Cardinals' Sins

Rick Pitino is the biggest name caught up in college basketball’s latest scandal, but he won’t be the last giant to fall.

- Tim Layden

ON A winter’s night in 1991, I went on a recruiting trip with Rick Pitino. He was 38, in his second year as the coach at Kentucky; I was a reporter at Newsday. He was well-known at that point in his career, but not yet a celebrity.

Pitino had taken the Kentucky job in the spring of 1989, following a scandal that involved the familiar sentinels of illegal payments to players and academic fraud. The Wildcats had been placed on three years’ probation and banned from the NCAA tournament for two years. On this night, Pitino rode in a van with me, a team manager and longtime Kentucky equipment manager Bill Keightley. We watched a kid play at Somerset High, and afterward Pitino asked the rest of us if we thought he could play for the Wildcats. I remember waffling. Pitino said, “Not a chance.’’ (He knew the talent he had coming). On the way back to Lexington, we stopped at a pizza joint. Our waitress, a middle-aged woman, saw Pitino in his blue, logo’d windbreaker and timidly asked his name. She seemed genuinely unsure, or perhaps just fearful. “Rick Pitino,’’ he said. The woman covered her mouth in shock. Pitino smiled and signed an autograph.