After four college teams — including two rivals — a pair of NCAA championships and nearly four decades in coaching, there’s few coaches who could retire with more of a mixed legacy than Rick Pitino.
There’s the positive image: The master motivator who seemed to understand the limits to push his players to more than most, who used a player’s grotesque leg injury to inspire his team to a national title and one who managed to keep a coaching career long after so many contemporaries were whisked into retirement or fired for underperforming. There’s the proteges in Billy Donovan and his own son who have gone onto promising careers. If Pitino retired today, it would be with a 74% win record and photos of him proudly getting a Louisville Cardinal tattoo.
On the personal side, there’s the work to remember his brother-in-law who died on 9/11.
But then there’s the flip side. The first sex scandal: The one where the world heard the graphic details of his sexual encounter with a woman, Karen Sypher, in a restaurant — that occurred as his assistant coaches were in the next room. And then one now — which he denies but he always had to know could hasten the end of his career — where a woman claimed she provided recruits with escorts to try to lure them to Louisville. While college basketball may be a historically dirty recruiting game, even that has to be enough to stop mothers from sending their sons to a man who seems to allow and himself shatter lines of morality when it comes to sex and women.
Whether he knew or not about what his assistant coaches are doing to get recruits to come to Louisville, he should — it’s what he gets paid millions of dollars to do. And it’s what parents trust he’ll avoid when they send their teenage sons to play for him. It should be enough for him to not coach again because being a college coach isn’t about just winning. It’s about inspiring, motivating and being a role model for young adults in some of their most formative years.
So now as he stands behind the bench for the final six weeks of what’s now a pointless season, it’s easy to wonder: What image will eventually define him? Is it the championship trophies? The moments surrounded by his players? Or will it be the Pitino who allegedly flipped off a fan, who angrily denied the latest allegations against him and even at one rambling press conference cited how a scandal killed Joe Paterno. The one who sat stonily in a press conference as Louisville’s athletic department announced his team’s self-imposed postseason ban on a day that they had to have known would have a news cycle too focused on the Super Bowl to concentrate on what’s going on with their team.
For longtime Louisville fans, it may be the first. But for the rest of us? I never really got the image of Sypher testifying about their relationship out of my head.
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