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LOUISVILLE MAGAZINE 2.16 55 contest. He's made the Final Four in four of the past fve years, and he led the Wildcats to a national championship in 2012. And he's having all this success a little more than an hour's drive away. His accomplishments have begun to overshadow yours. Fifth-year transfer guard Damion Lee hit a three-pointer with 5:31 remaining to bring Louisville within one. But that's as close as your team would get. You had a chance to win with a three-pointer at the buzzer, but Lee threw up an airball from the corner, to the cheers of the 24,412 on hand at Rupp. Wildcats 75, Cardinals 73. Te postgame handshakes were quick. You left in a hurry. I was seated upstairs behind the Kentucky bench, nowhere near the tunnel where you made your exit. Did you give the middle fnger to the fans? Many people thought so. You denied it, in a text message to ESPN.com. A video surfaced. I replayed it over and over like it was the damned Zapruder flm and still couldn't tell. Whatever. Only you know. You surrendered a chance to defend yourself by skipping out on the postgame media session. Six days later, on New Year's Day, you held a press conference. "When we go into a press conference in a neighborhood like that, I don't want to hear about the scandal, OK? I don't want to hear about that. Tat has bothered me every single night," you said. What you said fve minutes later, at the very same press conference, seemed to be a contradiction of Trump-ian proportions. "I'm too old. I don't care, OK?" you said. "Tere's only one good thing about being 63, is you don't care what people think anymore." (Pitino declined Louisville Magazine's multiple interview requests. "While he appreciates the opportunity," U of L sports information director Kenny Klein wrote in an email, "he said at this stage of his life he's not looking for any personal attention.") Your freewheeling, undisciplined speaking style concerns some of your school's faculty. Luke Milligan, a Louisville law professor, worries that an of-the-cuf remark could have unintended legal consequences for the school. "He's the most high-profle university employee, he's in front of the press all the time, he doesn't know where all the university's legal pitfalls lie, and he's an uninhibited public speaker," Milligan told me. "No matter how many times you instruct him to say 'no comment,' he's eventually going to get carried away and slip up." You're the most high-profle employee at the university, and at nearly $4.5 million dollars this year, you're the highest paid. "Now, he's the man," Vecsey says. "He fgures he can do whatever he wants." I felt sorry for you while watching the video of that New Year's Day press conference. Tat wasn't the Rick Pitino of my youth. Tat wasn't the no-nonsense ass-kicker I grew up admiring. Tat was a babbling, petty excuse-maker. What would you have said if one of your players came to you with such weak excuses for skipping out on an obligation? What happened to you, coach? Perhaps the answer lies somewhere in the past. • C ome with me back to New York and a time when the world made a little more sense for you. We're outside Madison Square Garden. Mecca of basketball. A lot of people were initially skeptical of your hiring as Knicks coach. You had the reputation of being a cheerleader of sorts. Tere were questions as to whether your motivational tactics and high-energy style would work in the NBA. It's one thing to wave the pom-poms for college kids. It's another to do it for jaded millionaires. You were a college guy, yes, but an accomplished one. You'd gotten the Knicks job on the strength of your work at Boston University and then Providence College in the '80s. You spent four seasons at BU, earning an NCAA tournament berth in 1983. After two years here in New York as an assistant coach with the Knicks, it was on to Providence, where your Friars made an improbable run to the Final Four in your second and last season. You were truly a madman back then, according to many of your players. Glenn Consor — who played two seasons for you at BU and is now a broadcaster for the Washington Wizards radio network — recalled your intense nature in Born to Coach: "Tere were defnitely times when you thought he was crazy. Tere were times when you didn't want to do it anymore." Consor told me a story of one particularly grueling task called the "minute on the brick drill" that he and his teammates were forced to perform if they made a mistake during practice. Tey went into the lane in a defensive stance balancing a brick on each palm, then slid back and forth from one end of the paint to the other as many as 20 times in a minute. "If you stood up, or dropped the bricks, you had to do it all over again," Consor says. "It was a killer. Your legs were humming." But like so many of your ex-players, Consor speaks of you in the highest possible terms: "I left BU knowing I became the best player I could've been...and it was all because of Rick Pitino." Te brick drill was a non-starter at the NBA level. It was the kind of thing that needed to be tweaked if it was to work with the Knicks. But you did. And you got the team's core guys to subscribe to what you were doing. Te general premise — that a coach could motivate through positivity — worked during your time in New York. You ended up having two good seasons here at the Garden. Following that frst- round loss to the Celts in '88, you won a playof round the next year, then lost in six games to Michael Jordan and the Bulls. You bolted for Kentucky after the season. But your tenure with the Knicks was a success. L et's go to the Upper East Side — 63rd Street between Second and Tird avenues — the site of Bravo Gianni's, one of your old favorite New York haunts. It's closed now, I'm sorry to say. Been almost fve years since the owner and chef, Gianni Garavelli, had a stroke and the restaurant was shut down. In its place is what looks to be a luxury apartment building. I didn't get the best view of it. Te doorman gave me the evil eye as I tried to peer inside. But it seems very posh. Te block, in fact, consists almost entirely of apartment buildings and a parking garage. As New York streets go, this one's a bit lacking in character. Te closing of Bravo Gianni's couldn't have helped in this regard. Yeah, the world's changing, coach. Sad, ain't it? I know you're something of a traditionalist. You're not a fan of certain things that might be considered progress. You devoted an entire chapter in Te One- Day Contract to the dangers of technology. Twitter, in particular, rankles you. As part of a rant against Twitter in the book, you referenced some of the great coaches of yesterday and today and asked hypothetically if they'd have ever succumbed to the time- I felt sorry for you while watching the video of that New Year's Day press conference. That wasn't the Rick Pitino of my youth. That wasn't the no-nonsense ass-kicker I grew up admiring.