At labyrinthine Webster Hall nightclub in the East Village of New York in late December 1995, back when nightclubs were nightclubs and dating apps were nonexistent, a small batch of Kentucky sportswriters happened upon a small batch of Iona men’s basketball employees. Regal Kentucky would play Iona at Madison Square Garden the next night, and a Kentucky writer relayed to an Iona employee that Kentucky Coach Rick Pitino had commended the Gaels as “scrappy.”
“That’s an insult!” the Gael said through the thumping din, one night before one of the best teams in college basketball history gave Iona a 106-79 wave of its Big Blue hand.
It just goes to show what life can show you if you wait around for 24 years and three months. As of the silent Saturday gone by, Pitino - the sport’s most skillful coach if you ask some people, present company included - will nudge back into college basketball coaching - what’s this? - Iona. It’s a development worth a much-needed chortle for reasons exceeding the above, even if those reasons don’t include the eerie, coronavirus timing of it all.
For one thing, it reinforces the gathering notion that the FBI’s trash talk of late September 2017 wound up as overcooked. Now, we must never pooh-pooh officials for a good turn of trash talk. Righteous trash talk can help spruce up a dreary day. It certainly lent intrigue and portended something momentous when FBI assistant director William Sweeney said to college basketball coaches, “We have your playbook.”
It just never upended the sport in the dramatic way that seemed possible that Tuesday. All four head coaches whose assistants got nicked remain in their luxe jobs and thrones. Pleas and sentences happened here and there to the anonymous and the semi-anonymous. Nobody among 330 million Americans assumes the sport’s cloaked economic system has ceased being the sport’s cloaked economic system.
Maybe someday the NCAA can fill the dearth of major penalty to programs, but the American culture won out, retained its priority of favorable scoreboards and seems more tolerant than ever of whatever raunchiness enables them. (A rare exception would be the Louisville fan base of 2017, when a local TV poll taken the day of Pitino’s ouster showed an overwhelming weariness of scandals and willingness to change.)
Later, as the trials and the years went along, it kept making zero sense that only one bright-light coach would fall and that that coach somehow would be Pitino. Really? Only him?
Across the four decades and programs he coached, he didn’t lure many of the upper crust of recruits. He didn’t need to generally or want to essentially. He worked improbabilities even from wreckage, as when he oversaw Kentucky while it moped in the NCAA hoosegow at the outset of the 1990s.
His 2012-13 Louisville team that won it all before the banner came down starred players with recruiting rankings such as No. 21, 36, 39, 44 - pretty damned good, just not excessively drooled-over. The 1991-92 Kentucky team he coached to a 103-102 lead over Duke just two seconds from the Final Four, before something happened, was pretty much inexplicable as a feat of cleverness and strategy and belief and unimaginable individual improvement - even if its players were better than the junk heap understandably ascribed to them as storytelling fodder.
Yet for further guffaws, further guffaws do appear here. It turns out that when Pitino did make his way back to his homeland from three seasons astray from the American college game and from his current post coaching in Greece, he did so at a university that falls under the bosom of a religion. He did so for a university that presumably believes there’s somebody looking down upon us, expecting us to tell the truth and stuff like that, and monitoring our ventures into the reprobate side of life.
On Saturday, that university listed Pitino’s gaudy accomplishments with this: “... became the first coach to win an NCAA championship at two different schools.” That’s accurate to a point but lacks even an open-parenthesis introduction to the fact Louisville had to go up to the roof and remove that 2013 national-title banner over some malfeasance involving prostitution. You can debate whether that was fitting in American college sports with their long and honored tradition of rascality or whether prostitution should be legal as the Dutch do it or that a key FBI informant ratified Pitino’s claim he had no clue about the pay-for-play that got him shooed. You just can’t really argue that it’s not funny that a school with a religious bent hired a coach whose last big banner went down for prostitution.
That’s, as they say, hysterical.
His return and the sport’s return will mingle for fresh jazziness. He will add vividness, color, a big dose of flair coming right out of quiet New Rochelle, New York. His otherworldly skill will operate from a place where it can get a true demonstration, a place that requires it to shine to the “unfathomable new heights” envisioned Saturday by Iona’s board chairman, in yet another funny turn.
If we can bear to glimpse closely enough or if it forces us to, it could show us about life and fifth chances and what might happen if you wait around long enough.
For one thing, the Gaels sure will be scrappy.
