is that they prominently reference the other recent scandal in the Louisville basketball pr
ogram—the “Strippergate” episode. (The episode is repeatedly referred to as “the escort matter.”)
You could argue that such behavior, taking place a short walk from Pitino’s office and involving people under his supervision, does not reflect positively on him and would not work in his favor in any kind of legal battle. But his lawsuits take the opposite view: His lawyer reasons that Strippergate was so awful, so publicly humiliating and damaging that it would make him extra careful about risking another scandal. It is not the kind of logic you would be likely to hear in a criminal courtroom—a defense lawyer arguing, say, that his client has committed crimes in the past, so knowing the consequences, why would he chance it again?
Pitino, however, is portrayed as a coach who ran an otherwise rule-abiding program. “Adidas outrageously conspired to funnel money to a recruit or the family of a recruit,” his lawyer wrote, without regard for how Pitino’s “public and private standing and reputation hinged on him running a clean, proper and strictly compliant men’s basketball program. This is particularly true in light of the recent, well-publicized matter resulting from an assistant coach’s improper provision of escorts to University of Louisville men’s basketball players and recruits.” The lawsuit states that Pitino had a “reputation for honesty and integrity” that was tarnished by Adidas and seeks damages from the company for having “recklessly caused [him] emotional distress.”
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Pitino would begin to talk about coaching again, and his name was linked to several possible jobs, including a couple in the NBA—a measure of respect for his coaching acumen. When the 2018 season began, he would be sixty-six years old and nearly two decades past his last time on the sideline of an NBA game, but no knowledgeable basketball person doubted his ability to make any team, pro or college, better.
When we talked in January, he was still subdued. He used the word “assassinated” or “assassination” no less than five times. When I asked about his future, he replied, “I haven’t even thought about it. There’s some mornings I don’t even feel like fighting anymore. I’ve been assassinated.”
He had long maintained a cordial relationship with journalists, who enjoyed his banter, but he complained about the coverage of him in the press. “I don’t have it out for the media,” he said. “But the media today has a different culture. It’s a no-win battle. . . . Years ago, they wanted the facts, now everybody wants to be first. Ask any of my assistant coaches who worked for me—it was impossible for me to give anybody five dollars. I have never given anything illegal to any athlete at any time.”
He brought up the two big scandals in his past. He didn’t see why people continued to blame him for the parties in the basketball dorm featuring the escorts—or how he could possibly have known what was taking place. High school recruits stayed overnight when they came for their campus visits, and he would see them at breakfast. What coach would have asked them if they had met any strippers the previous night? He had no reason to suspect it.
With one exception—his own humiliation following a night in a Louisville restaurant—everything bad that had happened to him in Louisville was the fault of others. People he hired didn’t listen to him. They did things he never could have imagined. He repeated what has become a stock line when something has gone wrong in his program: “All I can say is, I taught them to do the right thing.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
THE CHARDONNAY CROWD
Every city in the United States that is not New York has an inferiority complex of some kind. Chicagoans, for all the attributes of their city, worry that it is seen as provincial. Philadelphia is ninety miles from New York, but its inhabitants are acutely aware that it will never be New York. (They celebrate the trickle of New Yorkers who are drawn to Philly by word of it being “the new Brooklyn.”) Angelenos fret over a perceived lack of intellectual heft, and there are actually people in San Francisco who obsess over the inability of any bakery in their city to make a proper bagel.
A regional city like Louisville generally just wants to be noticed, to register in some small way on the national consciousness, and that is the slice of its psyche that Tom Jurich so brilliantly converted into money. It mattered that the university takes its name from the city. There are just a handful of other such universities playing major sports, and most of them, unlike Louisville, compete with pro teams for attention. When the Cardinals played football on Tuesday nights, that was Louisville on national TV. When Pitino’s kids won their national title, their jerseys said Louisville. When people referred to “the ’Ville,” they were talking not just about the school, but the city. “This community, the U. of L., its psyche, its pride, and its self-confidence, are interlocked,” Abramson, the former mayor, said. “You can’t separate it.”
When Jurich arrived in 1997, construction of Papa John’s Cardinal Stadium was already under way. Even as it was still being completed, he began raising an additional $75 million to add yet more seats and luxury boxes. He raised $11.6 million for a natatorium. For a rowing center: $2.65 million. A baseball stadium, and later its expansion: $11.3 million. Soccer: $18.5 million. The purchase of a golf course and renovation of its grounds: $11.3 million. An indoor golf practice facility: $850,000. Various other practice facilities: at least $21 million. A tutoring center for athletes: $18.5 million. For Billy Minardi Hall, the basketball dormitory named for Pitino’s late brother-in-law: $4.5 million.
People in Louisville who did not know they were fans of lacrosse or swimming or soccer found themselves taking pride in the university’s status as an all-around sports power. They gave generously. Those who parted with millions got their names on the buildings.
Jurich’s daughters were both athletes—high-achieving field hockey players in high school who were recruited, on merit, to Louisville. He raised tens of millions of dollars for the women’s teams not just to get Louisville out of noncompliance with Title IX regulations—and to allow it to conference-jump all the way into the prestigious ACC—but, to his credit, because he deeply believed in the value of women’s sports. True to form, he did also see it in terms of money. He knew that few if any of his female athletes would get rich in professional sports, but he believed that a background in competitive athletics would help women in the business world—and he hoped that some of them would become wealthy enough to become donors to the university and its athletic department. When he was raising money for their teams, that was all part of his pitch.
The current football stadium is one of the best-appointed in the NCAA. Among its amenities is the Brown and Williamson Club—twenty-eight luxury suites stretching the length of the football field. The club takes its name from the tobacco company, manufacturers of Lucky Strikes and Pall Mall, among other brands, that was once headquartered in Louisville and is now a division of RJ Reynolds.
The stadium is undergoing yet another expensive renovation. Before he was fired, Jurich began raising an additional $63 million to close off the north end zone—the stadium had been a horseshoe—and add more premium seating. (The project is still at least $20 million short.) The new expansion, the university announced in 2015, will include club seats adjacent to “a gathering area [with] an exclusive view to the players, who will be running on to the gridiron from a middle-of-the-field level entrance after exiting the football complex through a tunnel.”
The concept of the field-level suites, taken from Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones, was its own bit of genius. There are strict rules about how universities can individually market their NCAA student-athletes. But here, Jurich created an exclusive seating area where fans will pay to be able to literally reach out and touch their favorite players as they come on and off the field. It is called the Adidas Three Stripe Zone, after the three angled stripes on the company’s logo, and its marketing promises a “one of a kind experience” in which fans will get “close-up access at the team runout.”
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In all, Jurich raised about $280 million in construction funds, mostly for the stadiums, ballparks, arenas, and state-of-the-art practice facilities along Floyd Street—the eastern edge of campus the university calls its “front porch.” The money came mostly from local donors, many of them trustees. But the biggest givers were not by and large alumni; they were fans of Louisville sports.
The total does not include the $238 million it took to build the KFC Yum! Center. That was public money, from taxpayers, but the favorable lease extended to the university—an “astonishingly lopsided” agreement, Bloomberg News called it—represented Jurich’s biggest coup. It was a bad deal for the city but a great one for Louisville athletics.
The Yum Center, which seats more than 22,000 for basketball, features seventy-two luxury suites that rent for between $75,000 and $92,000 each. Some courtside seats go for as much as $15,000 each for the season—or about $750 a game. Even though the university did not pay to build the arena, the lease provides that it receives 88 percent of premium seat revenue, 97 percent of suite sales, and half of the take from concessions. (That includes receipts from beer and wine, as well as from hard liquor, which is not sold in most college arenas.) “It’s unusual for an arena to be run by the tenant, but the U. of L. has almost total control of Yum Center,” one of the building’s concessionaires said. “It was built for them and they call the shots.”
The Last Temptation of Rick Pitino Page 18