It Was A Lousy Summer

However crappy your year has been up to now, there is a very good chance that Rick Pitino’s was worse.

Granted, unlike you, he still lived in some moated castle on a hill somewhere, wearing custom Armani suits while doing his yard work (or, more likely, paying someone poorer than himself to wear Armani suits while doing his yard work for him). But also, unlike you, he had to admit to a courtroom full of media and his family that he jizzed down his leg at the end of a 15-second sexual tryst with a grasping, desperate muppet. If you, also, endured such a thing, then I humbly concede the point.

Pitino’s much-publicized extortion case was a bounty of Schadenfreude for haters, many of us wearing our XXXL Kentucky sweat-dresses, but it was also extremely sad to watch.

There was a time not that long ago when Pitino — Macy’s parade float-sized ego and all — was one of the sport’s coaching jewels. A savior of one of its elite programs, a national champion, a basketball innovator and a genuine personality who was both recognizable and marketable, Pitino was the “It” coach of the mid-1990s. I mean, we’re talking the only non-Bobby Knight on-court coach in Blue Chips, for crissakes. This, friends, is approaching hoops immortality.

But as damaging to Pitino professionally as his off-court shenanigans were, the fact that his team just wasn’t very good was nearly as much of a problem. Because last year’s team was supposed to be pretty good and they stunk. But having recruited or let his staff recruit blue-chip talents that lacked character and character guys that lacked talent, Pitino seemed stumped as to how to squeeze quality out of such crappy and unlikeable players. Never have I seen a coach exude such palpable hate for his own players as Pitino did last February and early March. And whether it was his team, his humiliating drama or both, the man started to show signs of cracking. He looked just terrible, appearing to diminish significantly game-to-game — sometimes even within a game — all of it culminating in a skeletal, pallid Pitino stalking the sidelines like some sad-sack goblin, fiddling with his absurdly large 1996 title ring and contemplating his life in hell.

Despite the lurid summer months, a return to basketball appears to have improved Pitino’s outlook tremendously. After the trial ended, Pitino finally stopped calling impromptu and monumentally ill-advised press conferences and kept his mouth shut. Louisville, perpetually desperate for a winner, gladly moved on and both town and coach seemed to revel in a return to something approaching normalcy.

It got even better last Tuesday, when his supposedly middle-of-the-pack Big East Cardinals — now shed of most of its underachieving personnel — humiliated media darling and top-20 ranked Butler, 88–73, at Louisville’s swanky new KFC Yum Center. That Butler looked thoroughly un-rank-worthy is immaterial to the benefits in exposure and distraction Pitino — and his program — receives from the win.

It’s a good time for Pitino to resurrect his image through basketball, which was the only reason he was famous in the first place. Putting aside the restaurants and endorsements and motivational speaking tours and focusing on what he does best is really his only option now. The less he reminds people of how far he’s fallen personally by hawking local used cars or mega-Krogers, the better.

This season, he says, is a bridge year to next season, when a slew of top recruits are slated to arrive. But Pitino is always playing spin. And he’s almost always done his most impressive work with teams that needed an identity, a group of players that had to, either by mediocrity or design, subjugate themselves to the team. And he has just such a team right now, devoid of stars but not devoid of hustle and talent.

If Pitino could wrest a better-than-expected season out of his spare parts, the national basketball media would be waiting with pursed lips. Because the national scribes still love them some Pitino, and they love a redemption story even more.

While the climax of Pitino’s tawdry affair made for the best tabloid reading, he was not the only coach to have a miserable off-season. And, amazingly, his summer wasn’t the worst one among big-time coaches. Pitino may have suffered a large blow to his personal credibility, but his program remained untouched by scandal. The same cannot be said for Tennessee’s Bruce Pearl, whose inability to tame his own insecurities may have ended his run in Knoxville just as things were beginning to get interesting.

At a time when he should have been talking up his team’s remarkable run last March to within a few points of the school’s first Final Four, Pearl was instead sitting wet-eyed in front of a feral horde of media, trying to apologize for lying to the NCAA and trying like hell to avoid losing his job.

Having intentionally misled NCAA investigators about a recruit’s visit to his home and gotten caught, a clear violation and then a clear intent to deceive, Pearl then had to mea culpa hard and hope that his performance as coach would outweigh his personal foibles. He’s lucky that last year’s team went as far in the tournament as it did, and that Tennessee’s football program is in even worse shape, as it probably saved him from the guillotine. Stripped of off-campus recruiting and fined by the school, the SEC announced Friday Pearl would be suspended from his team’s first eight conference gamedays. The NCAA has not yet rendered judgment, so he’s hardly out of the woods. Still, he has his job. For now.

Never one to shy from that fine line between fan adulation and public ridicule, Pearl has got to be about out of chits at this point. The heady days of painting his chest and attending women’s basketball games for attention are over. Thanks to his own savvy and determination, Pearl presides over a top-20 program now. Not that he appears to totally realize this.

And cheating is about the only thing — other than a return to a Volunteer legacy of sustained averageness — that will turn his job to shit. The irony here, of course, is that the same go-getter instinct in Pearl that made him famous once made him a whistle-blowing do-gooder, nearly ending his career in its infancy. Only after the passing of years and the producing of winning teams at off-the-grid locales did he get his shot at a major program, and it would be doubly devastating to him to get run out of that job for evading the rules. But evade them he did.

The coming clean thing was vintage Pearl, a teary self-on-the-sword bit of showmanship on par with his No-seriously-I’m-here-supporting-the-team chest-painting stint, which was really a ham-handed snaking in on Pat Summit’s hard-earned success. Ever attention-cognizant, this latest case was one where his own bravado and audacity played against him, bringing him more scrutiny than might have happened to a more genteel personality. Roy Williams has never hesitated to drop some tears, but he’s also never been stupid enough to ask people to lie to the NCAA, nor admitted complicity in anything untoward. Ditto Coach K. And those guys aren’t without a few run-ins with the authorities themselves. Pearl, instead, handled it like the nouveau riche glad-hander he is, and it may still prove fatal to his career. At this point, his grasp on his program’s future looks dicier than a leisurely drive with Tyler Smith.

Pearl’s Tennessee team has been wearing the weight of the unknown on its shoulders so far, eking out close wins over Belmont and Missouri State and looking for all the world like a group that has other things on its mind. The Volunteers are supposed to be a conference contender this season, and there’s plenty of time to round into form, but they’ll need to shrug off Pearl’s woes — and his absence on the sideline for half the conference season — if they want to be a factor in a brutal SEC East.

Pearl, like Pitino, would do well to focus on his job and stop trying to sell his bona fides. He’s arrived. You know that by the fact that he still has his job despite his numbnut behavior.

Speaking of numbnuts, ask Bobby Gonzalez about arriving. Actually, on second thought, don’t.

Since being hired following a promising stint at Manhattan, ‘Gonzo’ never really turned the corner at Seton Hall. The school tolerated his “last angry man” act on the assumption that his reckless guile and coaching acumen would outmatch his less charming tendencies, but that proved untrue, just as it proved untrue that you can’t be too much of a dick for even the New York media market to stand. Gonzalez managed to do what not even All-American penises PJ Carlesimo and Latrell Sprewell could do in losing Gotham’s basketball press. Well played, dude.

Of course, it’s still mostly about winning. Seton Hall was trending perpetually mediocre. Then Gonzo had run-ins with the media and then with his own athletic director, had multiple players on his team of misfits and transfers arrested and was generally underwhelming in recruiting. When starting forward Herb Pope was ejected for blatantly cracking an opponent’s nuts in Seton Hall’s NIT loss to Texas Tech, enough was apparently enough.

Gonzalez being Gonzo, he refused to go gently, suing the school and wreaking havoc wherever he could, oblivious to the fact that he wasn’t just closing the book on this job but setting it on fire for the next one. Mostly it only made him look like the petulant prima donna he by all accounts actually is.

Then summer hit and it all got weird.

In July, Gonzalez was arrested on suspicion of shoplifting a handbag. Then Pope — he of the ball-thwacking incident — nearly died after collapsing during a pickup game and instead of responding to a former player’s fight for life, Gonzo did the only thing he could do and fuck it up. Pope never saw or heard from his former coach in the hospital, though he hardly seemed surprised.

Apparently Gonzalez is aiming for the full Eric Massa. I guess you can’t say the guy didn’t at least leave a lasting impression.

But Gonzalez was a coach going nowhere. UCONN head coach Jim Calhoun, on the verge of ending a Hall of Fame career, is suddenly pretty worried about his legacy. Calhoun is hanging on in the desperate hope of leaving on a high note rather than amid sanction from NCAA investigators.

Calhoun built the UCONN program from national laughingstock to multiple title-winner, all on the force of his Braintree meets Paris Island personality. He has always been one of the best recruiters in the business, and with that, naturally, come plenty of griping and suspicion about his tactics. Now that a former recruit allegedly got benefits from a person associated with the program, Calhoun is scrambling to keep his good name intact.

That this stuff has become almost standard practice in big-time college athletics, as programs skirt the edges of the rules to try and lock in elite talent, isn’t going to help him. The NCAA can’t brush these cases under the rug in today’s 24-hour sports news cycle. Calhoun may hardly be alone in this practice, but he’s a story principally because of his success. And as his health continues to deteriorate, he is worried he won’t have time to make things right before turning in his clipboard. So he’ll persist despite age and infirmity, be it battling Jim Boeheim for Bridgeport talent or sitting through 12-hour NCAA grillings. And there’s the odd scenario of a coach signing a lucrative four-year contract extension while an investigation into his program’s tactics is ongoing.

Or maybe that isn’t so odd anymore. With the exception of Gonzalez, who wasn’t winning enough to warrant the support, the uniting factor is that each of these guys has retained his high-profile, well-paying position despite major public relations fiascos thanks to institutions willing to stand by their multi-million dollar man. Would they all still be working today were they coaching at Gonzelez-esque levels? Each of these men had a few unabashedly bad months, but winning is a cure-all.

When Nick Nolte’s crusty too-true-to-go-through-with-it coach hoists himself on his own petard at the end of Blue Chips, his soul — and the integrity of the game, presumably — is saved. But I wouldn’t expect that out of any of these guys — Pearl’s tear-stained press conference came across as shrewd spectacle as much as admission of guilt. And after all, Blue Chips, was just a movie, while this stuff is real. Right?

Originally from Kentucky, JL Weill now writes from Washington, DC. His take on politics, culture and sports can be found at The New Deterrence and on Twitter.