When the NCAA Male University Basketball Tournament begins on Thursday, one of its most unexpected national title contenders will be led by a coach whose return to prominence once it could have felt inconceivable.
Eight years after the scandals finished the mandate of Rick Pitino in one of the most successful programs in the country and led him to find work in the middle of the world, the 72-year-old has the opportunity to stand at the top of the university game again thanks to No. 2 Seed St. John’s (30-4).
It is the sixth different record university that has made the tournament with Pitino, who had already made history as the first to win a national championship in two different schools and advance to a Four Four with three.
Five decades after his career, at a time when many of the contemporaries of Pitino training have retired a long time ago, Pitino did otherwise. Not only wanted to return to the university game, but I was willing to take a tortuous route to get there. And despite returning to a university system that had undergone seismic changes, from allowing players to benefit from their name, image and likeness, until jumping between schools without penalty through the transfer portal, Pitino has prospered.
“I really don’t believe in the word ‘redemption’ because those who judge you really do not know the facts,” Pitino said Monday in the Pat Mcafee program in ESPN. “They really don’t know in any way, innocent or guilty.
In the midst of a celebration within the Madison Square Garden in New York last week after St. John’s won his first title of the Big East tournament in a quarter of a century, the star of St. John’s RJ Luis, the player of the year of the conference that was transferred through the portal to play for Pitino, told journalists to direct the credit towards the septuagenerian in the secondary road.
“Coach P is the intellectual author behind all this,” said Luis. “I mean, it’s really special.”
The scene would have been difficult to imagine in 2017, when Pitino was fired by the University of Louisville after an FBI investigation that claimed that the school had organized payments for the family of a recruit. He stained his work prospects. Pitino, in 2020, told a radio program in Louisville that he had been “that he had been worn out of the business for two and a half years”, and although he argued that he was innocent of irregularities, “I was the leader and deserved to be fired.” (In 2022, an independent review process ended the case by giving only Luisville Light and None to Pitino).
In 2018, Louisville was forced to leave the 2013 National Championship that won under Pitino after an NCAA investigation into the accusations that an school employee organized sex and strippers with recruits.
“I was not at shameless, but nobody really wanted to deal with hiring at that time,” Pitino said in 2023. He could have retired. He had been the best paid coach of university basketball, and was already enshrined in the Naismith basketball hall. However, Pitino, a “self -described basketball addict, could not be kept away from banking, even if that meant carrying jobs far from its usual attention.
In 2018 he toured Athens, Greece, where he trained in the best professional league in Europe. Two years later, he returned to his native in New York to train Iona, a university so small that all his enrollment would fill less with the old Louisville Arena de Pitino.
He declared, hiring in Iona, that the work would be the last.
“The reason I said, who will hire a 70 -year -old?” He said in 2023. It turned out to take IONA to two NCAA tournaments and win more games than the program had made Pitino an attractive candidate for St. John’s. The school, like Pitino, was an ancient power that had lost its brightness. It had been classified for the NCAA tournament 20 times in 26 years before 2002, but only three since then.
Pitino, with a winning percentage of .713. Those totals would be even larger if it were not for the six seasons of Pitino training the NBA Knicks and Celtics, and the 123 unemployed victories from 2010 to 2015 due to the sanctions of the NCAA.
