A Bluegrass State of Mind

The life has returned to Louisville basketball, only two seasons after it had slipped away during a 12-19 season in Denny Crum’s final season as coach.

That was before Rick Pitino arrived, but there have been times when he has felt the life being pulled out of him too.

It had nothing to do with his troubled turn as coach and president of the Boston Celtics, his first encounter with failure.

It had nothing to do with the scorn and charges of “Benedict Rick” when the coach who’d turned a disgraced Kentucky basketball program back into a champion returned to Rupp Arena last season, reincarnated as Louisville’s coach.

It had nothing to do with basketball and everything to do with family.

When the World Trade Center fell a year and a half ago, Pitino lost his brother-in-law and closest friend since high school. Billy Minardi, the brother of Pitino’s wife, Joanne, was a trader for Cantor Fitzgerald on the 105th floor of the north tower.

A year after putting one foot in front of the other during a somber march through a 19-13 season, Pitino suddenly has the No. 2 team in the nation, with an 18-1 record and a 17-game winning streak.

Life, though diminished, goes on.

“What has been rekindled is a spirit to carry on and move on in a positive way,” Pitino said.

“I didn’t lose the passion. I think 9/11 just took so much out of my family, myself. It wasn’t basketball. It just took so much life out of me. It’s never going to be the same for any of us.

“Basketball really wasn’t that important anymore. I love coaching it. I love teaching young people. But it was just an overly difficult time and I have six nieces and nephews who are without fathers. [Don Vogt, the husband of Joanne’s sister, died after being struck by a taxi six months before the terrorist attacks.] Then 9/11 hits, and life will never be the same again.”

In December, Louisville held the first Billy Minardi Classic, a four-team tournament in which every coach was a former player, assistant or friend of Pitino’s.

Minardi’s wife and three children were there to present the trophy.

“We knew it meant a lot to him,” guard Reece Gaines said of Pitino. “He was happy, as happy as I’ve seen him. We knew it had been pretty tough on him. He kind of didn’t talk about it, but before practice for a couple of minutes, he’d talk about something that had nothing to do with basketball. Just take five or 10 minutes to talk about what we need to do in our lives, and keeping in touch with our families.”

On campus, a 36-student dormitory named Billy Minardi Hall is under construction, funded by $4.5 million in donations from Pitino and friends.

“We all feel good about what’s happening to honor him, but still, our lives will never be the same, ever again,” Pitino said.

In the first indication that this season might be something special, rival Kentucky visited Freedom Hall on Dec. 28 and took an 11-point lead in the first half, only to be blitzed the rest of the way in an 81-63 Louisville victory.

A new brand of Louisville basketball was emerging.

There is the relentless defense -- part of it a full-court press Pitino’s Kentucky teams made famous -- but there also is a group of players who have been transformed into more than simply an entourage for Gaines, Louisville’s best player.

That victory over Kentucky might have meant more to center Marvin Stone than anyone, even Pitino, who had absorbed the ire of Kentucky fans in the frenzied atmosphere surrounding the Cardinals’ 20-point loss in Rupp Arena last season.

Like Pitino, Stone is a Wildcat expatriate. He left the Kentucky team in December last season, uncertain at first where he would go. A McDonald’s All-American in high school, his career at Kentucky had amounted to little. Out of shape and coping with the deaths of his father and a sister, he averaged only 5.3 points in two-plus seasons as a Wildcat.

Nevertheless, when he announced his intent to transfer to Louisville, there was an outcry.

“People called me traitor all the time,” Stone said. “People would come up to me and say, ‘I can’t believe you did that. You can’t do that.’ ”

Pitino admits he hesitated to take Stone.

“I don’t want to take a player for one year,” he told his staff when they urged him to consider Stone. “And I don’t want anymore of the Kentucky nonsense. I want that to go away completely.”

But ...

“Then his mom called me,” Pitino said. “Told me he lost his dad, lost his sister. Told me the story. And after everything that’s happened in my life, she was such a nice lady.... She said, ‘Look, he needs this in his life.’ ”

Pitino said yes, and the 6-foot-10 Stone came through, slicing his body fat from about 15% to about 8% before the season. Since becoming eligible -- four games after Louisville’s only loss, a two-point defeat by Purdue -- he has been a new player, averaging 13 points and eight rebounds. Against Kentucky, he had 16 points and seven rebounds, giving the Cardinals the big man they desperately needed to compete.

“We would not be where we are today without him,” Pitino said. “We would just be a team that would win 16, 17 games, maybe hopefully win the [Conference USA] tournament.”

Stone isn’t the only player who has made a transformation.

Ellis Myles, a 6-8 junior from Compton Centennial High, was known as such an ill-mannered player he is remembered for talking back to Crum on the court.

“Everybody said this young man had the worst attitude they’d ever seen,” Pitino said. “They said, ‘You’re not going to believe how bad it is.’ ”

Gaines put the anticipated clash between Myles and Pitino succinctly.

“No one thought it was going to work,” he said.

Not even Myles.

“The first thing I thought was, ‘Would I make it?’ ” Myles said. “Because everybody labeled me as a lazy person, bad attitude, things like that. I didn’t know what to expect, but I knew he was a terrific coach coming from the NBA, and I knew a lot of us want to play at the next level and he was the person who could help us get it done.

“I had to do whatever it took. I wanted to prove I could make it with Coach Pitino.”

Before last season, Myles cut out the fast-food burgers and lost 30 pounds.

He lost his attitude too and now is the leading rebounder on a team no longer hung up on individual numbers.

“Yeah, I completely changed,” Myles said. “I would say I probably was lazy and had a bad attitude. But Coach Pitino changed me from a kid into a man.... I mean, just the discipline. He expects so much out of you.”

Gaines has undergone his own transformation, from a gunner of a shooting guard to point guard.

Pitino was concerned about getting more playing time for freshman guards Francisco Garcia -- a sinewy but marvelously skilled player who sank eight three-pointers against Cincinnati -- and Taquan Dean, who like Garcia committed to Louisville without setting foot on campus, simply because he wanted to play for Pitino.

“That was tough at first, knowing I could be out there scoring 25 points, 20 points a game, but as the point guard, I thought I was only going to get 13,” Gaines said. “I didn’t know how people were going to react, like, ‘Is he not playing good this year?’ I didn’t think they’d understand I was playing a whole different position.”

Pitino dug out the statistics from the 1996 championship team at Kentucky that had Tony Delk, Antoine Walker, Walter McCarty, Derek Anderson and Ron Mercer.

“He showed us how Derek Anderson only averaged nine points, Tony Delk averaged 17, Antoine Walker only averaged 14 or 15,” Gaines said.

“Once he showed me that team at Kentucky and said, ‘It doesn’t matter, Reece. If you win every game, everybody’s going to know about you,’ I was ready.”

His scoring has slipped, but not drastically, from 21 to 18 points, with an average of five assists.

“I thought this year I’d be worried about what my draft situation would be, if I was going to have a chance to play in the NBA,” Gaines said. “But come to find out, in all this, every game becomes so big, all I do is concentrate on the next game.... That’s not a cliche. That’s what happens.”

At 50, Pitino looks youthful again, his hair still black, his face less haggard. But he is no longer the boy wonder who took Providence to the Final Four in 1987 at 34 and later took over a Kentucky program on probation, then led the Wildcats to three Final Fours and the 1996 NCAA championship.

His stint with the Celtics was disastrous, ending when he resigned in 2001 with a 102-146 record, only 3 1/2 seasons into a 10-year contract.

The pressing style that worked for a 30-game college season was impossible to sustain over an 82-game regular season, and the demands he put on 19-year-olds were resented by pros.

There were personnel mistakes too -- constant changes and the lucrative contract he gave center Travis Knight.

“I’d never not enjoyed basketball,” Pitino said. “For those last 2 1/2 years, I did not enjoy it.... So, am I more of a college coach than a pro coach? I would say my personality, without question, is.

“In the pros, you really have to have blinders on a little bit. I mean, with us, if you’re late to class, you’re running. In the NBA, you really can’t sweat the small stuff. You have to be a CEO. You have to manage people, not mold them.”

Of course, except for timing, his next job after the Celtics might have been at UCLA. Pete Dalis, then the Bruin athletic director, started a mini-furor when he let it be known in 2001 that he had spoken with Pitino during his final days with the Celtics, feeling out his interest in returning to college.

UCLA Coach Steve Lavin, on the typically bumpy road to another Sweet 16, called Pitino an “opportunist” and Pitino, stunned that Dalis had made the conversation public, called to assure Lavin he wasn’t after his job.

“When I heard that at the press conference [Dalis] said he talked to me, I died,” Pitino said.

Had the job been formally open, the story probably would have ended differently.

“I would have sprinted to be the UCLA coach, no question about it,” Pitino said. “I love the area, I love the tradition, I love John Wooden. I think the program, the conference, is great.”

It is also water under the bridge.

Pitino says he is back where he belongs, in the state of Kentucky.

“I don’t think I would have had any interest in Louisville except for the fact that I was coach at Kentucky. I just loved it so much when I was here,” he said.

“People say, ‘Do you regret leaving? Was it a mistake?’ And I say, ‘You can’t ever tell if it was a mistake.’ It was Camelot. I never had a bad time there. So in reality, it was probably a good time to leave, because I never had any bad times there.”

The good times at Louisville? They might be only beginning.

“I’m never leaving Louisville,” Pitino said. “This is my last coaching job.”

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Full Dance Card

Rick Pitino is trying to become the first men’s basketball coach to take three schools to the NCAA Final Four. A look at coaches who have done it with two teams and those with the most Final Four appearances:

TWO TEAMS IN FINAL FOUR

*--* Coach First team Second team Forddy Anderson Bradley Michigan St Gene Bartow Memphis St UCLA Larry Brown UCLA Kansas Hugh Durham Florida St Georgia Jack Gardner Kansas St Utah Lou Henson New Mexico St Illinois Frank McGuire St. John’s North Carolina Lute Olson Iowa Arizona Rick Pitino Providence Kentucky Lee Rose Charlotte Purdue Eddie Sutton Arkansas Oklahoma St

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FINAL FOUR APPEARANCES

*--* No Coach School 12 John Wooden UCLA 11 Dean Smith North Carolina 9 Mike Krzyzewski Duke 6 Denny Crum Louisville 6 Adolph Rupp Kentucky 6 Bobby Knight Indiana 5 Guy Lewis Houston 5 Lute Olson Iowa, Arizona 4 Rick Pitino Providence, Kentucky 4 Henry Iba Oklahoma State 4 Harold Olsen Ohio State 4 Jerry Tarkanian UNLV 4 Fred Taylor Ohio State

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