The Last Temptation of Rick Pitino

by Michael Sokolove

  The lease terms and the popularity of Pitino’s teams, which regularly sold out their games, made Louisville’s program far and away the most profitable in college basketball. Its $45.6 million in revenue in 2017 was $15 million more than Duke, the second-highest program, which does not have luxury boxes at its on-campus Cameron Indoor Stadium. Neither does Rupp Arena, where the University of Kentucky in most recent seasons has led college basketball in attendance. The big money in college sports, as in pro sports, is at the upper end of the market.

  Yum Center was built to NBA specifications, including a full-sized practice court inside the building. The Louisville metropolitan area is bigger than New Orleans and Salt Lake City, which have NBA franchises, and about the same size as two other NBA cities, Oklahoma City and Memphis. The flourishes added at the Yum Center to attract the NBA added tens of millions of dollars to what was already an expensive project, and have contributed to the arena sinking under the weight of its debt.

  Political and business leaders in Louisville believed they had a strong chance of attracting the NBA franchise that ultimately moved from Charlotte and became the New Orleans Pelicans. Jurich, however, not only succeeded in giving fans a pro-like experience, but he also either directly used his influence to keep an NBA team out of Louisville, or—by establishing the university as Yum’s primary tenant, meaning it had its choice of dates during basketball season—made it untenable for an NBA team.

  There already was a “pro” team in Louisville—Pitino’s squad. If an NBA team had come into Louisville, the university would have had to share the arena and compete for the loyalty of the corporations and wealthy individuals who can afford suites and luxury seating. Without an NBA team, the Cardinals had that market all to themselves.

  Jurich denied that he ever actively opposed an NBA team coming into the market. “I was never asked about it, so I couldn’t say no,” he said. Others have different recollections. Said Abramson, who was mayor during the planning and construction of the arena, “Jurich and Pitino made it very clear that they had no interest in sharing the Yum Center with an NBA team.” David Stern, the NBA commissioner at the time, told Bloomberg that he remembered thinking when Louisville came up as a possible destination for a franchise, “If Rick Pitino doesn’t want us there, why are we going there?”

  Jonathan Blue, the former trustee, and the managing director of an equity firm in Louisville, was a strong supporter of Jurich’s and opposed his firing. But he disagreed with him about an NBA franchise. “They are single-handedly responsible for us not having an NBA team,” he said, referring to Jurich and Pitino. “I was for it. An NBA team puts a city on the map more than a great college basketball team is ever going to do. It would have solidified the success of the arena.

  “But Jurich was raising money for two expansions of the football stadium, soccer facilities, baseball. It went on and on and there’s only so much disposable income. He didn’t want to compete over the dollars, the media buy, or the attention. Once the NBA deal was dead, we had to deal with what we had left. It was brilliant business on Jurich’s part, but it had implications for the city.”

  The Yum Center became a burden to the city even before it opened. The bonds for its construction were supposed to be largely paid off from taxes thrown off by increased commercial activity downtown, spurred by the arena. That did not happen, in part because of the recession of 2008, which hit as it was still being constructed. But the ongoing problem was that the deal disadvantaged the city.

  A 2017 state audit said that since the 2010 opening of Yum, the arena authority “has faltered badly” while the finances of the Louisville athletic department “dramatically improved.” In the previous year, the audit said, the university earned $5.9 million for suite rentals while just $200,000 went to the city. The split from premium seats was $7 million to the U. of L. and $932,000 to the city.

  The arena authority managed to restructure the debt and get the university to agree to contribute about $2.4 million more each year—but by extending the bond payments as far into the future as 2054 (they had been set to expire in 2029), the public money expended on the project could reach $1 billion.

  The arena’s troubles were the source of rare bipartisan agreement among politicians. A Republican in the state legislature called the contract “an unmitigated fleecing of taxpayers.” A Democrat said it was another example that “there’s a lot at University of Louisville that has smelled in recent years.”

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  As U. of L. sports got bigger and ever more of a rallying point, they upended the city’s social structure. There was a sense in town that to be a donor to the athletic department—and to mix with others in the suites and premium seating areas at the football and basketball games—was helpful to whatever other aspirations one might have. “If you played in Jurich’s pool,” as one city leader put it, “you elevated yourself.”

  Jurich made $5.35 million in total compensation in 2016, some of which came from the University of Louisville Foundation, which manages the endowment. Dozens of people in the athletic department made salaries well into the six figures, which is not unusual in the NCAA. The high end of compensation is generally set by the men’s basketball coach and the head football coach (at Louisville, Pitino was making $7.8 million; Bobby Petrino makes almost $5 million, and $5.5 million with bonuses, but others are also well compensated. Louisville’s women’s basketball coach makes $1.15 million; its baseball coach, $1 million; its men’s soccer coach, $330,000; its women’s volleyball coach, $200,000.

  The university, for Jurich, was a family affair. His son Mark came back to the university after five years of playing minor-league baseball and worked as a fund-raiser for the athletic department. He stayed on after his father left but was fired several months later. His daughter Haley worked as an Adidas brand communication manager in Louisville.

  College sports plays by its own special rules. Nepotism is so common that it mostly goes unremarked upon. Bobby Petrino’s son Nick is the quarterbacks coach on his staff. (According to his bio on the athletics website, Nick has never had any coaching jobs except on his father’s staff, following him from Arkansas to Western Kentucky to Louisville.) Petrino’s son-in-law L. D. Scott is also on his staff, serving as defensive line coach. Between them, they make more than $500,000 a year. In January 2018, he hired another son-in-law, leaving him with three family members on his ten-man coaching staff.

  Rick Pitino’s son, the current head coach at Minnesota, spent three years on his father’s staff at Louisville, one of them as associate head coach. Keep in mind that these are jobs at a state-funded institution, not a family business. The coaches’ kids might be great at their jobs, but it’s hard to think of other publicly funded entities where chief executives can lard their leadership teams with family members.

  What Jurich built, with the help of the coaching acumen and charisma of Pitino, is a paradigm of big-time NCAA sports—a demonstration project of its benefits and dangers. Powerhouse sports programs often serve as a unifying force, but they are ultra-aggressive, gobbling up territory as they advance. They redefine campus dialogue. Myth becomes fact. The way to build a better academic institution is through sports? Yes, sometimes, but Duke was a pretty good school before Coach K came along, and if you look at any list of top universities, most of them do not achieve in sports at Louisville’s level, or even try.

  Ramsey’s physical improvements to the university and the buzz of the winning teams helped lift up important markers at Louisville, including what had been an abysmal graduation rate. (Studies show that students who enjoy a campus are more likely to do what it takes to stay there.) But by most evidence, the academic aspects of the U. of L. did not rise at anywhere near the same rates as its teams did. The U. of L. was ranked No. 165 by U.S. News in its 2018 guide to the nation’s “best colleges and national universities”—between the University of California–Merced and Mississ
ippi State. The J. B. Speed School of Engineering is generally considered the strongest of Louisville’s academic offerings; it was ranked 125th among undergraduate engineering programs by U.S. News.

  Academic departments are not all intended as profit centers. An English department, to give one example, may turn out some literature scholars, but it is also tasked with teaching future scientists and engineers how to write effectively. Humanities courses can serve to round out students who move on to practical careers, or at least that’s the hope. By its nature, sports engenders linear thinking. Wins and losses. Hits and errors. Yards gained. The assists-to-turnovers ratio. It all goes on the stat sheet and players are held individually accountable.

  When challenged about the centrality of athletics on campus, Jurich argued that everyone on campus should pull their own weight, just as the athletic department did—and as any division in a corporate structure must. It is the way he understood the world. “They couldn’t have gone out and raised money?” he said in an ESPN The Magazine piece, in response to criticism that his salary alone was more than the budgets of the biology, English, history, and math departments. “Why is it I’m accountable for everything and all we’ve done is been successful? But these other people get a free pass? If I was a humanities professor, do you think I’d sit there and say, ‘Man, I can’t get it done, poor me’? I’d never say that. I’d go find a way to get it done. You know what? Those schools have alumni too. Those schools have very rich graduates too. Nobody handed me anything when I walked into this place. Nobody. It was quite the contrary.”

  Jurich could be genial and charming, and when he was not feeling challenged he was easy to be around. It’s a big part of what made him so effective. But if you hit him, he hit you right back. If he had the upper hand in a negotiation, he used it. One reason why Pitino respected him is that he recognized Jurich as a fellow competitor. In 2016, when the criticisms of the arena lease got louder, Jurich responded, accurately, that no one had put a gun to the city’s head and forced it to make the deal. He said he was “baited” downtown and would always have preferred an on-campus arena.

  In a radio interview, he said that if political leaders did not feel the arrangement was fair, the sides could unwind the lease and the Cardinals would just build in south Louisville along Floyd Street in sight of the NFL-quality football stadium. It would be the newest and maybe the grandest addition to his sports complex.

  That was probably not realistic. Even Jurich would have struggled to raise money in a city that he had just left with a huge white elephant—which is what the Yum Center would have become without Cardinals basketball. (It was in bad enough shape with it.)

  But he insisted that this was the best solution, even after the radio host said he thought it would hurt the city. “Well, I think we should,” he said. “I don’t think we’re wanted down there, so I think we should.”

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  To speak out or even raise a concern about Louisville athletics was like standing in front of a moving tank. Not everyone was willing. There were dissenters, but it was difficult for them.

  Emily Bingham is not someone who agrees to sit obediently and keep quiet. Her forthright nature is something she comes by honestly: She is a scion of the Binghams of Louisville, one of the South’s storied families (“the Kennedys of inner America,” Vanity Fair magazine once called them) and the owners, from 1937 to 1986, of the Louisville Courier-Journal. The Binghams’ politics are liberal, and their newspaper reported aggressively. “There was always a Courier-Journal reporter around to challenge the timber cutters, the strip miners, the polluters, the corrupt,” John Ed Pearce, a forty-year veteran of the paper, said after a bitter family feud led to the sale of the paper to the Gannett chain.

  Barry Bingham Jr., Emily’s father and the longtime Courier-Journal publisher, was not a big sports fan, though he knew that sports coverage sold newspapers. He had some quirks. One was that he did not like corporate references seeping onto the sports pages, and so he ordered his writers to use other names for such events as the Marlboro Cup horse race and the Kemper Open golf tournament.

  In 2013, Emily Bingham was appointed by Kentucky’s then governor, Steve Beshear, to the University of Louisville’s board of trustees. She has a Ph.D. in history from the University of North Carolina, has taught at several universities, was an author of some note, and was the only academic on the board not employed by the university. Bingham joined a couple of other trustees who had been persuaded to join by Beshear and Abramson, who had become the state’s lieutenant governor. Both of the politicians are Democrats, as were Bingham and her small, like-minded faction on the trustees board, but the divide was more cultural than political.

  U. of L. sports was the plaything of Louisville’s business class and, to a certain extent, of its new money as well. Bingham’s cohorts were Steve Wilson, who had married into the Brown-Foreman bourbon family (Jack Daniel’s, Woodford Reserve, and other brands), and Craig Greenberg, a lawyer and a partner with Wilson in 21C, a chain of boutique hotels in midsized cities with lobbies that double as art galleries. They were not opposed to sports, but they did not instinctively believe that sports should be the university’s leading edge. “We tried to put people on the board who would ask questions,” Abramson said.

  Like all new trustees, Bingham was given an orientation, in which she was informed about the board’s customs and ways of doing business. One important bit of guidance was that trustees should avoid asking any questions of substance at public meetings of the board, which were open to the press. The real discussions, she was told, take place in the president’s box at football and men’s basketball games, as everyone is wearing red, enjoying the buffet and open bar. “I thought, ‘That’s not going to work for me,’” she recalled. “I was pretty astonished.” The atmosphere of cheering for the sports teams carried over into the boardroom. “You were either a cheerleader or an enemy,” she said.

  Ramsey, the university’s president, was an economist whose career had been divided between teaching at five different universities and working in state government in Frankfort. He grew up in a hardscrabble part of south Louisville, as he liked reminding people, in a manner that could seem pointed, especially in contrast to the new trustees. He was appointed to lead the U. of L. in 2002, five years into Jurich’s tenure, and as often happens with a long-serving CEO, he consolidated a great deal of power. He handpicked many of the trustees, and they were his loyalists and fans. In addition to serving as the school’s president, Ramsey was president of the University of Louisville Foundation, which controlled the university’s endowment.

  Ramsey and Jurich both had forceful personalities and worked well together mostly by staying within their own spheres. They had what one associate of theirs called “a mutually beneficial détente.” Jurich was a prodigious fund-raiser, and Ramsey was able to share in the credit for money he raised. When Jurich threw his loyalty behind coaches who came under fire, Ramsey did not interfere.

  They both were paid high salaries—compensation that was more generous than their peers around the country, and was reflected in the university’s bookkeeping in less than straightforward ways. That was a theme—hazy finances—that would later come out in a “forensic audit” of the university ordered by the state.

  In 2015, Bingham and some others on the board began raising concerns about Ramsey’s salary, and particularly the practice of paying him “gross-ups”—basically, paying his taxes for him. Another trustee, Ron Butt, came to Ramsey’s defense, comparing his performance guiding the university with the accomplishments of a superstar athlete. “How are you going to put a price tag on Michael Jordan if he comes to play for your team?” he said. “Are you going to pay him more than everybody else? Yeah. If for no other reason than intimidation. Jim is highly respected and sought after.”

  When a vote of no confidence in Ramsey came up for a vote, and narrowly failed, the board�
��s president, Robert Hughes, a doctor in Murray, Kentucky, composed a diatribe against the dissident trustees. The forum he chose was a blog that followed U. of L. sports called Card Game. “These problems of the Board of Trustees began in 2013 with a core group from a zip code in the east end,” he wrote, making it clear that he felt his opponents were effete. “This group has been relentless in pushing forward with incessant negatives and attempts to micromanage the university. I haven’t seen anything positive from them since they were added to the board; they have added nothing constructive to the debate or to the life of the university.”

  In July 2015, after the Katina Powell revelations broke, Emily Bingham wrote a column for the Courier-Journal. Its unsparing tone signaled that her frustration had finally boiled over. “A core responsibility of a board is employing and paying its leaders, yet we have been lied to about the president’s compensation,” she wrote. “We cannot move forward without honesty from the leader we employ.” She made reference to “countless rumors of self-dealing” and “conflicts of interest,” a lack of “complete information,” and a “culture of theft.”

  She then took on the athletic program, and in particular, the university’s venerated head coach. “In a basketball program already embarrassed by the sexual misconduct of its coach, egregious alleged sexual misconduct by employees and players was never met with clear, forceful condemnation from the president. Waiting for years for NCAA judgment is unacceptable. We cannot move forward with leaders whose moral compass on these issues is not clear.”

  This was too much for Pitino. It did not seem to register—or certainly not to matter to him—that the criticism was coming from a person with some history and standing in Louisville. If he knew anything about Bingham or her family, he did not betray it. What he knew was that she was not on his team. In a radio interview, he referred to her repeatedly as “that lady,” as if Bingham were a nobody taken off the streets and elevated to the board of trustees.