Look Out, Dave and Jay: Heeeere’s Ricky!

A fire-eating woman the first week. A magic show the second. A dread-locked comedian the third.

Louisville Coach Rick Pitino’s weekly show isn’t the typical highlight-laden summation of last week’s games and look-aheads to upcoming opponents.

Pitino tapes the show before a live audience on Sunday afternoons at a sports bar. More than 100 red-clad fans gathered for a recent taping.

Dressed in his trademark dark suit, Pitino sits behind a wooden desk with a Cardinals’ logo affixed to the front. Terry Meiners, a radio personality and one of Pitino’s closest friends, serves as the sidekick, sitting next to him in a leather lounge chair.

Instead of an opening monologue, Pitino dives into a list of his top five sports events from the previous week.

Last week’s list included a jab at George O’Leary, who resigned as Notre Dame’s football coach after admitting inaccuracies in his resume.

Meiners produced a copy of Pitino’s “revised resume”: “I’ve done some neat stuff. If you hire me, I’ll do some neat stuff for you, too,” Meiners read.

“I can’t lie on that resume,” Pitino quipped.

Louisville forward Luke Whitehead’s frightening headfirst, feet-in-the-air fall in the Cardinals’ win over Coppin State also made the list. Whitehead wears his hair in braids, and Pitino laughed when Meiners showed him and the audience a computer-doctored picture of the carefully coifed coach with cornrows.

“I can’t wait to braid it tonight,” Pitino said.

Next, Pitino introduced his weekly “Hero Among Us,” the leader of a local shelter for boys. He interviewed two Louisville firefighters during one show and a nun who helps AIDS patients in another.

Another segment was a taped one-on-one game between Bryant Northern and Sara Nord, high school classmates who are now the point guards for the Louisville men’s and women’s teams. Pitino officiated, and Nord won, 5-4.

“Were you being a gentleman?” Pitino asked an embarrassed Northern after the game. “Do you realize right now how much you’ll take? She wore you out. She’s not even breathing heavy.”

Later, Pitino plucked a card from a red and black bird cage. Pitino sold it as the “Internet Question of the Week,” but it turned out to be a gag, too.

Paul Hornung, the former Heisman Trophy winner and NFL Hall of Famer who lives in Louisville, asked about the Cardinals’ training methods, saying he could lose a few pounds.

Spike Davis, a local comedian, took his own playful shot at Pitino during a three-minute routine.

“I was supposed to be on a couple of weeks ago, but I had to lose like 18% of my body weight,” Davis said.

The only resemblance to a traditional coach’s show came at the end, when Pitino brought out Whitehead, and the two went over 60 seconds of highlights from Louisville’s last two games.

But Pitino also asked Whitehead how long it would take to braid his hair.

“About an hour, but it’s going to look really nice. Your wife will love it,” said Whitehead, Louisville’s second-leading scorer.

Pitino, in his first year in Louisville after three-plus seasons coaching the Boston Celtics, patterned the show’s format after St. Joseph’s coach Phil Martelli, who does his own irreverent show in Philadelphia.

“I saw it once and I thought it was hysterical,” Pitino said.

A weekly show for the local Fox affiliate was part of the contract Pitino signed when he was hired in March, returning to the state where he coached the Kentucky Wildcats from 1989-97, winning the national title in ’96. Immediately, he wanted to change the staid, conventional format former coach Denny Crum used for 12 years.

“Every coach in the business has done these shows. They’re all the same,” Pitino said. “To me, I wouldn’t call it drudgery, but it was just repetitious, not a whole lot of variety. It was just a rehash of things we went over in the post-game.”

Meiners said he’s gotten some negative feedback.

“This has ruffled some feathers among traditionalists, who want to talk and hear about basketball all the time. Fans have stopped me in the grocery store and they say, ‘Hey, I want to see more highlights,”’ Meiners said.

Pitino said no one should take the show very seriously.

“In these times, I feel like the more you can laugh, the better,” he said.