Next Move: Stay Put

Miles Simon, the Arizona star, fell to his knees. Hugging the basketball. Smiling.

“Such a war,” he would say, pleased to have been in it. Perfect. A smiling war in which Miles Simon, who practices levitation disguised as a jump shot, did magic. Thirty points. The last four in a five-point victory. “This,” he said, “is the most unbelievable thing I’ve ever done.”

Miles Simon, smiling around the basketball. What a wonderful finish to a wonderful night. A national championship for Arizona moved its players to do the unthinkable: They mussed up the silver hair of their perfectly coiffed coach, Lute Olson. “Hey, hey, hey,” the coach said, enjoying the frolics but quickly covering the damage with one of those celebratory ballcaps that appear the moment a championship is won.

Such a happy war. Even the losing coach, Rick Pitino, left the court feeling good. Yes, give Rick Pitino a wonderful college basketball game and he’s happy. Give him Arizona, a mystery out of the desert, winning it all by beating the monarchs, by beating Kansas, North Carolina and Pitino’s Kentucky team. Give Pitino all that, and even in defeat, he knows there is reason to smile.

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He called Arizona great and said he was happy for Olson, a sensational coach often maligned by critics who said he couldn’t win the big one. Now Olson has the ultimate big one, just as Pitino won his a year ago.

No tears for Pitino, no regrets. Just fun. “I’ve never had this much fun coaching in my life,” he said. “And I can sit back--I’d like to win it every damn year--and I hope John Chaney or Roy Williams win it another year. I’d like to see the peers I have so much respect for happy. . . . I’m so happy for Lute Olson.”

Winston Churchill, a practiced loser in politics, said success is never final and failure is never fatal. Here’s the way Pitino put it after his team failed to win a second consecutive national championship: “From the time I left the court, I was a happy man, just trying to make the players feel good. I told them, ‘If you’re down, you don’t understand the game of life. Because you guys have gone so far, given me so much, made the school proud that, to me, you’re the greatest team I’ve ever coached. . . . You’re not champions with a second-place trophy, but you are champions in your heart.’ ”

Arizona 84, Kentucky 79, overtime. Arizona did it the only way it could be done. By being quicker than a quick team. Being tougher than a tough team. Wanting it more than a team that Pitino had called “a heart team.” To have beaten three No. 1 seeds, as Arizona did, is to have done the unprecedented.

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And now it is time to ask again: What’s next for Rick Pitino? Will he stay at Kentucky? Or move back to the NBA?

One man’s guess: He’ll stay. The college game is more fun for Pitino, more satisfying personally and more challenging professionally.

Certainly, Pitino leaves open the door for a return to the pros. In his eight seasons at Kentucky, his name has been connected to virtually every open NBA coaching job. While most conversations went nowhere, the New Jersey Nets proposed a deal worth maybe $30 million last year.

By Pitino’s account, he had decided to accept the Nets’ offer only to change his mind when he realized his heart wasn’t in it. He said his children had grown up in Kentucky and considered themselves Kentuckians. His wife had made peace with her misgivings about leaving the East Coast. He made enough money--at least $1 million a year--that even $30 million for six years wasn’t persuasive.

Ah, you may say, but those six years would have been with the miserable Nets. What if his beloved Celtics come calling?

A New York native who played at Massachusetts and coached at Boston College before moving to Providence, Pitino calls himself a New Englander. He even went out of his way during the Final Four weekend to make that point; he said his contact with real life in Kentucky is basically limited to driving the two miles from his home to his office.

On the face of it, such a man surely would consider it the greatest triumph of his life to resurrect the Boston Celtics. But, making another guess here, Pitino at 44 no longer believes in the concept of “the greatest triumph.”

Winning basketball games is important, no less so than ever for a man who merrily confesses to being consumed by the desire to win. Still, he now realizes there can be more to coaching than W’s and L’s. For instance, there is Derek Anderson. Kentucky’s leading scorer, Anderson made a sensational recovery from knee surgery two months ago and might have played in the Final Four. But Pitino said no, the risk exceeded any possible reward.

“It may sound corny,” Pitino said, “but I made a decision . . . because I do feel he’s like my son, in that his future is in my hands and I’m his guardian away from his immediate family. You just don’t have that feeling in the NBA. Although (as the Knicks’ coach) I was very close to Patrick Ewing, Mark Jackson and Charles Oakley, I was not their guardian. I was a coach. . . . These (Kentucky) players, I’m their guardian, I’m their second father or second big brother to them.”

The challenge in the pros, Pitino said, is going up against the best players in the world. “You had to try and stop Larry Bird and Kevin McHale, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Charles Barkley,” he said. “To me, it’s the ultimate defensively to stop the greatest players in the game. That’s the gratification, that you’re competing each night against the best.”

A man guessing at Pitino’s future could do worse than simply listen to the coach’s words after losing that smiling war to Arizona: “I’m going to wake up tomorrow morning, let the guys take some time off, get back to individual instruction and start working on getting back to San Antonio.”

San Antonio? It’s the site of next season’s Final Four.