Honeymoon Clearly Over for Coaches

In separate, long and surprisingly humorous sessions with the media Sunday in New York, Kentucky Coach Rick Pitino and Syracuse Coach Jim Boeheim recounted with relish the circumstances behind Boeheim interviewing--and hiring--Pitino as his assistant at Syracuse on Pitino’s wedding night in 1976.

During a recruiting trip into New York City, Boeheim, then a bachelor putting together his first coaching staff, tracked down the 24-year-old Pitino in his hotel room with new wife Joanne.

“We got married in the afternoon, and we went to the Americana Hotel,” Pitino said. “And he put a phone call in early evening, maybe five o’clock, six o’clock, and I had literally carried my bride across the threshold, put her on the bed--and it was a very important step in my life, she’s an Irish Catholic girl, so this is a very big moment for me. . . .

“And the phone rang, and I heard this whining voice at the other end. . . . He’s a convincing person, I came down and we literally talked about two, 2 1/2 hours. He would not let me leave until I committed to take the job.”

After getting Boeheim to increase his salary from $14,000 to $17,500 during the course of the night, Pitino agreed to take the job and got Joanne to agree to postpone their planned honeymoon so he could hit the recruiting trail.

Said Boeheim, who still considers Pitino one of his closest friends: “The part of the story that hasn’t been told is, I was living in Syracuse with three guys in a house. And Joanne, instead of going on a honeymoon, came to Syracuse and I put her in the house with three guys and I went to recruit Roosevelt Bouie and Rick went to sign Louis Orr.

“And probably it made my career at Syracuse, and certainly Joanne does not seem to have suffered too much since. She’s made Rick pay many, many times over putting her in that apartment.”