From Hawaii to Kentucky and Louisville, the college basketball coach has frequently run afoul of the rules.
Rick Pitino has achieved tremendous success as a college basketball coach. But he has also run afoul of N. C. A. rules at various points in his career. That caught up with him on Wednesday, when he was ousted as Louisville’s head coach.
A New Yorker, Pitino played guard at the University of Massachusetts, then moved into coaching as an assistant at Hawaii in 1974. He was briefly the interim head coach there as well. The program was hit by N. C. A. sanctions during his tenure, and Pitino was implicated in eight of the 64 violations .
The violations involving Pitino included giving plane tickets to a player, arranging for athletes to get used cars and giving out coupons for free food at McDonald’s.
Pitino got his first head coaching job in 1978, at Boston University. He was later a Knicks assistant coach for two years, and then, in 1985, took the top job at Providence, where he led the team to the Final Four and became a hot commodity. He was head coach of the Knicks, then landed a marquee college job.
In 1989, he took over at scandal-ridden Kentucky. “This program is as rich in tradition as there is in all of basketball, but you’ve been brought to your knees with a tremendous scandal,” he said at the time. “I like correcting problems. It’s a great challenge in my life.”
His first two years, he was ineligible for the N. C. A. tournament because of those pre-existing problems, but in Year 3 he made the round of 8, then the Final Four the next year, 1993. Pitino won the national title in 1996 and returned to the Final Four in 1997. He was named to the university’s athletics hall of fame.
After four seasons with the Celtics, he returned to the college game in 2001, and his landing place was Louisville, Kentucky’s archrival. On the court, there has been success: two Final Fours, then a national title in 2013.
But his time in Louisville has been clouded by scandal.
In 2009, he confessed that he had an affair with the wife of the team’s equipment manager and paid for her to have an abortion. The woman, Karen Sypher, was later convicted of trying to extort Pitino for millions of dollars.
A more sweeping scandal that impacted the team broke in 2015. A former director of basketball operations was found to have provided strippers and prostitutes to players and recruits in a campus dormitory over several years. The school declared itself ineligible for postseason play in 2016, and the N. C. A. suspended Pitino for the first five games of the coming season.
“I will not resign and let you down,” Pitino said in the aftermath. “Someday I will walk away in celebration of many memorable years, but that time is not now.”
His lawyer, Scott Tompsett, planned an appeal because he said the ruling did not “identify a single specific thing that Coach Pitino should have done that he wasn’t already doing that would have either prevented or detected the illicit activities.”
The latest scandal involved a star recruit being paid $100,000 by the sneaker company Adidas to attend Louisville. At the time he was recruited, Pitino told News Radio 840: “We got lucky on this one. I had an A. U. director call me and ask me if I’d be interested in a player. I said, ‘Yeah, I’d be really interested.’ In my 40 years of coaching, this is the luckiest I’ve been.”
Louisville’s interim president, Gregory C. Postel, said, “While we are just learning about this information, this is a serious concern that goes to the heart of our athletic department and the university.”
When success comes with scandal, people often pay more attention to the success. Pitino was the highest-paid coach in basketball at more than $7 million a year.
