Rick Pitino and Me

Some fans bond with particular players, some fans bond with particular teams. But for me -- and, I think, a lot of UK fans -- no fan-based relationship is more emotional or tumultuous than our relationship with the Kentucky basketball coach. The Cats have had six different coaches since I started following them in 1975, and I could write page after page on my feelings toward each of them. I wanted Coach Calipari to take over for years, I was thrilled when he got the job, and I think he may be the best coach in America. But for me -- and I suspect this is true of most fans born in the mid-1960's, as I was --nothing can ever really replace the years we spent following Rick Pitino's teams in the 1990's.

Pitino was hired at a time when I was starting to feel I had outgrown the Cats. I had obsessed over them every year from 1975 to 1986 -- often at great personal cost to myself. But I went to college, and I fell in love, and I started becoming a grown-up. And the Cats still seemed stuck in the same weird mix of drama and unhappiness that had followed them ever since I was a kid. In 1984, they lost a Final Four game because they went 3-33 from the field in the second half. In 1986, they finally replaced Joe B. Hall, and promptly dominated the SEC, going 17-1 in conference, winning the SEC Tournament, and getting a number 1 seed in the NCAA's. Eventually, they only had to beat a number 11 seed -- LSU -- to reach the Final Four and a glorious match-up with Louisville. But they lost, just as they lost almost every big game they played in the 1980's.

Something happened to me after that loss. I had met a girl a few months before that game, and I decided that hanging out with her was a lot more fun than worrying about a basketball program that was apparently under some sort of curse. That game utterly snapped my confidence in Eddie Sutton, and I never expected him to win any important game ever again. (For years, when he was at Oklahoma State, I almost always picked them to go out in the first round of the NCAA's.) I never bought into the whole Rex Chapman thing, I became distant and caustic toward the Cats, and I was not surprised when they flamed out in the 1987 and 1988 tournaments. In the fall of 1988, for the only time in my life, I left the South altogether; I went north to law school, and I didn't worry about how I would listen to the Cats from New England.

There was no Internet then, so I had to follow everything that happened next through telephone calls with my Dad. The dark clouds that had been gathering over the program since the early 1980's finally broke with a staggering vengeance. The team suffered a losing record -- the first once since the 1920's, I think -- in 1988-89. Then there was an absurd and humiliating scandal involving cash being sent through an overnight delivery service. And then a two-year ban from the NCAA Tournament -- the last such ban, I think, that was ever given out. Sutton was gone. Every player of any known skill left. Very serious people said that the Cats would win only 8 games in 1989-90. And meanwhile, they couldn't find a coach. Bobby Cremins turned them down. Lute Olson turned them down. Following it all from Connecticut, where no one knew or cared what was happening, I was heartbroken for Kentuckians and absolutely certain that the program would never recover -- would likely never even be allowed to recover.

But I was wrong. In fact, the scandal was just about the best thing that could have happened to UK -- the only thing, really, that could have crippled the Powers That Be in order to allow Rick Pitino to take over. Because he was exactly what we needed. He didn't care about our tortured history, our obsessions with Louisville and Indiana (who won four NCAA Tournaments from 1980 to 1987), our fear of coaches like Dale Brown and Don DeVoe. For Pitino, who jumped out of the NBA because of a bad relationship with his General Manager, Kentucky was a place to finally show the world what he could do.

And, boy, did he show them. The first year, they weren't even allowed to be on live television, so I couldn't watch them. But I knew they weren't like any UK team I'd ever seen before. In their third game, they scored 102 points against Mississippi State. Then they scored 111 against Tennessee Tech. Then they gave up 150 against Kansas. A few weeks later, they lost the UKIT to Southwest Louisiana, 116-113 (in overtime). (That was the last UKIT ever played; Pitino recognized that it was out of date and simply scrapped it.) I had never heard of such scores, and my Dad described to me a whole new style of basketball that no one had seen before. In 1988, the last time UK had a successful team, they shot 269 three-pointers -- this was on a team starring Rex Chapman, one of the best three-point shooters UK ever had. Two years later, Pitino's team -- playing a bunch of would-be scrubs -- shot 810 three-pointers.

Pitino's first team did not win 8 games; it went 14-14, including a 100-95 victory over an LSU team featuring Shaquille O'Neal and Chris Jackson. Folks said it was the loudest game in Rupp for years. In retrospect, it's amazing how far ahead of everyone Pitino was. Here were his assistants in 1989-90: Ralph Willard, Tubby Smith, Herb Sendek, and Billy Donovan. Every one of those guys became head coaches, every one took their teams to the NCAA Tournament, and two of them won national titles.

The next year, Kentucky was still on probation but now you could see them on TV. I sat in my dorm room basement and howled with glee as the Cats got revenge for their defeat against Kansas the year before -- beating the Jayhawks 88-71. Two nights later, they were clearly better than a very good UNC team, and lost only because of the unique officiating you get down on Tobacco Road. (UNC won 84-81; they shot 32 free throws, we shot 11.) Those two games -- the thrilling win and the infuriating defeat -- brought me back into the fold. This was the UK team I had been waiting to see my whole life -- a team that wasn't afraid of its history or its responsibility, but which embraced its mission and went on the attack. In 1990-91, the Cats went 22-6 and finished 9th in the AP Poll; we could only dream about what they could have done in the Tournament.

By the next season, when UK was finally eligible for the Tournament, I was married and living in Louisville. At this point, I made the crucial decision to go all-in on the Cats one more time -- to really devote myself to them as I had done in childhood, watching as many games as possible and reading everything I could get my hands on. This was one of the best decisions I ever made, because the 1991-92 Cats -- who are still memorialized -- played one of the most dramatic seasons in history, a season that ended only on Christian Laettner's legendary shot.

But that was only the beginning. The six seasons UK played from 1991-92 to 1996-97 -- the last six years Pitino was there -- were like something out of a movie. Every year brought drama that, years later, feels like it was made up. In 1992, they lost an overtime game in the Elite Eight. In 1993, they lost an overtime game to Michigan in the Final Four. In 1994, they beat two Final Four teams -- Arkansas and Florida -- to win the SEC Tournament, but were upset by Marquette in the second round of the NCAA's. In 1995, they rolled to the Elite Eight, but were humbled by UNC. In 1996, they won the Whole Thing. In 1997, they lost an overtime game for the National Championship.

Those are all incredibly dramatic stories. But that was only a small part of the Pitino years. He beat Bobby Knight and Denny Crum so badly, and so repeatedly, that I think he played a major role in ending their careers. He dominated the SEC so thoroughly that almost the entire conference had changed coaches by the time he left. He humiliated old foes like LSU (on January 16, 1996, UK went to Baton Rouge and led 86-42 at the half) and Tennessee (on February 17, 1996, UK went to Knoxville, that House of Horrors, and won 90-50). His system of a pressing defense and three-point shooting transformed basketball, and forced everyone -- except Tubby Smith (and maybe Dean Smith) -- to rethink their tactics. And most importantly, he talked to the UK fans like no one had done since Adolph Rupp. He taught us about the game, told us what mattered and what didn't, insisted that we enjoy basketball instead of dreading it, and pooh-poohed our fears about local rivals. It was wonderful, and I don't think the UK fan base has been so happy since the 1950's.

There were always concerns that it couldn't last. At first, the national media told us that Pitino's system could never win the national championship -- it was too goofy, too reliant on the three-point shot. But after he did win it all, the national media told us that Pitino was too big for the college game -- that he really should take his talent back to the NBA. Year after year, the rumors surrounding Pitino's imminent departure got louder and louder. I tried to ignore the rumors. I thought surely Pitino understood that he could never be bigger in the NBA than he was at UK. By 1997, he was on top of the college world. He was better than Coach K. He was better than Dean Smith. He was the best college coach I had ever seen. He had five Elite Eights in six years, and he was coming off of back-to-back trips to the national championship game, and I didn't see any reason that this couldn't continue for another 20 years or so.

But then he was gone. In the end, the very thing that had made him so perfect for UK in 1989 -- the fact that he didn't take our history and its burdens all that seriously -- was what caused him to leave. We knew how great he was, because we had seen him do things at Kentucky that no one had done for almost 50 years. But he didn't know it, because he didn't respect the college game enough. He had always used the NBA as a reference point to get us to put things in perspective -- to realize that for the players and coaches, that was the real Gold Standard for basketball. But in the end, he ended up fooling himself.

The thing about the NBA is that there's just not that much any coach can do. Over 81 regular season games, and playoffs that are best four-out-of-seven, talent will come to the fore. He didn't have any talent in Boston, and nothing he tried could overcome that fact. He went 36-46 in 1997-98, while UK won the national championship without him. He went 19-31 in the strike season of 1998-99. He went 35-47 in 1999-2000 (the year he gave the famous speech about how Larry Bird "isn't walking through that door"). And when he started off 12-22 in 2000-01, he resigned. His time in Boston was, in every way, a disaster, and I don't think his reputation has ever fully recovered.

We felt sorry for him, of course. We had known that coaching wasn't that important in the NBA, and so we knew that it wasn't his fault. Personally, I would have been happy to take him back -- and if it had been put to a vote, I'm sure that's what would have happened. But Tubby had won the 1998 national title, and he'd only been there a few years, and one couldn't just shove him out the door. And so we waited to see what Pitino would do. Personally, I was excited about seeing him back in college basketball -- I hoped he'd go to Michigan or UCLA.

But the Courier-Journal -- which had always attacked Pitino while he was at UK -- led the charge for Pitino to take the U of L job, and that's what happened. Once again, he just didn't get it. He thought we had been cheering for him all those years, that the relationship was between him and us. For us, however, it was always about UK first. That's our Code. That's how we're raised. No Person Is Bigger Than the Team. I see now that he has never understood that. In fact, I'm certain he thinks we violated his code -- Never Turn On a Friend. In his mind, he saved us when our program was dying, and we should be grateful. But in our mind, of course, we gave him the greatest platform in the world, and he betrayed us.

These aren't the sort of misunderstandings that can just be papered over, and so we've hurt each other a lot. If he had stayed at Kentucky, and had continued winning at the pace he established from 1992 to 1997, I have no doubt he would be regarded as the greatest college coach since John Wooden, and we would have many more banners hanging in Rupp Arena. But any relationship has two sides, and the sad truth was that he didn't want to be there.

We're all a lot older now. He came to Kentucky two years before I got married; this fall my first son is going to college. Pitino was 39 when Christian Laettner hit that shot; he'll turn 60 in December, and this may be his last trip to the Final Four. It's still too soon to forget the events of the last ten years, or to make up for what he did by taking the Louisville job. But I hope that someday -- perhaps in another few years -- he will return to Rupp as a spectator, as a retired and legendary old coach. And the big screens will play highlights from the 1990's, and the old players will be there, and the Blue Hairs in the good seats -- who will be my age then -- will stand, and remember, and the whole place will cheer and cheer and cheer.